Because Process Matters » Gartner

Impacting Business with Enterprise Architecture: What the Future Holds for EA Efforts

Sandra Moran — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 13:21:23 +0000

Cliché as it may be, I can’t stop myself from turning the page on the calendar of a new year and turning my mind to my personal goals for the year. Naturally, many organizations have a tendency to follow suit. Bolstered by this spirit of the possible, organizations begin to envision themselves achieving their goals – to rethink the way their business operates with renewed desire to drive innovation, increase speed to market and dramatically improve customer service.

To bring life to those enterprise aspirations, business and technology leaders should look to 2012 as a year to continue improving their collaborative efforts to achieve business change. There are no indications that the new year will bring any relief from the increasing pace of technology and business change, nor the increasing demands from more educated and socially connected customers. 2011 continued the trend toward business driving IT and 2012 offers the opportunity to make this shift pay off for organizations. Many organizations who are focused on bridging the gap between business and IT groups will achieve far more benefits if they fuse these two groups into business teams working collaboratively to drive transformations.

So, what does 2012 have in store for EA teams?

In its yearly series, Gartner Inc. recently predicted that many organizations will begin to leverage EA tools to drive business value and impact. According to the report, “Gartner Predicts: Opportunities for EA to Lead Business Transformation in Turbulent Times,” December 1, 2011, Phillip Allega, Betsy Burton, et all. “EA practitioners will begin to shift their focus to begin to think about their role differently and, in many cases, employ a new way of working.” With only 40% of EA programs worldwide reporting to IT, EA’s focus must shift from IT and operations to delivery of demonstrable business value.

As I read through the report, I found the following assumptions particularly interesting.

The managed diversity approach
“By 2015, 25% of Global 1000 organizations will produce cohesive EA artifacts that support the diversity of complex business ecosystems.”

When undergoing a business transformation initiative, organizations must account for global operational diversity. According to the report, “the managed diversity style defines choices or options for what projects or customers can leverage without defining only strict, rigid standards. Managed diversity does not mean that there are no standards, but rather that EA planning achieves a balance between the need for a set of standards that help control costs and the need for a diversity of solutions to increase innovation, business growth and competitive advantage across locations that the organization operates in.”

Properly executed, EA can help organizations achieve the delicate balance of identifying and propagating best practices, maximizing technology investments, ensuring compliance with local regulatory bodies, and risk reduction with the flexibility to adapt business systems to compete in global markets. With flexible but defined guardrails, organizations typically find a significant increased speed in their ability to execute when teams are empowered to leverage the elements they need with the guidance to avoid critical mistakes.

Working together
“By year-end 2014, 50% of Global 1000 organizations will support EA as a collaborative business and IT effort.”

Successful organizations have already started moving their EA teams out of IT and into the business. Gartner’s survey results indicate that while 68% of EA programs in the US report to the IT organization this picture is already considerably different worldwide. China, who primarily looks to EA for business transformation initiatives, reports to business leadership 76% of the time. This shift in reporting relationships naturally drives changes in the focus and composition of project teams. The complementary nature of skills, perspectives and insights from enterprise architects and business people can combine to produce dramatically better results. Organizations cannot drive business growth without carefully selecting the members of the project team.

I particularly appreciated Gartner’s caution, “do not assume that just because business leaders are collaborating and engaging in EA, the effort will be “business strategy driven.” Executive leadership should be mindful that they have defined a clear business strategy that includes actionable directives to provide the context in which these collaborative teams can drive execution.

Increased focus on the decision process
“Through year-end 2014, 60% of organizations will continue to focus EA on assurance, rather than governance.”

According to the report, there are two key challenges when implementing EA governance: 1) they lack training and critical understanding of the topic, and 2) they focus exclusively on control and assurance. This is a problem because EA practitioners often lack an understanding of how the business uses information to makes business decisions. Quite honestly, it is easier to focus on control and standardization because this space is more comfortable for individuals with a technical background. Increasing collaboration between IT and business can be part of this solution but only if architects dig deeper to understand the decision process, the relative value of investment priorities in the context of the business strategy and which standards provide value to the organization. This level of understanding requires more than collaboration between the groups. It requires a true respect and commitment to understanding how the organization defines and drives business value and how they can then become a part of driving that change.

