Because Process Matters » enterprise modeling

3 Reasons Organizations Need Capability Maps

Alison Cooley — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 14:30:43 +0000

Organizations are made up of thousands of capabilities, each individually responsible for what the organization must do to successfully perform any type of business activity. With thousands of capabilities supporting multiple business units, it becomes difficult to see and understand how the people – and the technology that supports them – work together to perform a single task.

Capability maps help make sense of it all. They are an organizational model, representing the business capabilities, processes and functions and all of the IT resources that enable them – allowing you to more easily see how each operates in order to run the day-to-day business operations

But, why should you invest in capability mapping when you already have your own method that’s been working?

Over the past few months we’ve talked to our customers and industry experts and discovered that capability mapping is a cleaner, easier way to illustrate how your organization operates at the individual level – enabling organizations to analyze and understand what capabilities are being underutilized or overworked.

Still not convinced? Here are three reasons why we think you should start capability mapping:

1. Close the gap between EA and BPM

Yes, business process management (BPM) teams and enterprise architecture (EA) teams are responsible for driving different strategy initiatives –BPM for process improvement and EA for strategy and IT planning. However, there does not need to be a complete disconnect between the two units. Getting these two teams to see eye-to-eye and collaborate more effectively is key in mending this gap. Capability maps help facilitate this by offering both teams a complete, holistic map of the organization’s capabilities and resources. Now, they can discover both problem areas and opportunities that exist across all levels from strategy to execution and work together to address them.

2. Gain support from senior executives

To the senior executive, it really doesn’t matter how the business unit leverages its capabilities to meet its performance target. What matters is that they have visibility into the organization and know that the business is achieving its goals and hitting its numbers – and if it’s not, they need the visibility to know where the trouble lies. Organizational capabilities can be mapped out in a way that offers this visibility and insight. Using a capability map, IT and business leaders are better positioned to get more support from senior executives for process improvement projects and IT investments. They are able to illustrate what capabilities are missing, what capabilities need work and what capabilities can be eliminated in order to run a better, more effective business.

3. Prioritize and manage initiatives

With full visibility into the capabilities, organizations can drill down and see how their business operates on a daily basis. From there, organizations are able to prioritize and manage transformation and improvement initiatives and see exactly what capabilities are being leveraged in order to manage change. This visibility allows organizations to identify the strengths and weaknesses, see what capabilities require the highest priority, remove redundancies, and devote more resources to improving the capabilties that are broken or flawed.

Capability maps are simple to design, easy to use and necessary for optimizing organizational structure, planning roadmaps for change, and evolving and improving business processes. If you want to learn more about how capability maps can strengthen your business and help mend the gap between EA and BPM teams, check out this onDemand webinar featuring Neal Lohmann, director of business transformation solutions for Metastorm and Clay Richardson, senior analyst for Forrester: Align EA & BPM with Capabilities – Get Expert Insight from Forrester.

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The Top 5 Capabilities You Want From BPM Suites

Alison Cooley — Tue, 08 Mar 2011 14:25:37 +0000

What do you want to achieve by using business process management (BPM) software? Address compliance and risk management issues? Improve your customer service? Integrate data across existing applications?

To achieve these goals, some organizations look to leverage a robust BPM suite, while others are simply trying to improve their processes using BPM. Regardless of intentions or methods, organizations are investing more and more each year in BPM projects to improve flawed business processes, save money and boost productivity.

Gartner asked 600 business process management users to rank 22 capabilities they wanted most from BPM software and then ranked the responses from most to least important in a report titled, Survey Analysis: BPM Spending to Grow Significantly in 2011¹.

Here are Gartner’s top five and where we see the value…

1. Business Process Modeling

Process is the foundation of an organization. Exploring, modeling and analyzing processes is a reliable way to determine how to improve the way things are done. By having an enterprise and business architecture modeling element, you can develop a blueprint of your organization to understand the interrelationships, processes and behaviors that exist. From there, you can model out exactly how the process will change and actually see how it would work in a real-world scenario.

2. Business Rules Management

Organizations need to make decisions based on rules and policies and they are looking for a way to edit and approve expectations and claims on a case-by-case basis. A business rules management capability within a BPM suite allows non-technical business users to be directly involved with managing the rules and processes that are subject to complex and varied exceptions – making it easier for them to make the right, informed decision.

