Because Process Matters » Metastorm BPM

The Buzz from our User Summit: Live Demo of Social & Mobile BPM

Derek Weeks — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:05:06 +0000

At our annual User Summit (Nov 7 – 9) in Reston, VA, one of the most talked about presentations was the demonstration of OpenText’s new mobile and social BPM capabilities. Steve Russell, SVP and CTO of our business process solutions group, walked the audience of over 400 attendees through a scenario where people were:

• interacting with dynamic process forms on an iPhone
• managing case complex work from an iPad, and
• monitoring internal social networks to provide real-time guidance for in-flight business processes.

The presentation not only provided cool insight into the future of our business process technologies, but got attendees thinking about more scenarios where process and case management could be applied. Attendees were interested in extending BPM to a new set of mobile and field workers and customers (e.g., “How do we integrate our existing customer-facing mobile apps with mobile BPM apps”). They were curious to learn more about how teams could use social network feeds to guide process outcomes or improve customer service (e.g., “how can our insurance agents provide better service on the ground following a natural disaster”). I received several questions about how knowledge workers accessing existing process apps on PCs on or off-premise, might instead move to tablet based solutions (e.g., “all of our attorneys have iPads – I want to learn more about moving our existing process app to the tablet”). Our latest product introductions and a few near-term roadmap deliverables provided new answers and insight to answering these and other questions.

If you would like to learn more about our social BPM offerings visit our Mobile BPM solution page download one of our recent Social BPM webinars or ask your contact us and we can bring a similar demonstration to your site.

Is Social BPM a Fad? Matt Ridely Would Argue “No”
I just watched a TED video of British author Matt Ridley, “When Ideas have Sex.”While it is not a video about Social BPM, it does discuss the value of how communities socialize ideas to innovate. This video really helped cement in my mind the benefits we are achieving through our Social BPM capabilities. As Matt Ridley explains in his TED talk, “what is relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas and how well they are cooperating… because of the connections people are making and the ability of ideas to mate as never before… we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation.” I have heard some people refer to Social BPM as a fad, but based on the knowledge shared by Mr. Ridley, one can better understand how companies are and will be using Social BPM capabilities to drive further innovation and differentiation.

To see Mr. Ridley’s complete TED talk, go here.

How Social Technologies are Improving Case Management
As I explained in a recent presentation (Gartner ITxpo: An Introduction to Adaptive Case Management), the idea of using technology to share information is not new. Email exchanges have gone on for decades. Services like LinkedIn, Skype, Facebook, and Twitter are uses by hundreds of millions, if not billions of people. The power of social BPM is in accelerating the efficiency and exchange of ideas. In the context of adaptive case management (ACM), the Social BPM capabilities we provide simply enables users to get more work done in a single context-rich environment, rather than shifting between multiple tools and communication devices to get their work done. When applied into the ACM environment the exchange of ideas –“in the context of my work” – through these social technologies advances innovation and competitive differentiation for organizations.

If you have a couple of minutes, be sure to check out the entertaining presentation on Case Management found through the link above. Questions or comments? Feel free to leave a comment below or reach out to me on Twitter @weekstweets.

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How to Start a BPM Initiative: A Lesson from Early Adopters

Sandra Moran — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:42:06 +0000

Business process management (BPM) initiatives are growing in popularity because thousands of organizations have proven the measurable value BPM can deliver at a lower cost and in a dramatically shorter time than with traditional solution development approaches. Early BPM adopters have achieved an exceptional amount of success in their BPM deployments and there is a lot you can learn from the road they’ve paved.

According to the Forrsights Software Survey, Q4 2010 the of the major drivers for BPM adoption among financial services and insurance companies are

– Optimization of processes (72%)
– Ability to ensure consistent process execution across divisional or geographic barriers (54%)

In the same survey, the biggest drivers from BPM software adoption among public sector and healthcare organizations was the

– Optimization of processes (72%)
– Ability to support compliance efforts (59%)

Regardless of the industry, one fact remains clear – more and more companies are adopting BPM to not just improve day-to-day productivity of workers, but to fully understand and optimize their organizational practices.