What is your take on Gartner’s predictions for EA this year? Do you see your EA team driving or reacting to these predicted trends? Will this be your year to deliver strategic business value? Leave your comments below and we can discuss.

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The New iWorker Meets Adaptive Case Management

Derek Weeks — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 11:53:47 +0000

IT organizations are faced with a growing set of user expectations from the lines of businesses they support. The mismatch of expectations is being accelerated by the now ubiquitous access to Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype, personalized portals like iGoogle, and iPhone or iPad. The growing use of these technologies has evolved millions into technology and social savvy “iWorkers”. These masses are now collaborating, finding expertise, communicating with one another, and personalizing their application interfaces –all outside of work. For many people, stepping into their office each morning takes them back a decade or more when comparing their work environment and applications to technologies they have used to make their personal lives more productive.

Adaptive Case Management: Taming Unstructured Process Work for Today’s Knowledge Worker

View more presentations from OpenText Global 360

In a presentation I delivered to a full room at this week’s Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Orlando, I discuss this growing disparity between what IT is delivering and the growing expectations of their technology and social savvy iWorkers. I led the session attendees through the story, which you can read through below, describing the interactions of Bryan (the IT Pro), Jenny (the new iWorker), and Tom (Jenny’s supervisor). After revealing some of the challenges Bryan, Jenny, and Tom were faced with, the story unfolds to reveal how a new case management solution enabled them to change the way work was done.

The story shows how Adaptive Case Management enabled the organization to

better manage structured and unstructured processes
deliver content in context
take advantage of new social and mobile technologies to collaborate anywhere their business operates
offer personalized work interfaces based on roles, skills, and process context across the organization

If you are interested in learning more about Adaptive Case Management and how it might help your organization meet the growing expectations of the new iWorker, I invite you to take a tour through the presentation below. To continue the converation, you can follow me on Twitter @weekstweets.

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From Social Stigma to Social Synergy

Kevin Haugh — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 13:17:12 +0000

It is remarkable how quickly social technologies have become the primary way that many people communicate and collaborate. Yet in many companies the use of these technologies is seen as detrimental time wasters that should be prohibited in the workspace. One of the reasons that social technologies have gotten a bad rap stems from their heritage in non-work related communication. Use of the term “social” further reinforces this perception. But, a more fundamental reason that social technologies have not achieved either the level of business endorsement or results is that these technologies have not been connected closely enough to work activities seen as generating business value. But there are huge, untapped opportunities for social technologies to deliver large business value.

In the past year or so the social term and its capabilities has been attached to BPM. Industry analysts, practitioners, vendors and experts have all contributed to the discussion of what Social BPM is and what it means. Elise Golding, Carol Rozwell and Jim Sinur wrote a very nice research brief¹ on Social BPM and defined two implementations of Social BPM—Social BPM design and Social BPM iteration. I would argue that a third implementation of Social BPM involves social process participation, absent any explicit effort to design or iterate the process.

The first and second implementations of Social BPM involve pursuing process design and ongoing improvement. Social technologies provide a more collaborative and lighter weight way to engage a broad range of people in discovering, documenting, and designing improved processes.

For example, a major problem in organizations is that many processes are neither well documented nor understood. In a typical process improvement effort a business analyst must bring together a team who they believe knows about the process. Only after dozens of meetings and several documents passed back and forth through multiple cycles, can the team then validate what the process is and start to figure out why. Now, after spending much time, effort and money, the team can finally begin to design improvements in the new process.

By closely tying social capabilities to process design with Social BPM, businesses are able to engage process owners, process participants and other stakeholders across the organization in real-time during the requirements and process definition stages of your project. Errors can be immediately identified and input from a broad range of users incorporated. Social BPM enables you to quickly and efficiently access previously untapped knowledge for the most informed and accurate process improvement. A combination of socially oriented technologies can come together with process modeling to accomplish this, including context sensitive chat, screensharing and use of the Cloud.

My discussion about Social BPM doesn’t end here. Stay tuned as I explore additional implementations of Social BPM, its future and how it can (and will) help transform business.

_________________________
¹Gartner, Inc., “Social BPM: Design by Doing” by Elise Olding, Carol Rozwell and Jim Sinur, May 4, 2010.

