February might be the shortest month of the year, but that’s not holding us back. Our calendar this month is jam-packed with informative webinars on a variety of topics around business process management (BPM) and enterprise architecture (EA). Check out the list below to see what we have to offer and be sure to register!

Communicating in the Language of Business
Thursday, February 9, 2012
11:00AM-12:00PM EST

It’s no secret that companies are looking to their enterprise architecture teams to increase business agility, cut costs, streamline operations and improve customer service. In this webinar, Sandra Moran, Director, Product Marketing for OpenText BPS will illustrate how enterprise architects can leverage customizable business performance intelligence dashboards to better demonstrate to both business and IT leaders the deeper value you can achieve from your EA investments. For more details and to register, click here.

Financial Services Webinar Series: Paperless Funding
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
11:00AM-12:00PM EST

In this 30 minute demo Brett Kovach, Senior Solution Consultant for OpenText BPS will show you how banks and major automotive and equipment financing organizations improved their lease and loan origination with three simple best practices for BPM. For more details and to register, click here.

Unlock the Secrets of BPM ROI: Insightful Study from Forrester Research
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
11:00AM-12:00PM EST

In the third installment of our Getting Started with BPM series, Clay Richardson, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research, Nathaniel Palmer, Editor-in-Chief of BPM.com, and Donna Tellam, BPM Solutions Director, User Experience Specialist, OpenText BPS will share proven strategies for BPM success. Learn from real-world examples of the challenges organizations face with BPM and how they’ve managed to overcome them. We encourage you to watch the first two installments, Practical Approach to Get Started with Process Improvement and Building the Right Team to Drive Process Improvement. For more details and to register, click here.

New Matter Intake Meets the iPhone
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
11:00AM-12:00PM EST

Gone are the days of being chained to your desk! Today, law firms can leverage mobile BPM capabilities — on the go — to expedite critical processes – such as new matter intake.  Mobile BPM keeps processes moving, regardless of the lawyer’s location. Join Keith Levin, Legal Sales Manager for OpenText BPS and Kristian Uggla, Legal Solutions Engineer for OpenText BPS, as they explain how OpenText’s new mobile BPM capabilities can increase your agility and reduce your time to value. For more details and to register, click here.

If you can’t make it to one of these webinars, don’t worry! We’ll have the recording onDemand so that you can watch it whenever you have the time. You can access the recordings, here.

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Question: Where do you think this market is going? Do you see other tools coming into play?

Answer: If EA initiatives are successful, you can think of their output as a road map for where to focus resources and energy to close the gaps between your organization’s strategy and its ability to execute toward those strategic goals. The natural extension to EA is to take those initiatives and operationalize them. In other words, take the EA concepts and turn them into project plans that organizational leaders drive into their teams. For some, these initiatives may require organizational change, reallocation of resources, or business process improvements and system integration through tools like business process management (BPM).

An organization that learns to leverage the synergy between EA and BPM will be able to more effectively prioritize projects based on this higher level context for change and therefore, identify which projects have the greatest ability to help the organization execute against its strategy. BPM projects funded without the strategic context EA provides may have an incremental impact to the business. However, this approach fails to provide  executives with the perspective they need to make more informed decisions about where investments should be made based on  their relative impact against strategic goals.

Even with BPM’s extraordinary ROI, some projects have significantly more value than others. As I have yet to meet a company with unlimited resources, enabling your company to make decisions that focus the resources you have on the projects that have the greatest impact to your goals is extremely valuable. Companies who combine EA and BPM technologies are in a better position to close the gap between strategy and execution by focusing on initiatives that matter and seeing to their rapid operationalization.  If you’re still not convinced, I encourage you to read Gartner’s recent report, “Make EA and BPM Work Together to Deliver Business Value.”

Where do you think this market is going? Feel free to leave comments below and we’ll discuss!

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KMWorld recognizes OpenText Metastorm for demonstrating clearly identifiable technology breakthroughs that service a full spectrum of constituencies, especially customers, while seamlessly integrating into enterprise-wide environments. This year there were over 800 products assessed by KMWorld’s judging panel, which included editorial colleagues, analysts, system integrators, vendors, line-of-business managers and users.