For those of you who are new to BPM or are still deciding the right project for deployment, taking the lessons learned from previous organizations is a great place to start.

Choose your first project carefully
Gaining executive buy-in is one of the most challenging first-steps of your BPM adoption. It’s important to do your homework prior to developing your adoption strategy. Take a look at some of the considerations other organizations have developed for their BPM projects see what you can leverage as you begin your own journey toward BPM adoption. For companies with an appetite for change, you should consider selecting a high-visibility, mission-critical process. For others, selecting a troublesome but less mission-critical process is an excellent first project to demonstrate the success and ROI of BPM before the more mission-critical processes are tackled.

Think of BPM as a way to drive change
While it is important to ensure and promote the success of your initial BPM projects, organizations who have achieved the greatest results in their BPM deployments have thought of BPM as a way to drive business change throughout their organizations. If you think about and promote BPM as a way to improve a few key processes or automate a function that cuts out 15% of costs, you aren’t going to get the full value of your investment. From the day-one of your deployment think of BPM as a platform that can transform the way you do business, better respond to business opportunities and a mechanism to support continuous process improvement.

Establish clear metrics to define success
As I said earlier, executive sponsorship is critical. One of the best ways to illustrate the value of BPM is to set clear metrics that define the success of your implementation. By measuring each of your BPM projects, you can communicate and demonstrate the value of BPM to other departments who have yet to automate their specific business processes using BPM.

Develop a meaningful way to access projects value
With multiple projects running independently from each other, it is important to develop a way for users to understand and access the relative value of each of your company’s projects. When you step back from individual projects and get a holistic view of the full-scale of your organizations implementation, you will most likely find that what you thought were multiple BPM applications might actually be better solved by automating a single “big process” with variations for each group or department based on a few unique business rules. This view enables you to deliver more capability, to more users in an even shorter time period. It also drives operational excellence in more areas by leveraging best practices across a larger footprint in the company.

There are thousands of organizations who have transformed the way they do business by leveraging BPM. To learn more about how some organizations have solved complex business problems and achieve significant ROI, check out this success story page. If you have questions about how to start your first BPM initiative, feel free to leave a comment below!

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Mobile BPM: Connecting People to Process Wherever They Are

Sandra Moran — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:08:21 +0000

In an increasingly more mobile society, work is not completed only in the office – it is often done on-the-go using a mobile device. Unsurprising to most, a study conducted by Morgan Stanley indicated that 91% of all U.S. citizens have their mobile device within reach twenty-four-seven.

To take this even further, in a recent report Gartner predicted that “by 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide. According to Gartner’s PC installed base forecast, the total number of PCs in use will reach 1.78 billion units in 2013. By 2013, the combined installed base of smart phones and browser-equipped enhanced phones will exceed 1.82 billion units and will be greater than the installed base for PCs thereafter.”[1]

So where does that take business improvement applications?

It’s clear that accessibility to information is critical. People have become accustomed to getting the information that they need as they need it. Business users are increasingly demanding the same access to the work that they participate in. Whether they spend most of their time in the field, in the office, or find themselves working both in and out of the office, they need to be able to continue the flow of work through the enterprise. However, many critical business applications today have been designed to require process participants being chained to their desks. With mobile usage so prevalent, it is only natural to extend the availability of the business applications you have grown to depend on daily to your smart phone. More importantly, with integrated support for mobile access, businesses can now rethink the very ways that they interact with customers, partners and employees.

OpenText Metastorm is pleased to announce the release of OpenText BPM Mobile for Metastorm BPM – allowing you to engage customers, partners and employees in completely new ways! The product release extends the Metastorm BPM solution by empowering you to fully participate or initiate business processes from the Metastorm BPM suite via smart phones or iPad.

OpenText BPM Mobile for Metastorm BPM gives you:

The ability to deliver process improvements beyond the back-office and into more strategic client-facing and field scenarios.
An improved customer experience made possible by consistent processes regardless of the way a customer wants to communicate with you.
The option to define rules outlining how to perform a process via mobile device versus a personal computer to improve the mobile user’s experience.
Instant mobile access for user’s on-the-move, helping to continue the flow of work regardless of location – eliminating unwanted bottlenecks.
Out-of-the-box, multi-platform support for Android, Blackberry, iPad and iPhone users with no additional development effort for each platform.