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Thoughts from Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit

Wendy Werve — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 18:01:03 +0000

Last week, Gartner’s US Enterprise Architecture Summit in San Diego attracted several hundred attendees. More than 500 IT and business professionals attended the conference, which indicates to us that EA is gaining momentum as a strategic business priority.

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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Must See Guide to Gartner EA Summit

Wendy Werve — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 14:32:37 +0000

The Gartner EA Summit in San Diego is only a few days away and it’s packed full of great keynotes, sessions, case studies and roundtables to help organizations better understand and maximize the value of enterprise architecture. As one of the largest gatherings of EA experts, we wanted to take this opportunity to put together a short list of our must see sessions that you won’t want to miss this week!

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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Power of EA + BPM: Thoughts from Gartner EA Summit

Wendy Werve — Wed, 11 May 2011 13:55:03 +0000

The Gartner Enterprise Architecture Summit in London came to a close yesterday. After two days of insightful keynotes, analyst presentations, workshops and networking, it was clear that business processes and EA are inherently and necessarily linked to one another. In a recent Gartner survey, improving and aligning business processes was cited as an EA priority as well as a key business and IT priority for CIOs. As Gartner analyst Elise Olding discussed, in her session, “BPM – The Catalyst to Deliver outcomes,” when EA and BPM join forces, the results are much more than either can achieve alone.

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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Thoughts from Gartner BPM Summit

Process Matters Blogger — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 16:13:21 +0000

Gartner Business Process Management Summit is in full swing and after a jam-packed day of keynotes, sessions, roundtables and one-on-one conversations with BPM users, vendors and industry experts, we are seeing three major themes driving BPM interest and adoption today – Visibility, Change and Results.

Collaboration between business and IT
Bringing together business and IT helps organizations define better practices that can drive improvements in your company. Collaboration is critical for success. When business and IT start to share their knowledge, ideas and experiences there is greater opportunity to discover best practices that can be delivered back to the organization to improve the way the business operates. Having these two groups come together will deliver, strengthen and increase BPM buy-in throughout the organization.

BPM is about transforming the way you do business
BPM isn’t just about automation – it’s about transforming and improving the way that your organization operates. BPM is about changing the way you engage your knowledge workers to drive positive, meaningful change across the enterprise. Organizations that have implemented successful BPM projects are able to actually see a difference in the behavior of their users and how the organization functions as a unit.

BPM needs measurable results
How do you know if you have made the right improvements to your organization? Organizations need strong metrics to ensure they are executing according to plan. BPM tools today must offer users the ability to understand where and how they have made real business improvements. Organizations want and need to see what projects have a significant, bottom-line impact.

There are two more days of the Gartner BPM Summit. Stay in the loop with all of the latest BPM news – follow us on Twitter @Metastorm and the event hashtag #bpm11 to get updates throughout the show.

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Must See Guide for Gartner BPM Summit

Process Matters Blogger — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:49:46 +0000

As one of the largest BPM conferences in the world, the Gartner BPM Summit offers objective advice and insights into some of the latest issues, disciplines and trends emerging in the BPM community. With the Gartner BPM Summit coming up next week in Baltimore, we thought we’d take this opportunity to pull together a quick guide of some must see sessions.

Gartner Keynote: The 2011 Gartner Scenario: Critical Capabilities That Create and Sustain Business Value
We all know that there is an alarming disconnect between business and IT. For some time, the two groups have struggled to see eye-to-eye to deliver value for their process improvement initiatives. In this session, Ken McGee plans to dive into the most important capabilities business process improvement teams should leverage and how they will evolve over time.

Orientation to Business Process Management
For those of you that are new to BPM, this session is a must! You will learn everything you need to know about BPM, from terminology to key perspectives and major trends to concepts and decision frameworks.

The BPM Scenario: From Operational Excellence to Resilient Processes
In this session, you will discover how BPM technologies move past the traditional focus on operational excellence and dive deeper into adaptive processes. Janelle Hill will discuss why BPM is more important than ever and the strategic reasons why organizations should start moving from operational excellence to more adaptive processes.