3. Collaboration

With the continuing (and game changing) innovation of social networking, collaboration has become a critical part of our society and organizational fiber. Removing communication barriers within organizations is an ongoing goal in the quest for optimal productivity and agility. People use social networking tools to collaborate in every other aspect of their lives and are now looking for collaboration tools and techniques to be extended to the office. When you combine advanced collaboration tools with business modeling, organizations are better equipped to easily engage more people in creating the right processes that offer the best value to the enterprise.

4. Process Optimization/Simulation

The ability to simulate process changes is one of the most valued aspects of a business process management tool – it allows you to make smart, well thought out decisions. By simulating processes you have the ability to understand interactions and design the best processes to maximize your resources. A business process analysis element allows you to analyze process performance and stage as is and to be analysis – which helps you compare the potential for increased service levels as well as time, error, and cost reductions.

5. Human Interaction Management

People are the core of a business and they’re involved in some of the most manual, complex, and evolving processes that run the organization. BPM suites help organizations support these human-centric processes by giving managers visibility into the interworking of the business and access to the content they need, when they need it. Organizations can document and analyze these human-centric processes, gather input from employees (hopefully using a robust collaboration capability!), and better understand the strengths and weaknesses of the organization’s practices so that business improvements can be made.

Clearly there is a close match between what people are looking for in a BPM suite and what Metastorm offers. This is likely because, as a long-time leader in the BPM market, we have spent years talking to industry experts, analysts, our partners and our customers about what they want and need from a BPM suite and how we can best help them solve their process problems. It’s clear that BPM isn’t going away and that people are turning to it more and more to help fix some very complex problems.

For more information about Metastorm BPM, read our solution sheet or check out some of our customer success stories.

¹Survey Analysis: BPM Spending to Grow Significantly in 2011, by Teresa Jones, February 2011.

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3 Reasons to Start Thinking About a Business Transformation Strategy

Process Matters Blogger — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 14:23:47 +0000

The reality is change is inevitable. To keep up with today’s fast paced business environment you need to start thinking about how to prepare and handle potential business transformations. From managing a merger or acquisition to upgrading to SAP to selecting a sourcing strategy, business transformations take many forms. Business transformations, big or small, give you the opportunity to improve and advance your business operations – allowing your organization to evolve and expand your footprint within the market place.

But without a clear, well defined plan in place—one that allows you to see and understand all of your business capabilities and determine the best possible transformation strategy—your organization won’t be in a good position to effectively implement and manage change.

Why invest in a business transformation strategy? Here are three business reasons to create a formal business transformation strategy and implement a consistent framework for managing change:

1. Eliminate siloed departments and competing practices

Executives and senior managers often don’t realize how many complex, competing practices exist within their organization. Siloed departments cause huge communication barriers, which end up preventing any sort of meaningful change, while also stifling innovation and blocking agility. A business transformation strategy will give you ability to identify and remove these redundant practices, and help you map out a more effective and strategic way to establish consistency, repeatability and measurability across business transformation activities to better manage change and foster innovation.

2. Gain visibility and control into business operations

If you can’t see how your organization operates on a day-to-day basis, how can you determine the right change and manage it once it has taken place? Investing in a business transformation framework solution will allow you to drill down in the daily operations to see exactly how people and processes work together and simulate potential business transformations to deliver ongoing improvements and remain competitive.

3. Establish collaboration and a common vocabulary across all business practices

Communication is the key to success. Organizations need to figure out how to establish a common vocabulary and enhance communication between people from various departments and locations. By mapping out each role and responsibility within the organization and having a tool that establishes an effective form of communication, you can remove the communication barriers that keep your organization from being able to keep up with and positively contribute to change. Real-time chat and model viewing capabilities across multiple users allows organizations to model, discuss, and improve their business operations, making it easier to execute and manage a business transformation.

To remain successful and competitive, your business has to change. The best approach to managing any change is being prepared for the unknown. Metastorm offers a business transformation practices framework that can be implemented directly with our complete software portfolio, to give your organization broad understanding and visibility into your practices and allow you to prepare and respond more quickly and effectively to environmental, technological, or regulatory changes.

If you’re interested in learning more about how a business transformation framework can help your organization manage change, I encourage you to participate in Metastorm’s upcoming webinar The Power of Business Transformation on February 8^th at 11:00am EST.

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The Road Ahead for Enterprise & Business Architecture

Mark DiGirolamo — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 14:29:17 +0000

With a new year upon us it’s always exciting to look ahead. With the many changes that 2010 brought in EA – more focus on metrics, a trend toward aligning with BPM, etc. – what could be coming next? Here at Metastorm we believe we will see a continuation of the trends from 2010, as well as some interesting new developments. By far, 2011 will be the year of the business driving EA – business and technology objectives, plans and actions will become fused into a cohesive roadmap for success.