The OpenText BPM Mobile capability is available to all OpenText customers on active maintenance for Metastorm BPM. More information about this release, including the solution sheet is available on our OpenText BPM Mobile for Metastorm BPM solution page. If you have questions feel free to contact us directly or leave a comment below.

________________

[1] Gartner’s Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users, 2010 and Beyond: A New Balance, by Brian Gammage, Daryl C. Plummer, Ed Thompson, Leslie Fiering, Hung LeHong, Frances Karamozis, Claudio Da Rold, Kimberly Collins, William Clark, Nick Jones, Charles Smulders, Mike Escherich, Martin Reynolds, Monica Basso, December 2009

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3 Tips to Improve New Client On-boarding

Alison Cooley — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:39:20 +0000

In its nature, new client on-boarding is prone to error. For example, to bring on a new customer a financial services firm often goes through redundant, manual paper-intensive processes – producing bottlenecks so large that it takes several weeks, or even months, for a customer to be fully integrated. The process, while seemingly effective at one point in time, is now flawed. Employees spend several hours entering the same data into several entry points and have little to no visibility into the new customer’s application progress.

Time is money and customer service is critical, so we’ve pulled together three quick tips to help you on-board your customers more efficiently and effectively. Now you can save money, improve overall customer and employee satisfaction, and gain a strategic advantage over your competitors.

#1 – Select a flexible business process management suite
Out of the box solutions for your new client on-boarding process aren’t going to give you the competitive edge that you need. Business process management allows you to build a customizable new client on-boarding process that is agile enough to allow you to evolve and change the process over time. For example, OpenText BPM integrates into your existing systems, giving you the ability to

mask the complexity of underlying legacy systems
create an aggregated view of client information across multiple systems and departments
streamline and manage the best process for your success
monitor inbound workflow with ease, providing you complete visibility into the status of a new customer’s progress
improve customer service

#2- Get the right people together and collaborate
Process improvement will only be as good as the people, knowledge and skills that are brought to the table to implement the transformation. You need to capture the current on-boarding process and understand the people, process, systems and technologies that it involves. The best approach is to identify key stakeholders and understand the bottlenecks and why they occur before you start to remodel your process. From there you can analyze and determine the best approach for improving and automating your new process.

#3 – Monitor and report on your process
You will never know how much you have improved without setting a way to monitor and report on your process. Having visibility into your process is critical to your ability to control and manage your progress. You no longer have to worry about reporting on several regulatory mandates, including Know Your Customer (KYC), because BPM allows you to capture both your human-centric and system-centric processes. With these tools you not only have a holistic picture of how your organization’s on-boarding process is executed, but see down to the granular level details about a specific process, system or technology involved. A BPM suite with dashboard capabilities takes monitoring and reporting to a whole new level, giving you complete 24-7 visibility into every aspect of you process.

New client on-boarding doesn’t need to be headache
Long, unnecessary processes will hinder your organizations ability to on-board customers quickly – resulting in lost business to competitors. Investing in a robust, flexible BPM suite allows will help you automate and streamline key processes and dramatically improve your organization, resulting in increased ROI, higher productivity, better turnaround and more profitability.

Do you have tips for improving new client on-boarding? Post a comment and share them.

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Forrester Business Process Conference: How Dynamic Case Management Helps Businesses Hit High Velocity Improvements

Deb Miller — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 16:17:12 +0000

I just returned from this year’s Forrester Business Process Conference (#BPF11) in Boston and once again gained some great industry insights. I was especially taken by the keynote from Forrester’s Craig Le Clair who has done some outstanding work on the role of dynamic or adaptive case management in achieving business improvement. Craig was joined by Steven J. Spear, Senior Lecturer at MIT, expert on achieving operational excellence and author of “The High-Velocity Edge.” Together their message focused on what needs to happen differently for our business process solutions to meet today’s more demanding customer expectations.