We believe this award continues to symbolize our deep commitment to developing industry-leading EA, BPA and BPM software and solutions that transform the way organizations do business. We are honored to again be listed as a Trend-Setting Product of 2011. Stay tuned – we have some great product announcements around the corner!

Want to learn more about the OpenText Metastorm business transformation platform? Check out our solution page, full of white papers, case studies and solution sheets, or get a free trial of Metastorm ProVision or Metastorm M3!

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This makes Metastorm M3 the only enterprise-class business planning & modeling solution offered on the Azure Marketplace. M3 offers the most popular modeling types from Metastorm’s Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Business Process Management (BPM) software and delivers them anywhere, anytime in a secure, easy to use environment – enabling real-time collaboration, annotation and recording capabilities in the cloud.

With a $0 investment in new software or infrastructure, both business and IT staff of any experience level can get involved in the design process and collaborate across different departments. For greater business improvements, you’ll want to take modeling even further and identify relationships between key business and process components of your organization.  So anything that your teams build in M3 can be uploaded into Metastorm ProVision as part of a larger EA or business transformation project or exported into Metastorm BPM for automation.

This certification as part of the Windows Azure Marketplace is the latest in OpenText Metastorm’s credentials. As a Gold Certified Partner in the Microsoft Partner Network, OpenText Metastorm leverages Microsoft Silverlight for its user interface, and offers integration with the Microsoft Office suite, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Workflow Foundation and Microsoft Visual Studio. For additional information, check out M3 here in the Windows Azure Marketplace.

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With multiple applications supporting a variety of systems and processes, information becomes dispersed across several databases, making it extremely difficult for users to access the information that they need in a timely and efficient manner. Organizations often do not know what applications they own, and have little insight into the value they bring to the company, how much they cost to maintain, and who uses them. To further complicate this issue, Gartner reports that by 2015, 60% of new business application purchase decisions will be made outside of IT¹.

As you look to maximize your technology investments, the following guidelines can help you better understand what applications your business owns and needs:

1.  Collect information about your current portfolio
One of the largest problems when building an application portfolio management (APM) repository begins within the initial phases of collecting information. Organizations don’t always know what they have. To get your APM project going, it takes a champion at the executive level to bring together different areas of the business to identify, understand and examine each individual application and what business process and capabilities it supports. According to Gartner, a top-down approach allows you to collect the highest level of information for each application, which allows you to undergo a quick assessment of the balance of value to cost and risk for each application. From there you can group allocations according to their specific characteristics².

2.  Facilitate collaboration between business and IT
Often, IT drives an APM initiative either for IT chargeback purposes, or to conduct maintenance impact analysis, and may be viewed as having little interest in supporting the business’ interests. On the other hand, the business often advocates for APM to identifying where they could leverage an existing application to save a capital investment required to support a new business capabilities, unaware of the impact it might have on IT. The only way APM will be successful is if the two groups collaborate and work together to meet both requirements and viewpoints. Together, business and IT can take into account their experience and collective knowledge to identify, understand and analyze the value and impact each application has across the business.

3.  Don’t try to boil the ocean
Organizations tend to think that they need to have a complete application portfolio before they can see value from the investment. This is not the case. Companies are more successful if they select a business unit, focus on the applications within that domain, and implement reports and dashboards that illustrate the business value. Your team can leverage early success demonstrating value to the company and then move on to improve other areas of the business. 

4.  Establish visibility into your processes
The best APM solution complements your organization’s enterprise architecture initiatives. Taking a business capabilities-oriented approach allows you to prioritize the various needs of existing applications, such as maintenance, training and cost. Embedding your APM solution into your enterprise architecture framework allows you to establish clear visibility into your process. An excellent APM solution, built on an enterprise architecture platform, gives you the ability to understand – all the way down to the business process level – what it takes to retire a system with minimal disruption to operations.

5.  Build a repository of APM information
As your application portfolio matures, more and more meaningful data should not only be collected, but maintained. A repository of data can be extremely valuable when making large-scale business decisions. With extensive information about your applications in one central location, executives are able to make smart, creative decisions that result in huge bottom line savings.

Enterprise collaboration and executive sponsorship is the foundation for a powerful APM solution. It is essential that you communicate with knowledge workers across your business to really understand the value and role each application brings to the success of your organization. APM needs to be a cooperative effort between both business and IT. A champion from the executive level can help build the case for fostering collaboration between business and IT. 