Leveraging a COE to Drive Better Business Process Improvements
Organizations that implement a process Center of Excellence (COE) have a higher rate and degree of success for their business improvement programs. In this roundtable, Kevin Haugh, vice president of product marketing and management for Metastorm, will lead an interactive discussion on how Process Centers of Excellence enable organizations to better manage, streamline and standardize their BPM projects by applying best practices and prior lessons learned around requirement discovery techniques, project success metrics, methodologies and team makeup.

Advancing BPM Maturity
Learn how to assess and advance your BPM maturity in this session hosted by Janelle Hill. You will discover what BPM maturity really means, where your organization falls on the BPM maturity spectrum, and how you can advance your BPM maturity.

Selling BPM to Your Organization
Getting everyone onboard for a large BPM project can be difficult. In this session hosted by Janelle Hill, you discuss who the right people are that you should select for your BPM planning team and how you can gain buy-in and support for launching your BPM initiative.

Using BPM as a True Business Process Improvement Platform
In this session, Metastorm customer Manoj Kumar, director of enterprise application development for AmerisourceBergen, a Fortune 25 pharmaceuticals company, will share his experience around how AmerisourceBergen has successfully evolved its use of BPM from a proof-of-concept pilot to a full-scale, enterprise business process improvement platform. AmerisourceBergen has deployed more than 200 processes in Metastorm BPM and is also using BPM to support broader business transformation initiatives and is continuing to leverage BPM to drive enterprise-wide change, augmenting and extending its SAP system and critical legacy and enterprise applications, and govern numerous cross-functional and customer-facing processes.

Social BPM: A Tweet Size Overview
It seems that everyone is talking about Social BPM, but there’s still a lot of confusion about its value. Elise Olding will explore some of the key trends that are driving social technologies in organizations today, how they are advancing, and how Social BPM differs across business and IT.

Real-World Innovation: Great Solutions Driven by BPM Technology
This panel of the leading BPM solution providers, including Sandra Moran, director of product marketing for Metastorm have an interactive dialogue on the different innovative solutions organizations are achieving leveraging business process management technology.

There’s so much to learn at next week’s Gartner BPM Summit. Visit their website today to register for any of these sessions at http://www.gartner.com/technology/summits/na/business-process/.

Be sure to stop by Metastorm’s booth (Booth #5) 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 at wwerve@opentext.com

Don’t forget to follow the event on Twitter with the hashtag #BPM11

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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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A Bumpy Ride for Life Sciences in 2011?

Ethan Smith — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 15:57:50 +0000

As 2011 gets into full swing, I can’t help but think about the impending federal regulations forcing pharmaceutical companies to document, track and report payments to physician and physician owned entities, set to begin at the end of the year. In its annual Predicts 2011 series, Gartner recently published a list of predictions for the Life Science industry — Predicts 2011: Life Science Companies Will Need to Defend Their Base and Adapt to New Business Realities, by Steven Lefebure and Dale Hagemeyer, November 2010. After reading the report several times, two predictions stand out:

“By 2012, a major pharmaceutical company that downsized without transforming processes and technology will experience a major failure of control.”
“By 2012, a life science company will pay a $1 billion-plus fine for noncompliance with government contracting/rebating rules.”

What is most striking to me about the 2011 predictions is the disastrous nature of the consequences that Gartner cites – all of which can be tied back to a lack of focus on process. Over the past year, I have become concerned about the rapid pace at which companies in the industry have been consolidating. How does a company fully understand the value of a potential merger or acquisition – let alone realize its true value when events are happening this quickly? I agree with Gartner on this one. Without significant investment in technology to document, harmonize and optimize processes, a merger or acquisition is bound to fail.

What’s especially frustrating for me in particular is that software, services and industry expertise exist (from companies like Metastorm) to help in these situations, and far too often we find organizations either are not able or willing to listen and invest. Rather than ignoring the problem, what organizations should do, as Gartner clearly states, is “consider business process management tools to create agility and the rapid deployment of reorganized processes” and “evaluate processes together.” Not surprisingly, the analysts recommend strongly examining compliance and governance functions to “ensure scarce resources are focused on ‘material’ risks.”

In today’s era of heightened regulatory scrutiny and fines it is shocking that compliance seems to be both overlooked and understaffed. In addition to overall process improvement, solving compliance burdens is an area in which Metastorm has a long track record of client success.