Gartner, Inc. recently published its views on what is coming in EA. The report, “Predicts 2011: Enterprise Architecture Shifting Focus to Business Value Outcomes,” November 11, 2010, Philip Allega, Betsy Burton, et al., provides several angles on the evolution of the EA market. At Metastorm, we are honing in on two key themes that are very present in our customer base and which we will use as the basis to drive innovation in our technology this year.

“2011 will be the year of business driving EA”

EA has historically been a task performed by IT, managing technical portfolios, identifying standards, and the like. While this will continue, EA is being pressed to expose their value to the business, and beyond that genuinely engage and collaborate with the business. As Gartner’s recent report suggests, “…it’s clear that EA is not only about IT anymore, making business engagement more critical than ever.”

Exposing value to the business was an important step taken last year. Using various techniques, EA made it a priority to advertise their value and the cost savings and efficiencies they fostered. 2011 will take this a step further and create true collaboration, at every level, with the business. This will effectively move EA out of the IT realm and into the business. This is extremely exciting and should be seen as a momentous shift. In fact, EA may not even be referred to as “EA” but something entirely different.

“Results based”

In addition to a strong alignment with the business, EA will also need to move towards a more formal approach for measuring its value. EA groups that don’t celebrate this will be in danger of losing funding. “Results based” is our new paradigm. Funds will move toward departments and projects that are transparent in the value that they are delivering. Also mentioned in Gartner’s report, “as business leaders shift their focus to leading and lagging indicators … EA practitioners will capitalize on this shift.” The idea is to tie EA outcomes to business outcomes and clearly expose the critical role EA played reaching that positive outcome.

In the end it comes down to collaboration and communication. The EA groups that do this the best will be the heroes, and the software and services vendor that best enables this will be rewarded.

At Metastorm, we are excited for the year ahead and believe we are uniquely positioned in the market to enable organizations to embrace these latest trends. Creating a tighter relationship between business and IT has long been our strategy – and the work we have done with our software portfolio in the past year goes even further to blend the groups into a cohesive team working toward the same objectives. With a Smart Business Workspace that powers EA, BPA and BPM and provides people with a tailored view into the information, tools and metrics they need to deliver and measure value, Metastorm Enterprise software will be the foundation of the future for EA at organizations worldwide.

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Fortune 100 Energy Company: Identifying Gaps and Opportunities

Process Matters Blogger — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 14:40:26 +0000

Metastorm has a successful track record of providing support and services to organizations looking for a better understanding of their organizational operations, identifying areas for improvements, and maximizing operational performance and resource utilization. Recently, a Fortune 100 Energy Company used Metastorm Enterprise solutions to establish complete visibility across their corporate controls, helping them identify, analyze and improve gaps within their organization.

In this video from the Metastorm Customers Speak Out video testimonial series, released earlier this week, Cindy Bivians, senior manager of corporate risk control from a Fortune 100 energy company, shares insights into how they deployed Metastorm ProVision to achieve optimal business solutions. Bivians discusses how they are using Metastorm ProVision to model, visualize and improve gaps across the enterprise. By implementing Metastorm ProVision, the organization was able to establish transparency across integrated processes within their Corporate Risk Controls sector. In doing this, they were able to identify missing items and areas that needed improvement and documented results – including a repeatable savings of 65 hours of time from one group process. Since then, they have deployed Metastorm ProVision into all other areas of their organizational structure, and expect to see a dramatic change in hours saved in 2011.

Implementing Metastorm ProVision enables businesses to thoroughly understand the intricate relationships that exist between business strategy and business process and identify areas for improvement. Want to learn more about how customers are leveraging Metastorm Enterprise software? Check out our customer page where you can watch the complete Metastorm Customers Speak Out series and read over 100 customer success stories.

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Metastorm Raises the Bar on Social BPM

Process Matters Blogger — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:44:11 +0000

There continues to be a great deal of buzz around the concept of Social BPM, but Metastorm took the concept beyond the theoretical last week with its release of Metastorm M3 and Metastorm Smart Business Workspace.

Gartner, Inc. even issued a “First Take” research note with its opinion on the new applications – the conclusion being that Metastorm has raised the bar for Social BPM environments and surpassed its existing competition.