____________________________

¹Gartner, Predicts 2011: Aligning Enterprise Business Applications to Drive Business Outcomes, November 2010.
²Gartner, Planning for Application Overhauls: Start From the Top With APM, July 2010.

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Now, more than ever, consumers have become highly critical and skeptical of financial services firms. People want assurance and move visibility into the operations, fees and services offered to them. To gain back customer trust and loyalty – while driving greater profitability, growth and agility – you need to focus on how your organization will address three key areas.

Three BIG topics in financial services you need to pay attention to, right now:

The Compliance Challenge
In the world of regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II code, MiFID, etc., you need a solid platform in place that supports current regulations – but more importantly, creates an environment in which adaptability is a fundamental component. New, stricter regulations are knocking on the door. To avoid a significant drain on resources, money, and time, it’s critical that you invest in a tool that enables you to achieve compliance on a long-term basis without having to significantly alter your operational systems. Business process management (BPM) can help financial services companies define, automate and standardize processes to be both auditable and consistent. By leveraging the existing underlying systems, and providing a more agile platform that is integrated with them but enables control and automation across systems and departments, you are able to implement changes in a fraction of the time you could with legacy systems. Most regulatory mandates require you to provide a wealth of information and audit trails. With BPM, you can track, monitor, and report on critical processes to not only comply with federal regulations, but better improve current processes to drive enterprise-wide efficiency and profitability.

Better Customer Experience
No new customer wants to spend weeks (and even months) getting their account started. The fact of the matter is, in many financial service companies customers go through a long, rigorous process to open their account – all of which is caused by ineffective, poorly structured new client on-boarding processes. One of our customers, Cornerstone Tax Advisors, had an extensive, paper-based on-boarding process, and as a result the time between the first client interaction and the conclusion of the contract ranged from 11-20 months! However, by using Metastorm BPM, the company was able to control and monitor in-bound workflow with ease, visualize its operational positions, and easily design, model, and change its new client on-boarding processes – radically improving the customer experience, and allowing the company to bring on new clients better and faster.

Smart Consolidation
Over the past few years, we have seen a significant amount of consolidation within the financial services industry. The reason for this is simple – companies want to expand their portfolio, gain more market share, increase their customer base and achieve higher profitability. Unfortunately, almost half of the companies that undergo a merger or acquisition do not achieve the original goals. This is largely due to not having clear objectives – that take into account the organizational structure – to meet the strategic goals of the acquisition. An enterprise architecture tool can help you understand the people, processes, systems and technologies within both companies. Taking it a step further, with an enterprise architecture tool you can analyze, model and simulate the optimal way for these processes to merge together – producing the best business structure possible for your organization.

As the world recovers from the economic crisis it is imperative that you have all the resources to make well-informed business decisions. You need to know what capabilities and assets you have and the best way to manage and utilize them to remain a viable competitor in this ever-changing marketplace. To find out more information about Metastorm’s financial services solutions, visit our financial services solution page.

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The conference served to reinforce what we are seeing and what many of you who are involved in enterprise architecture (from the business or IT side) are likely experiencing – that EA continues to transform and that the EA role is becoming a critical part of developing business strategy. In fact, according to Gartner, five years from now, 30% of EA efforts will be supported as a collaboration between business and IT – an increase of more than 20% from early 2011.This evolution demands new approaches to connecting with larger business ecosystems. This is the key to driving improved business performance. 

As EA gains visibility as key a driver of business performance, enterprise architects must be able to demonstrate how EA efforts and initiatives deliver value to the business. According to Gartner analyst Betsy Burton (in her keynote “You’ve Got a Seat at The Table: Now What?”), a common mistake architects and IT people make is to describe the “business value” in terms of the capabilities or results of EA, rather than basing it on a measurable value of EA’s impact to the business (business outcomes). EA teams must be able to articulate both EA capabilities and business outcomes, but measure the value of EA based on the impact to the business. To do this, EA’s must know and reflect the CEO’s top priorities.

To achieve business outcomes and to drive business change, EA value must be collaboratively developed and supported within the context of the business direction, strategy and future vision.

Below are a few conference sessions where IT and the business worked collaboratively to achieve positive and successful business outcomes.