Metastorm recommends that Life Sciences companies take a 3 pronged approach to process understanding and improvement:

Involve all key stakeholders up front by using cloud-based collaborative modeling and process discovery tools. Virtually anyone can access the tool and groups can work online together to come to consensus on goals, organizational roles, business rules and process flows.
Establish a central repository to house business models, strategy roadmaps and “as is” and “to be” models of the business so that all stakeholders have visibility and stay on the same page. An enterprise business architecture tool is best equipped to provide this along with critical process analysis capabilities.
Leverage process automation and business process management software to enforce and track behaviors for consistent process execution that meets business guidelines and supports business objectives. People will actually welcome an environment that takes the guesswork out of adhering to complex compliance regulations and that gives that instant access to the information they need to make better business decisions. It also serves to automate the documentation of and reporting on key processes and metrics.

Business processes not only drive company operations, but they also are a key element of compliance. Back to Gartner’s 2011 Predicts report – the other prediction I find almost equally compelling (given the hard dollars associated with it) is that, “By 2012, a life science company will pay a $1 billion-plus fine for noncompliance with government contracting/rebating rules.” I can’t tell you how often clients ask me for Return on Investment (ROI) models to justify process analysis and business process management software – while almost every day news headlines cite yet another pharmaceutical company paying a massive fine. There is the ROI right there – often hundreds of millions of dollars.

The numbers are no longer trivial in terms of fines, and the negative publicity can be even more damaging in a market that is becoming increasingly competitive.

The other side of this is pretty simple as well – fines are a source of income for the government. I don’t think that requires further explanation, but suffice it to say the industry is going to pay one way or another. I addressed the government contracting and rebating rules component of this prediction, in a blog post last year.

I don’t know any other area of Life Sciences where such complex, yet bottom-line-impacting processes, activities and controls are so far behind the curve. I understand this is a highly complicated process and area of regulation. My response (similar to Gartner’s recommendation) is simple – the impact is huge (to the tune of an $11B a year loss for the industry) so– this is where you should be investing heavily in controls, processes, and technology to ensure you are compliant and also agile enough to adapt to on-going changes. I also recommend taking it a step further, which some of our most mature clients have done, and layer process controls and automation through Metastorm BPM on top of the core infrastructure of revenue management. We have multiple clients who have taken this approach and literally saved millions of dollars on an annual basis – providing more than adequate ROI justification and case study proof points to get your organization moving.

I think it’s clear that things are going to get much worse for some Life Sciences companies, with potentially disastrous consequences. While those that do take the time now to develop process visibility, understanding, optimization and control will be poised to not only survive this industry storm, but emerge as the market leaders. The best approach to survival in 2011 and to prepare for the future is for Life Science companies to invest in a strong, flexible software suite that allows them to fully understand their organizational capabilities, while providing features allowing them to track and manage change. The question is – are you ready to step up and make this investment now or are you going to wait and risk the fallout?

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Process Predictions and Prognostications – What’s Happening in BPM

Wendy Werve — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:45:42 +0000

As part of its Predicts 2011 series, Gartner recently made four predictions about how business process management (BPM) will help organizations evolve and distinguish themselves over the next three to four years. Gartner predicts that organizations – especially among the Global 2000 – that increase investments in and focus on process-related skills, competencies and competitive differentiators, will extend their leadership and competitive edge.

According to the report: “Predicts 2011: Business Process Management Competencies Will Expose the ‘Haves’ and ‘Have-Nots’,” by David W. McCoy, John Dixon, Jim Sinur, Michele Cantara, November 2010, Gartner predicts make four key predictions related to BPM. We will address two in this blog post:

Between now and year-end 2014, overlooked but easily detectable business process defects will topple 10 Global 2000 companies.
By 2015, context-aware computing will be used to rejuvenate at least 25% of “commodity” enterprise processes that are currently perceived as “low value.”

The first prediction is of course a call to action for large organizations to address the need for BPM sooner rather than later. As BPM enters mainstream adoption, those who fail to invest in the disciplines and technology to analyze, improve and automate cross-functional business processes will surely be at a disadvantage. Numerous organizations have proven that BPM does in fact work and delivers high value results – so we are not sure why any Global 2000 company would risk being left behind. Or for that matter, why any government organization would still be watching and waiting.