Time to Change Our Process Approach
Craig led with a challenge that our traditional approaches to process improvement are failing. It’s time to change our process approach. Prior approaches have become irrelevant because of the ascendance of “untamed” business processes. Those processes that form in the seams and shadows of organizations between packaged applications. Firms struggle to effectively deal with these and provide the necessary and expected customer experience. For example:

Customer on-boarding – takes the customer down the tunnel that reflects the internal systems and we need to flip the focus to the customer view
Insurance claims processes – departmental silos are slowing claims resolution, raising liability risks, and giving customers bad experiences that can drive them to competitive alternatives (for my take on this area, check out How ACM Helped Fix My Car)
Invoice processing – packaged applications and ERP systems don’t deal well with resolving exceptions with the customer in mind, and coordinating invoices with purchase orders, deal sheets and other critical supporting documents is a problem

The issue for IT and business leaders alike is to turn around the previous lost decade (1998 to 2009) consumed by rigid and often brittle packaged apps in silos, where 75 percent of IT budgets went to maintenance.

Analyst Advice: Invest in Dynamic Case Management Solutions
Craig’s advice on how best to deal with these untamed process issues is investment in dynamic case management solutions. Case Management will help to close the gap between processes that control and processes that engage, and will move us from our current environment to a more dynamic customer centric environment:

In effect, this is a movement toward a solution and support transformation where IT vanishes into the business. And, the resulting solution environment needs to simplify the complexity that businesses are facing.

Operational Excellence Expert Says Some of Most Difficult Problems Arise in the Complex Handoffs Between Systems, Activities, and People
With his focus on how businesses can gain high-velocity operational excellence, Steven J. Spear dove-tailed perfectly with Craig’s observations and advice for process improvement programs and approaches. Mr. Spear sees that some of our most difficult problems arise in the complex interrelationships and handoffs between systems, activities, and people – much like the untamed and less structured processes that Craig describes. Because of that it is hard to track what is connected to what and then hard to determine “the why” when it fails. To address this we must focus on ways to ensure that people have context and can see the complexity in which they are embedded and for which they are responsible, and at the same time simplifying that complexity for them.

New ways of working – including knowledge sharing – are driving results for high-velocity companies and Mr. Spear provides some great examples in his book. One example right from our own Global 360 (now OpenText) customer community is Citi who presented their case management application at the Forrester conference. While I don’t have a recording of their Forrester presentation session to share, you can learn more about the Citi case study at How Citigroup Delivers Exceptional Customer Service with Case Management. I think it is a great illustration of how case management can play a key role in driving operational results.

_______________________________________
About Deb Miller
Deb Miller is Director of Market Development for Global 360 (now OpenText). Her work focuses on industry strategies for business process improvement. Her career includes more than 20 years of global industry experience with GE. You can read more of Deb’s writings at http://www.DebsG360.wordpress.com/ and follow her @DebsG360 on Twitter.

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Must See Guide to Forrester Business Process Forum 2011

Wendy Werve — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 14:00:29 +0000

The Forrester Business Process Forum in Boston, Mass. is just three days away, and they’ve put together two jam-packed days of keynote addresses, cutting-edge sessions and networking designed to help attendees better understand the new trends in customer engagement. Taking a look at the agenda, which is available online, we’ve put together a short list of the must-see sessions and keynotes during the conference!

The New World of Customer Engagement: Maximizing Long-Term Value
In this keynote address, Mike Gualteri, Principal Analyst for Forrester and Derek Miers, Principal Analyst for Forrester, will discuss what it takes to transform your customer service operations. You will learn how to build a program that not only engages your customers but delivers more value to your business. Attend this session to understand how you can be the catalyst to drive your entire organization to design the best customer experience possible.

Deliver Exceptional Customer Service
Do you know how you’re dealing with the rising impact of knowledge workers and globalization in your process improvement goals? Tim Burns, Director Enterprise Workflow Solutions, Securities and Fund Services for Citigroup Fund Services Canada and Steve Russell,CTO for OpenText Global 360, will share the best practices for delivering exceptional customer-centric service with dynamic case management.