United Airlines Case Study
United Airlines, a Metastorm customer, presented to a packed audience on how business and IT are working together and leveraging enterprise architecture and Metastorm ProVision to identify and streamline critical processes in the wake of the recent United/Continental merger to deliver increased value for both business and IT. 

PG&E Case Study
Another Metastorm customer, Pacific Gas and Electric Company ( PG&E), shared their vision of how a customer-centric capability and process architecture enables projects to deliver holistic enterprise business solutions. The framework is valuable input for their IT partners as they build the infrastructure that supports business processes. The case study discussed PG&E’s framework approach, process management maturity, and how they are using information technology delivery methodologies to work collaboratively with other users.  

BPM – The Catalyst to Deliver Outcomes
In addition to end user case studies, several Gartner analysts presented compelling presentations. One that we found particularly insightful and relevant was Elise Olding’s session on the relationship between BPM and EA. During her presentation, Elise identified where the synergies between BPM and EA lie, and discussed how successful enterprises that understand how EA and BPM work together are achieving powerful results. “BPM delivers proven value and executes on EA strategy. When EA and BPM work together, it is a winning combination that connects strategy with results.”

We were pleased to see many Metastorm customers at the event and hope you found the event worthwhile. Thank you to those of you who stopped by to see us at the Metastorm booth. For those of you who were not able to attend the conference, we will leave you with some words of wisdom and practical advice from Tom Peters:

1.)  Have lunch with your colleagues – it’s often the best way to solve a lot of problems in business.
2.)  Say “thank you” often, it lets people know you value and appreciate their contributions and will make them want to help you in the future.
3.)  Execution is strategy — it’s all about the people and the doing, not the talking and the theory.

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Gartner Keynote: You’ve Got a Seat at the Table: Now What?
As an architect, one of your hardest challenges is to determine how to focus, position, and communicate the business value of enterprise architecture. In this keynote address, Betsy Burton, VP Distinguished Analyst for Gartner will revisit the value of EA and explore the best practices for how you can deliver, demonstrate and drive true business value across your organization.

United Airlines Flies on Enterprise Architecture
Discover how United Airlines uses Metastorm ProVision to analyze, understand and transform its organizational operations. Diana Krohn, Sr. Enterprise Architect for United Airlines and Diane LeBeau, Director of Business Architecture for United Airlines will discuss how United is leveraging enterprise architecture to establish the foundational elements of a business architecture practice, forge business partnerships, create engagement patterns, and build a durable business model repository.

Effective Enterprise Architecture Governance Plays Several Roles in IT Governance
How do you effectively connect strategy to execution? In this session, Julie Short, Research Director for Gartner, will discuss: why EA governance is a critical component in linking business and IT, what is the nature of EA governance, and the best practices that make EA governance effective.

Rapid-Fire: Architecting for the Unknown
Things happen and if you’re not prepared, change can be detrimental to your organization. Betsy Burton will explain how enterprise architects can better prepare for unexpected change and shift their strategic thinking in a way that allows them to seek, model and adapt to new events by leveraging technology, information, people and processes.

PG&E – The Importance of Business Capability and Process Mapping Maturity
Business capability and process mapping are critical components in building a strong, cohesive infrastructure to support your business processes. Metastorm customer, Matthew Duncan, Senior Project Manager for Pacific Gas and Electric Company, will share PG&E’s vision for creating a customer-centric capability and process architecture enabling projects to deliver holistic enterprise business solutions.

BPM – The Catalyst to Deliver Outcomes
It is becoming increasingly clear that EA and business process management (BPM) are inherently and necessarily linked to one another. In this session, Elise Olding, Research Director for Gartner, will cover everything you need to know about BPM and how successful organizations today are achieving valuable results from leveraging the power combination of EA and BPM.

Transforming Business Process and Technology
To be a successful consumer-driven organization today, you must focus on how you can get customer service, business processes, metrics and technology to work together to achieve a target state roadmap. Hear directly from Metastorm customer, Bill Riordan, Global Business Process Manager for HP, about how HP was able to radically transform its customer service operations. Before you go, check out this short video highlighting how HP was able to identify and analyze over 1,500 disparate global processes and improve and consolidate them into 100 universal processes across 132 different countries! 