Of the Gartner predictions in the report, the second is perhaps the most significant from an innovation perspective as it suggests that successful organizations will utilize context-aware computing to not only transform low value processes, but also to more fully leverage differentiating processes in ways that increase competitive advantage and drive value for the enterprise. In addition to delivering value for the organization, Gartner suggests that context-aware computing will benefit end-customers by enabling a more personalized and intimate experience.

According to the report, “Context-aware computing centers around the concept of leveraging information about the end user — the environment, processes, communities and identities employed when interacting with computing technologies.”¹ That end user could be an employee or it could very well be a customer, and if you give some thought to this concept you will likely quickly come up with high-value areas – from supply chain management to customer service to crisis management – where this would add significant benefit. This still nascent application of BPM provides an opportunity to those organizations who have already invested in BPM to take their efforts a step further and continue to drive competitive advantage over their competitors who may now just finally be making the move to BPM technology and business process improvement philosophies.

Given its potential for being a ‘disruptive’ and ‘game-changing technology,’ context-aware computing as it relates to process management and performance is a topic Metastorm will be delving into at length in future blog posts. In the meantime, we continue on our quest to also educate those large organizations who have still not made the leap into BPM – although at this point, I would say given all of the proof points pointing to the success that BPM delivers, it should be more of a short jump than a leap.

¹ Predicts 2011: Business Process Management Competencies Will Expose the ‘Haves’ and ‘Have-Nots’, by David W. McCoy, John Dixon, Jim Sinur, Michele Cantara, November 2010

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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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Metastorm Positioned in Leaders Quadrant of New EA Tools Magic Quadrant

Process Matters Blogger — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 13:16:02 +0000

Just a few short weeks after Gartner positioned Metastorm in the Leader quadrant of its latest Business Process Management Suites (BPMS) Magic Quadrant, Gartner published a new Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Architecture (EA) Tools — and Metastorm is pleased to announce that it is also positioned as a Leader in this report.

The evaluation emphasizes how well solutions support EA teams in day-to-day activities, including modeling future-state analysis, road mapping, presentational aids, dashboard analysis and scenario planning. The Leaders selected in this report have a broad range of capabilities to support EA, combined with the ability to deliver these to diverse group of stakeholders. See our press release on the report for full details.

At Metastorm, we have focused on incorporating strengths into our software that truly make us unique versus the competition — including ease of use, the availability of frameworks and models for several industries (including telecommunications, insurance, defense and supply chain management), the ability to integrate EA with BPA and BPM, and the delivery of a web-based repository tied to world-class modeling capabilities.

Adopting an EA tool allows your organization to improve its management, analysis, reporting and communication abilities. Metastorm ProVision offers a powerful suite of enterprise and business architecture, process discovery and business process analysis, and integrates seamlessly with the Metastorm Enterprise software portfolio – which is the only platform recognized by industry analysts for combining the three synergies of EA, BPA and BPM. We believe that consistently being positioned as a Leader in industry analyst evaluations for all 3 disciplines is a confirmation of Metastorm’s ability to provide our customers and partners with the best-of-breed solutions, enabling them to effectively drive strategy and change throughout their business operations.

Explore Metastorm’s product page learn out more about Metastorm ProVision. I also encourage you to review our full list of industry analyst credentials to gain further understanding of Metastorm’s market leading position in the broader technology landscape of EA, BPA and BPM.

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Highlights from Gartner Symposium/ITxpo

Process Matters Blogger — Fri, 22 Oct 2010 19:31:06 +0000

Gartner’s 2010 Symposium and ITxpo came to a close last night. During the week, we attended several analyst sessions, keynotes from industry leaders, workshops with end users, and engaged in hundreds of conversations with business and IT leaders. It was clear that the burning question that is commanding the attention of business and technology executives alike across the globe: How can IT enable business goals and accelerate business results?

Several analysts at the conference focused on addressing this topic and while each came at it from a different angle – depending on their research coverage area or discipline, one thing remained consistent: transforming business is all about managing organizational change and culture change. This often understated consideration is critically important because without support, consensus and buy-in within and across the organization, true business transformation is not possible.

If the goal of business transformation is increased productivity, we need to figure out how to align IT goals with business needs and how to measure results against business outcomes. According to John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco, who delivered one of the conference keynotes, changing process is the only way to bring about productivity improvement. I think many people agree that process change, management and optimization are essential for enabling business results.