Servicing Customers in a Dynamic World
It’s no secret that customers expect around the clock support. However, a customer’s need varies from situation to situation. In this session hosted by Craig Le Clair, Vice President, Principal Analyst for Forrester and Connie Moore, Vice President, Research Director for Forrester, you will discover how dynamic case management can improve your customer experience. Hear first hand case studies that bring together business process management, social networking tools, analytics and mobility to redesign the experience individual customers have with your company.

Untamed Business Processes: The Barrier to 21^st-Century High-Velocity Companies
Business process improvement programs must adapt to the ever changing expectations of customers and employees. In this session, Craig Le Clair and Steven J. Spear, Author, Senior Lecturer and Senior Fellow for MIT, will discuss how over time, packaged, industry-specific systems prevented companies from achieving maximum success. The session will review how critical untamed processes will affect your organization and what you can do about them.

The Impact of Social Computing on Customer Experience Design
Clay Richardson, Senior Analyst for Forrester will explain the deep value that social networking tools have on improving customer engagement and driving better business decisions. Finally understand how you can use social platforms to reach your customers and connect back with back-end applications and mission-critical processes such as recruiting, customer service, advertising and supply chain. Learn how to empower customers and partners to build social applications that tap into your end-to-end processes and engage your internal network to drive the best possible business outcomes.

Change Management: Your Key for Sustaining Breakthrough Process Transformation
Change is inevitable and one of the most difficult problems when driving enterprise-wide transformations is getting the team onboard. In this session a panel of experts — including Tom Coleman, Chief Information and Process Officer for Sloan Valve Company, Margie Rodino, Vice President, Global Human Resources for Sloan Valve Company, Claire Schooley, Senior Analyst for Forrester, Ronald Sharpe, Change Management Lead for Cabela’s, and Wade Wallinger, GM Value Change Optimization for Chevron – will discuss best practices for managing ongoing organizational change. You will learn what approaches, methodologies and techniques you should use to help your employees through the transformation process. Discover where change management fits within your organization, who should drive the initiatives, and the key roles needed to on the change management team.

There’s so much to learn this week at Forrester’s Business Process Forum. Visit the Forrester conference website today to check out all of the other great sessions you should attend at the conference!

Be sure to stop by Metastorm’s booth (Booth #19) and Global 360’s booth (Booth #21) to view a product demonstration or speak to a representative. Don’t forget to follow the event on Twitter with the hash tag #BPF11.

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Fall 2011 Survey: SharePoint and BPM

Derek Weeks — Mon, 19 Sep 2011 13:52:57 +0000

Every six months we run a survey about how people are using SharePoint. Some surprising results have been revealed. For instance, in the survey running now through October 1^st, we see that BPM/workflow is the #1 third-party app being considered for running on top of the SharePoint platform. In the last survey from Winter 2011, we found that SharePoint 2010 deployments had grown from 8% to 42% of enterprises in just six months.

The survey covers topics about SharePoint and BPM, user challenges, plans for cloud, strategies for training, BPM maturity, levels of mission-critical content stored, and more. If you have 2 minutes, we invite you to participate in the current survey HERE. The survey results are free and will be mailed to everyone who participates.

As with all surveys, we remind everyone that it is not the stats that count. It is what you do with the stats. For example, if BPM is the top 3^rd party app being considered for deployment on top of SharePoint, we want you to consider – should we be doing the same thing, or does this validate BPM plans we are already executing. When the survey reveals that few companies put a training plan in place for SharePoint, should you organization be doing the same? Or when a trend is showing that more and more businesses are adding mission-critical content to SharePoint, we want you to ask – would our organization feel comfortable doing the same.

Surveys provide great opportunity to think about, validate, and challenge our current thinking. We invite you to participate and when the free results are published – to learn from others in the SharePoint and BPM community.

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Three Big Topics in Financial Services

Alison Cooley — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 18:03:44 +0000

In the wake of this historic, global economic downturn there is little room for error among financial services companies. Volatile market conditions, impending regulatory requirements, and an intense competitive atmosphere have banking and insurance companies of all sizes rethinking risk, streamlining operations, and seeking new ways to create a more adaptable enterprise.