Enterprise Business Architecture: Uniting Business and IT
Every organization wants to get business and IT on the same page. And, leading organizations know that a critical aspect of uniting these two groups comes from understanding how to leverage enterprise business architecture in a way that engages business leaders. In this session, Betsy Burton will discuss the value of supporting an enterprise business architecture and how organizations can better understand the impact change makes on the people, process, information and technology within their organization.

This year, Gartner is offering tons of valuable opportunities for you to expand your knowledge of enterprise architecture, hear directly from your peers about their success in implementing EA programs and engage in dialogue about the future of EA. Visit their website today to register for any of these sessions or explore other sessions they’re offering.

Be sure to stop by Metastorm’s booth (Booth #1) to view a product demonstration or speak to a representative. If you’d like to schedule a meeting during the conference, stop by the 1:1 scheduling booth or contact Wendy Werve, Director, Analyst Relations for Metastorm at wwerve@opentext.com .

Don’t forget to follow us on twitter @Metastorm and use the event hashtag #GartnerEA.

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One of Metastorm’s customers is a global aerospace engineering corporation that has several business units responsible for building and supporting its engineering services. This organization is organized by individual project teams, and has several, massive multi-million dollar projects running at any given time. Each project team can have a budget allocation of millions of dollars and is comprised of several engineers who work closely together, but separate from members of other project teams to complete their individual missions. Given the sizable investment for each project, the team focuses solely on what they need to do in order to deliver on time and on budget. As a result, if a team needs a specific application or program that they don’t already own they go ahead and purchase it, without checking if the other teams have the tool.

The company realized that these teams were working on similar projects but in siloed teams and there was little communication occurring across the organization. This resulted in multiple teams owning the same programs and resources – creating duplication of effort and financial investment. It also became apparent that there were some projects that could have been leveraged by another group eliminating re-work and lost time. Given the lack of cross-departmental visibility, opportunities to improve overall profitability and efficiency were lost.

Realizing that they would be able to operate more effectively if they had a better understanding of their current applications, systems, programs, and processes, the company looked into implementing an enterprise and business architecture tool. They recognized the need to get a comprehensive blueprint of what assets each of the project teams owned, what they were doing, and how it fit into the bigger picture. After looking at several vendors in the marketplace, the company selected Metastorm ProVision to help consolidate its engineering efforts and build a new system that encompassed the entire organization’s capabilities.

The project started 18 months ago and with the help of Metastorm consultants they built a repository for all of the different components, capabilities and assets that once existed among siloed project teams. With Metastorm ProVision, the company now has an enterprise model that helps them understand the relationships that exist across their organization, what assets they have, and how project teams are leveraging these assets. All the sub-projects roll up into a high level view of all initiatives and are tied back to corporate KPIs. Metastorm ProVision allowed them to create strategy through to execution providing a clear vision to transform their engineering operations.

For many organizations, enterprise architecture has become a critical component for bringing value to the business and integrating IT and business operations. As we have discussed in this series, EA initiatives can start at an executive level, as part of an IT initiative, or in response to a specific business requirement. Regardless of its source, your organization should find a tool that supports the ability to move beyond tactical architecture to allow users of all backgrounds to understand the systems, processes, applications and people that will help your organization maximize its resources and reach its goals.

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With a powerful enterprise architecture system in place, a variety of groups can lead EA initiatives. For instance, one of our customers is a global financial services company who is one of the largest credit card issuers in the United States. To support its global operations, the organization has 10 different mainframes located throughout the world that are responsible for running the company’s complex business applications.

Recognizing the amount of money and time spent maintaining these mainframes, the IT department decided they needed to consolidate and move the mainframes to a more centralized, lower cost location where they could be better managed. The members of the IT team went through a demanding investigative process to analyze the potential to bring the mainframes back to the U.S. At that time, the mainframe systems were outsourced to another company to be hosted and maintained.  After almost four years, the IT team realized that it had not saved any money from this outsourcing initiative.

Realizing the enormous scale of this data and system architecture project and the potential cost savings that the company could achieve, the IT team needed a strong enterprise architecture solution that allowed them to model all of the assets and capabilities of each mainframe in order to better understand the divisions and functions they supported. Using Metastorm ProVision, the team was able to build a portfolio management solution to understand its entire mainframe environment, which includes the hardware, software, applications, communication, support, maintenance and costs.  