We heard over and over that the key to addressing the IT/business alignment challenge is making sure that business and IT speak the same language. If you are talking about databases and routers and I am talking about revenue per employee and faster time to market, we are not speaking the same language and our goals are not the same. When evaluating technologies and concepts, we need to ask how they are going to enable business results. If we can successfully translate technology into productivity, IT budgets will grow dramatically. If we can speak a common language, it’s a win-win for business and IT and we can move the culture of the organization forward.

ITxpo highlights:

The business/IT alignment conference theme resonated with the attendees we spoke with during the conference. We met with attendees from a wide range of industries – financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, energy and utilities, telecom, Federal government, armed services, state and local governments – who are looking at how EA, BPA and BPM can help them better understand their enterprise, simulate and analyze changes and process improvements and execute those changes in a way that positively impacts business outcomes. Several current customers who stopped to speak with us (thank you for stopping by!) are looking to expand their use of Metastorm, with many interested in learning more about our cloud modeling capabilities in Metastorm M3 and about Metastorm Smart Business Workspace.

Neal Lohmann’s Business Transformation and Architecting for the Cloud education sessions held during the conference were very popular as were Kevin Haugh’s Business Process Management (BPM) and Modeling for the Cloud sessions. Mark DiGirolamo’s Enterprise Business Architecture sessions were packed with CIOs, Enterprise Architects, PMOs and technology leaders wanting to learn how to deliver more effective strategic business and IT planning.

Many attendees stopped by after Salt River Project’s presentation on Tuesday and wanted to learn more about how Metastorm ProVision could be used to help them with their initiatives. Many also visited us after Gartner’s sessions on the Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites (BPMS) and the Magic Quadrant for Business Process Analysis (BPA), both of which positioned Metastorm in the Leaders quadrant.

The message echoed loud and clear throughout the conference: bridging technology and the business through business architecture and process improvement is critical for managing enterprise change and improving business productivity. All in all, it was an informative and insightful week hearing from IT leaders who recognize that it is up to them to translate technology into business value. They seem energized to take on this challenge (or, perhaps more appropriately, this opportunity), and are ready for change.

I think Mr. Chambers summed this point up and brought the conversation full circle by reminding attendees that: “One of the important things to remember as an IT administrator or business leader is that transitions wait for no one.”

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Gartner Ranks Metastorm as Leader in Business Process Management Suites

Process Matters Blogger — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 15:42:03 +0000

Gartner unveiled its latest Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites (BPMS) 2010 report Tuesday evening at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo. Today Metastorm announced it has again been positioned in the Leaders quadrant in this evaluation, which includes 25 of what Gartner considers to be the best BPMS solution providers in the market.

The report cites Metastorm’s ease of use and strong functionality across the process improvement life cycle and ease of use for nontechnical and technical roles as notable strengths. Attendees at Gartner Symposium reported that Gartner analyst Michele Cantara also highlighted Metastorm’s collaborative cloud modeling capabilities and the ability of Metastorm ProVision to tie EA and BPM together as key differentiators during her presentation about the BPMS Magic Quadrant at the conference.

This year, the Magic Quadrant evaluation focused on vendors’ ability to support the following four main usage scenarios that drive organizations to invest in a BPMS:

Support for a continuous process improvement program
Implementation of an industry-specific or company-specific process solution
Support for a business transformation initiative
Support for a process-based, service-oriented-architecture (SOA) redesign

Metastorm is known for its ability to provide a flexible, comprehensive and highly-proven BPMS solution that effectively addresses each of these scenarios and allows organizations to quickly implement, manage, monitor, and analyze core business processes. Complementing its leadership position in the BPMS Magic Quadrant, Metastorm is also positioned in the Leaders quadrant of Gartner Business Process Analysis (BPA) Tools Magic Quadrant and Enterprise Architecture (EA) Tools Magic Quadrant. The power of these three solutions combine in Metastorm Enterprise to enable effective alignment of process execution activities with business goals at all levels of the organization.

I encourage you to read what industry analysts have written about Metastorm to understand the value of Metastorm’s Enterprise software solutions and how they can be leveraged to help organizaitons make better, more informed business decisions.

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