Our ability to raise the bar was not by sheer luck. In developing these new applications, Metastorm invested a great deal of time and energy in working with our customers and industry experts (as well as assimilating user feedback on the flaws in other vendor offerings) to understand market needs and focus on the key criteria that would deliver the most business value. Such feedback included:

A true Cloud platform – not just SaaS
Collaboration and social networking tools that business users will embrace
A rich user experience that mimics desktop applications, but runs in the Cloud
Role-based personalization that is configurable at the individual user level
Automatic capture of collaboration sessions – record, playback and audit
Full integration of content and models with Metastorm’s enterprise architecture (EA), business process analysis (BPA) and business process management (BPM) software applications
Not just workflow modeling

That last criteria is a critical distinction that many people overlook – any modeling and collaboration tool that is confined to just a workflow or process view is flawed by nature. How can you truly capture and optimize a business process without fully understanding the bigger picture enterprise elements that contribute to process success?

Metastorm has raised the bar on Social BPM by releasing a rich enterprise modeling environment on a true Cloud platform (Microsoft Windows Azure) with 11 different model types and 23 modeling objects, complemented by social collaboration tools that are inherent in the user environment. Of course Metastorm M3 enables collaborative process discovery, but it also goes beyond process to enable collaboration on other enterprise assets, including people and organization models, business capabilities, goals, rules, requirements and systems, that factor into the true optimization of organizational performance. Opening up insight and collaboration on a broad set of models, to a broad set of participants, on an unlimited scale, sets the stage for not only social interaction at the business level, but also increased accuracy of assumptions and faster realization of business improvements – improvements in processes and improvements in how your organization operates as a whole.

I encourage you to read the Gartner research note while it is available for public access through September – Metastorm Offerings Raise the Bar for Social BPM Environments. Whether you are just starting to consider the value of Social BPM or you are unhappy with your current tool, now is the time to request a free trial of Metastorm M3 to take your efforts to whole new level.

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Collaboration in the Cloud—Introducing Metastorm M3

Process Matters Blogger — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 15:20:21 +0000

In our recent blog post about the Future of Social BPM, we promised that there were some exciting new innovations coming from Metastorm in this arena. And today, Metastorm is excited to announce the release of Metastorm M3™— a true, cloud-enabled modeling suite which allows an unlimited number of users to collaborate in real-time on goals, capabilities, systems and processes to achieve better business results. Metastorm M3 is the first ever “social enterprise modeling” environment.

Operating on the Microsoft Windows Azure ™ platform, Metastorm M3 provides users with complete benefits of a private or public cloud, including scalability, performance, security, and elasticity. Metastorm M3 is designed to be modeling for the masses, offering 11 different modeling types—goal, organization, capability, system, process/workflow, activity, rule, project, requirement, location and deliverable— from the Metastorm Enterprise software suite. Additionally, Metastorm M3 provides 23 modeling objects and viewpoints, going beyond a traditional process model, to give users more comprehensive and holistic business improvements.

Metastorm M3 empowers businesses by offering a cloud-based environment through which an unlimited number of users can easily improve their organizations using enterprise modeling and collaboration. Business and IT users are given a rich, social environment in the Cloud where they are able to utilize social networking tools such as chat, whiteboard, model annotation, sharing, recording, and playback to design and implement business practices. A distinguishing feature of Metastorm M3 is that it offers secure, cloud-based collaborative enterprise modeling for anyone, anywhere. Metastorm M3 is an excellent tool for mass deployment because it offers built-in modeling guides and real-time help, requiring no prior knowledge of or training in enterprise modeling and no IT setup. Additionally, its location in the Cloud allows users to gain unlimited access, opening a broader, global collaboration for businesses to achieve the most optimal results.

Metastorm M3 is designed to be used alone or with the Metastorm Enterprise software suite. Any input, information and data captured in the Cloud is compatible with Metastorm’s enterprise architecture, business process analysis, business process management and integration products to ensure ongoing, shared visibility and the ability to incorporate user input enterprise-wide process improvements.

“Metastorm M3 is designed to go above and beyond any other tool available today to give our customers a distinct edge over their competition,” said Greg Carter, executive vice president of development and CTO of Metastorm. “Leveraging our years of best practice experience in modeling, architecture strategy and process improvement, we have compiled a rich set of modeling and collaboration tools to empower users on a global scale to participate in business architecture and process definition activities that were once limited to a specific department or skill level.”

What to know more about Metastorm M3? Check out the social media version of the press release here, complete with screenshots and other related materials.

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