The first step was to map out the current environment of its mainframes. During this process, the IT team identified close to 500,000 objects in the repository. After the mapping phase the team built out a consolidated model and was able to reduce the number of mainframes from 10 to four. Additionally, the team was also able to consolidate the subsystems (regions) from 30 to less than 10, which considerably lowered redundant messaging. Working with the Metastorm consulting team, the organization has identified two separate data types within the consolidated mainframes, the customer and the supplier. They have also been able to understand and define specific objects. With the unique data linking supported by Metastorm, if an application is moved the team will know what databases, queue requests, transactions, subsystems, data, file transfers, batch jobs, and software that will be affected.

In this particular example, the IT team led the effort to embark on a full-scale enterprise architecture project. Based on the initial estimates, the company expects to see an estimated $40-100 million savings in the first fully operational year.

Tune in next week as we examine another business case where a totally different group within the organization decided to undertake an EA initiative.

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Of course the answer really depends on the problem you are trying to solve. The reality is that any of these groups can drive an enterprise architecture (EA) initiative when it is supported by a robust enterprise architecture solution.

One of our customers is the largest global discount retail store chain in the world. Rapid global expansion of the customer’s business across North America, Asia, EMEA, and South America, resulted in a significant increase (in the thousands) in the number of applications required to support its growing business demands. Over time, the retailer’s enterprise architects discovered thousands of redundant and overlapping applications that existed in silos, often in largely unknown departments around the world. Not only were these applications redundant, they were costing the organization millions of dollars in maintenance, troubleshooting and licensing fees. Additionally, data was dispersed across dozens of countries, requiring multiple data entry points and different management requirements for individual applications.

The scope of the project was overwhelming. As they began dissecting the initiative, the architects determined they needed an enterprise and business architecture modeling solution to help them truly understand all of their applications. Specifically, they needed to know which applications supported the key functions of their business operations, which applications caused process breakdowns, which applications supported the core capabilities of specific business functions, and which applications were redundant and unnecessary.

After demonstrating to company executives the critical need for an Application Portfolio Management (APM) solution to solve this problem, the architects turned to Metastorm. Using Metastorm ProVision, the architects now have complete visibility and control into their global applications – giving the organization as a whole increased business agility and dramatically decreased costs. With this APM solution, the retailer expects to retire unnecessary applications and the hardware that supports them, simplify its IT support structure, and significantly reduce maintenance costs.

In this instance, the retailer’s enterprise architects pushed the initiative forward. However, as we will see in Part 2 of this series, EA’s aren’t the only people who drive enterprise and business architecture initiatives within organizations. Tune in next week as we explore another business case where a completely different group within an organization drove the EA initiative.

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To achieve and maintain excellence throughout your enterprise, collaboration and process improvement must be constant.

Once you have captured and deployed the best practices discovered during the design phase, collaboration must continue to be fostered.  Process improvement cannot be viewed as a one-time event.  To achieve the agility that you need today, your organization must continue to evolve and improve processes, adapt them quickly when opportunities and challenges arise, and leverage technologies that allow you to continue to build on the collective intelligence and insights of your organization’s top performers.  When your systems support rapid development and deployment, your organization has the ability to continually innovate and better respond to change whether it comes from internal or external forces, like competitor’s actions or new regulations.

By uniting the people who know how to get work done most effectively with people who need to know on a continuous basis, your organization will have a deeper understanding of its strengths, weaknesses, process gaps and redundancies.  Seeking continuous feedback on how to continue to evolve and improve processes is a critical part of building a culture of operational excellence.  In fact, there are technologies that enable multiple users in your organization to communicate, collaborate and make process improvements anytime, anywhere.  This ensures that the right people with the right knowledge are involved achieving operational excellence.

There is untapped knowledge and excellence in your organization.  The most successful companies are deliberate about identifying excellence and ensuring it becomes part of the operational model.

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We see these top performers in every organization. One division consistently outperforms other divisions. One customer service representative handles more calls per day, producing better customer satisfaction outcomes than their counterparts. One department handles transactions at a 10% lower cost than industry averages.

But why does this happen?

Drawing from the disciplines of Enterprise Architecture, EA practitioners can help organizations not only discover but standardize their best practices to increase overall business performance. If you leverage an EA solution during the business process design phase of your business process management (BPM) projects, you can better discover what your best practices are. More specifically, exactly what the things are that a top performer or department consistently does well that helps them achieve better results. Oftentimes what is really working is not necessarily what the company thinks is working.