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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Evolving the Way Work Gets Done

Sandra Moran — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 14:13:09 +0000

Taking into account the needs of our customers and partners and the rapid technology advancements in social computing, today Metastorm released Version 9.1 of the Metastorm BPM software suite, Version 9.0 of Metastorm Smart Business Workspace and the new Metastorm Business Process Intelligence (BPI) dashboards. These new editions include enhanced Social BPM capabilities, a completely personalized workspace, and new graphical process and business performance analysis dashboards to help you improve communication and increase productivity across your organization.

Personal Productivity Redefined!
Metastorm Smart Business Workspace serves as the interface for the Metastorm Business Transformation Platform and gives you a completely personalized user experience with the ability to quickly connect with other users across your enterprise. You can find and immediately connect with others based on a user’s skill set, education or certification, and responsibilities. Metastorm Smart Business Workspace lets you find the right people for the right projects, helping you resolve issues or handle exceptions with better outcomes and in less time.

Not just Social BPM, its Smarter BPM.
Easily understand, align and support your organizational goals using the new and improved features in Metastorm BPM Version 9.1. Some of these key features include more dynamic applications for improved usability, higher productivity and full-scale global deployment that allow you to design process improvements in a more strategic way. Dynamically route work based on user skill set, experience and work load to ensure the most efficient and effective work allocation strategy. Instant chat and playback capabilities help you quickly (and easily) collaborate on projects and understand the evolution of an idea or resolution of an issue. By involving all the right people in an environment designed for both business users and IT, you can access and leverage untapped knowledge to truly understand where you are and where you want to go.

Immediate insight into your business operations!
The new Metastorm Business Performance Intelligence (BPI) dashboards facilitate meaningful data analysis and informed decision-making by offering you an easy-to-use, web-based interface that helps you quickly build reports and analyze data from other systems and technologies. Any business user has the ability to create their unique dashboard on the fly, without any knowledge of coding. The Metastorm BPI dashboards can be deployed in a variety of environments, including Metastorm Smart Business Workspace, and can be directly integrated into Microsoft SharePoint or Microsoft Office. You can customize your alerts and exception management with the click of a button, giving you the ability to make immediate decisions based on real-time performance information or historical trends in your business.

With these new features organizations can truly bring together the people, knowledge, content and systems to establish complete visibility, eliminate bottlenecks, and facilitate information-based decisions, faster. For more information about these product releases, I encourage you to check out the Metastorm BPM, Metastorm Smart Business Workspace and Metastorm Business Performance Intelligence solution sheets or reach out to a representative.

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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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Extending Our Leadership

Process Matters Blogger — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 13:30:06 +0000

We’ve got some great news! Last week, IDC MarketScape announced that Metastorm has is a Leader in Business Process Platforms – citing our consistent ROI, product innovation, cost management strategy, planning capabilities, and portfolio strategy, including our technical platform and vision around integration with content management.

So what does this mean for us and our customers?

With the recent merger with OpenText earlier this year, this leadership positioning not only reinforces Metastorm’s product strength, market credentials and influence, but it signifies to our customers that we are wholly committed to providing innovative, easy to deploy solutions that have the power to transform their businesses operations. We are extremely excited to receive such high marks for product innovation for our personal user work environment delivered in Metastorm Smart Business Workspace. We agree that its collaboration capabilities with direct links to specific work, enterprise search for people with specific skills to help you get work done, and dashboarding capabilities are the next generation of user workspace. Metastorm Smart Business Workspace offers users a highly personalized environment, allowing them to easily mash-up and integrate data and applications via widgets. Users can easily come together and interact on process improvement initiatives by leveraging social collaboration tools that allow users to easily find each other and communicate.

Adopting a BPM tool with enhanced Social BPM capabilities engages users and makes them more productive and connected. Users can leverage social collaboration in a way that promotes and drives collaboration with the right people in the right departments anytime, anywhere – enabling organizations to get work done better, faster and cheaper.

Metastorm’s Business Transformation Platform is the only platform recognized by top industry analysts for combining the three disciplines of enterprise architecture, business process analysis and business process management, and we are committed to investing in product innovation and expanding our vision to help organizations drive the best possible business improvements .