What EA disciplines can help draw out best practices? EA practitioners know to sometimes move out of the conference room to observe workers, to see work as it unfolds and inquire about why a particular action was carried out. This observation creates a more detailed picture of actions and interactions that may not be thought of by an expert as they describe their work in a more structured setting. A second technique is to explore the interrelationships of roles that depend on each other to complete work items. In bringing these roles together and developing a better understanding between the teams of each other’s work you can bring more visibility to the entire process. Finally, applying consistency and structure to the definitions of business processes will begin to lay a foundation for how work is understood by the organization.

In addition to approaching the discovery phase with a proven EA methodology, bringing visibility into the process is another critical part of uncovering excellence. For many groups, it isn’t until the current process is fully understood that opportunities for improvement can be identified and shared with other groups. Visibility can often reveal immediate differences and opportunities for better practices. Once processes are visible, additional opportunities for improvement can be discovered through a collaborative process with top performers and departments. During this discovery and design phase it is very important that you include the business users that will be impacted by the proposed changes. In doing this you will have the ability to capture and leverage how these business user’s ideas build upon each other to answer the “what if” questions, like: Why are we doing work this way? What are the best ideas for doing this work in a smarter way?

Uncovering what makes you excellent is the first step in making process excellence possible in your organization.

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Organizations are looking to leverage enterprise architecture to develop a strong, detailed understanding of the operating model and supporting organization structures with clearly defined business rules and requirements.  Adding a business process management layer to the mix allows you to actually apply and automate the business practice improvements defined during your modeling phase.  

Think of enterprise architecture as your enterprise context or your value chain, which helps you define the larger, more complex business capabilities you perform every day.  As you spend time improving the value chains, you naturally begin to understand, associate and define your business operations in greater detail – focusing on specific pieces of the whole.  When you are ready to execute the processes you have mapped out, you have a complete map of both the micro and macro view of your business operations.  Thus, you are able to keep the larger picture in mind as you are improving and automating specific pieces, but still have the ability to drill down deeper and analyze, reevaluate and improve your practices leveraging what you’ve learned at the enterprise level to drive operational excellence deeper into the organization.  

According to Gartner analyst, Phil Allega, “Enterprise architecture is the process of transforming business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change.”  Business processes are a critical part of this transformation and organizations can extract maximum value by leveraging EA and BPM tools in tandem. Together, these solutions can transform your business by allowing you to truly understand, model, analyze and automate how the people, processes, systems and technology work together to deliver your business goals and improve your enterprise.

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When trying to improve or build a COE, make sure you have these six key strategies for success:

1. Define and understand your vision and goals
   Translating your basic business needs into a well articulated strategy can be daunting.  By articulating your business vision and goals upfront you are better able to prioritize and manage your issues and connect them to your overall business strategy.
    
2. Collaborate with IT and business users
   To harness the full power of a COE, you must bring together both business and IT.  It is critical that these two groups share their knowledge and experience and work together to analyze, map and build new, more effective processes.  Both groups must understand the value the other brings to the table and how they can work together to improve the overall business.
    
3. Understand your organization’s strengths, weaknesses and needs
   Every organization has its process issues. A strong analysis tool can help you understand exactly how your organization’s systems, people and processes interact – giving you deeper insight into which processes are successful and which processes need work.  
    
4. Build a best practices repository
   With careful consideration, a best practices repository is one of the best ways to tackle big business challenges. Your team must begin to analyze and understand both your structured and unstructured processes and how you can improve them to drive business growth.
    
5. Leverage software tools to see lifecycle of process
   A great COE will help your organization embrace and manage process improvement.  Powerful software solutions can help you model and analyze your goals and business strategy, enabling you to better understand where you are and where you want to go.  Business analysis tools allow you to model and simulate more of the operational aspects of your enterprise – helping you better understand how your strategy, processes, people and content are interrelated. A business process management tool can help you automate and monitor your human-centric and systems-based processes.
    
6. Focus on process improvement
   Today’s business world is ever-changing and it is critical that you are always analyzing and improving your business processes.  By always thinking about how to improve and remodel your processes, you will dramatically increase your agility and efficiency for competitive advantage.      

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