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Takeaways from the Elite User Conference

Jen Silate — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 16:12:13 +0000

At the Elite User Conference — both on the exhibit hall floor and in the sessions — the discussions surrounded the many challenges facing law firms today, including risk management, conflict processing, and new business intake, as well as the various solutions developed by Elite and its partners. The need for automation and integration was paramount to these discussions.

It is becoming essential for firms to automate their critical processes in order to increase profitability and efficiency. By automating the interactions between people, systems, and content, firms are able to:

Streamline their processes so that the best practices for any given task are consistently followed
Accelerate their on-boarding of new matter and employees to increase profits and improve productivity
Ensure compliance with regulations and confidentiality agreements with full audit trails

Integrating these automated processes across not only Elite systems, but the other critical systems firm-wide is just as essential. Cost savings and user adoption for any project increases substantially when you build on pre-existing technologies. The one-two punch of implementing a solution that automates your manual processes while integrating with the systems you already have in place not only delivers business improvement, but also a rapid ROI.

Further, agility is the key to sustained profitability — in the legal industry and elsewhere. Canned solutions with tight parameters and heavily coded customizations leave your project in a time capsule — a relic of what worked in the moment in time when the requirements for the project were defined and incapable of keeping up with the continually updated and ever expanding regulations governing the legal industry.

And it isn’t just a trend – automation, integration and agility are required to keep your firm profitable, efficient and ready for whatever challenges tomorrow brings.

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Achieving Operational Excellence

Sandra Moran — Thu, 26 May 2011 13:32:02 +0000

In my post last Monday, I discussed that if you leverage enterprise architecture (EA) disciplines and solutions during the business process design phase of your business process management (BPM) projects you can better discover what your best practices are. However, establishing visibility into your operations, and understanding how and why the top performers and departments in your organization have more productivity and success than their counterparts, is only the first step in achieving operational excellence.

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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Things happen. Are you prepared?

Sandra Moran — Thu, 19 May 2011 13:22:48 +0000

Unexpected events happen. Things don’t go as planned. Accidents, faulty equipment, property damage, safety violations, public safety threats, and personnel incidents are just a handful of events that can cause organizations to quickly react. It’s how you handle these unexpected incidents that can determine their severity and your exposure.

Incidents – big or small – can have a huge impact on your business operations and it’s important that when an incident does occur that you are ready to respond. Incident management scenarios span across all industries and incident management solutions enable you to quickly respond to and resolve the issue in a way that minimizes the overall impact to your business operations.

Organizations should seek a solution that is accessible and easy to use to enable recording, reporting and driving a resolution for incidents encountered during routine business operations. Investing in a strong, dynamic incident management solution allows your organization to:

Ensure all incidents are handled the right way by the right people. Categorizing incidents by the situation and defining who responds and what actions they should take eliminates confusion and greatly reduces cost and risk. This gives your organization a consistent, universal response process, allowing for faster issue resolution and better communication across the enterprise.

Adhere to corporate policies and insurance mandates, be prepared in the case of litigation, and manage overall risk. A strong incident management solution will give you the ability to track and audit each case with real-time visibility. For example, London Underground leverages an incident management solution powered by Metastorm to gather all of the information needed for any given incident, reducing the potential for human error in manually filling out forms. By electronically transferring and storing information, London Underground is able to process over 400 incidents each day – ensuring proper escalation and resolution, saving time and money, minimizing unexpected service interruptions, and most importantly maximizing safety.

Prepare and prevent future incidents. With automation, process integration and trend analysis capabilities, it’s much easier to proactively prevent future incidents from happening. Incident management solutions allow you to fully understand and track how you manage and respond to unexpected events. This way, you can go back and organize the process for continuous organizational improvement.

You know that incidents are going to happen. Do you know how you’ll ensure their handled in a better way? Move beyond reactive incident management and transform the way your business reacts.

______________________________
Sandra Moran has more than 20 years experience developing and driving marketing strategy for global enterprise software organizations. As Sr. Director, Product Marketing for Metastorm, Sandra is responsible for the positioning and successful launch of the Metastorm product suite.

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