Our theme this year is Expand Your Universe. Regardless of where you are on the spectrum of enterprise architecture, business process analysis, business process management, case management, and enterprise content management, there is opportunity to expand your reach to drive further strategic and operational improvements.

I have been a part of the User Summit since its beginning. There is no doubt in my mind the tremendous value you will gain by attending the Summit. However, if you are still deciding if you should attend – I have put together seven excellent reasons that should sway your decision.

The Top 7 Reasons Why You Should Attend #UC2011:

1.  Keynotes
Hear from John Shackleton, President and CEO of OpenText who will be revealing his vision for convergence of process and content and the value the new combination of Metastorm and Global 360 as OpenText BPM brings to our customers and partners. Bob Caldwell, general manager of OpenText BPM will also be sharing his vision for the continued growth and achievements of this newly created product group. Additionally, Clay Richardson, senior analyst at Forrester Research will be adding his insight into Social BPM and why collaborative and social technologies can drive serious, meaningful results.

2.  OpenText BPM Roadmap
Chief Technology Officer for OpenText BPM, Steve Russell, will address all attendees and share product roadmap insights and strategy. He will be discussing the future of enterprise architecture, business process analysis, business process management, case management, and enterprise content management and how these capabilities will come together to help your organization plan for and execute smart improvements. You will be the first to hear the plans and how they will increase your ability to change the way you do business. 

3.  Pre-Summit OpenText Metastorm Workshops
We’re offering a special one-day curriculum of unique workshops focused on giving you the knowledge to maximize your investment in OpenText Metastorm products. While the workshops are an additional cost to the Summit registration fee, our customers who invest in training are better utilizing our products and see a much higher return on investment from our technology. There are still seats available for our Pre-Summit Workshops – register today!

4.  Networking, networking, networking
With hundreds of attendees from a variety of industries, there are endless opportunities to network. By attending you can get new, fresh ideas about how to expand your EA, BPA, BPM, DCM and ECM efforts to support your business objectives.

5.  Customer Success Stories
One of the best ways to get the most out of your investment in our products is to hear the incredible things your peers are doing. This year we have a dynamic group of customer speakers, including Blue Rhino, Coca-Cola Bottling Company, HP, Parsons Brinckerhoff, PCSU Financial Services, Salt River Project, SCRI, and Sunstein Kann Murphy & Timbers LLP, who will all be sharing how they leveraged our technology to transform their operations.

6.  Location & Events
This year, our Global User Summit will be held in Reston, Virginia at the Hyatt Regency Reston – a premier hotel in the heart of Fairfax County’s technology hub and close to Washington, D.C. To further inspire you, we are providing a complimentary evening event for all Summit attendees. You can take advantage of this great opportunity to explore the world-renowned Steven F. Udar-Hazy Center – the companion facility to the National Air & Space Museum on the National Mall.

7.  Partner Symposium
This one-day event is exclusively for partners and designed to give you insight into the vision of the OpenText executive team for our partner community. By attending our Partner Symposium you will gain firsthand experience of how to maximize your sales success and maximize your potential as an OpenText partner.

By selecting Metastorm and Global 360 software, you’ve already made the commitment to innovation and business improvement. With two days of sessions, case studies, demos, networking, product roadmaps and more, you will gain some serious insight and deeper knowledge (that you can’t find anywhere else!) about our software solutions and how you can initiate positive change across your organization!

P.S.: Register by October 1^st and get $200 off the regular Summit rate!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

____________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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

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

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Over the years we’ve seen law firms try to dig themselves out of the seemingly endless cycle of redundant, paper intensive processes.  At one point in time, implementing processes – however manual – with multiple data entry points was meant to drive improvements and lower risk when gathering and reviewing critical new client information.  However, given the significant technology advances and growing demand for firms to offer best-in-class services, these manual processes have become outdated, confusing and frustrating, and they diminish business productivity as well as negatively impacting customer and employee satisfaction. 

Compiling, reviewing and processing new clients against the existing client database can be cumbersome.  Each individual client or new business requires extensive procedures to determine the conflict of interest, generate billing, and receive department approval—all before a new client is even taken on.  Investing in a robust business process management (BPM) suite is a smart, effective way for law firms to smoothly streamline and manage the end-to-end business process, while capturing the complete and accurate client matter, related party, and billing data for a potential client or business – information which is then automatically packaged and presented to the attorneys for approval via email, web or mobile device.  Data accuracy is improved, risk is reduced and attorneys waste little time on administrative tasks so that they can maximize billing hours.  BPM software equates to process improvement and increased revenues for the firm from the moment the first process goes live.

In ILTA’s 2010 Technology Survey, 464 firms representing over 80,000 attorneys and nearly 180,000 total end users were asked if and what they use to automate their business processes.  Of the responses, 27% of firms with 350-690 employees and 39% of firms with 700 employees or more indicated that they leverage Metastorm to help analyze, streamline and automate their business workflows.

Over 190 law firms globally, including six of the 10 largest firms in the world and over 30% of the AmLaw 200 rely on Metastorm’s Enterprise portfolio suite to model, analyze and improve the firm’s business processes to reduce overhead, improve the range and quality of services, and optimize resources, all while cutting cost without losing strategic advantage.  Law firms deploy Metastorm’s legal solutions to standardize process and automate manual operations to ensure complete consistency and accuracy, accelerate new client matter intake and conflict-of-interest review, maintain regulatory compliance and automate audit trail capture.   

Metastorm understands that in the legal sector time is money, and we have spent countless hours developing and perfecting the right software solutions to meet your industry needs. Investing in business process management software now will enable your firm to rapidly and effectively take on new clients in a way that is easy to manage while also addressing back office processes for increased productivity, faster customer response and improved profitability.  

If you’re interested in learning how your firm can benefit from Metastorm’s software solutions visit our legal solutions page, where you can download an overview of Metastorm’s legal services, learn about Metastorm’s Client Matter Inception Process Pod, and read customer success stories.

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Government agencies – like their big business counterparts – are looking for the perfect solution, something that gives them the answer to all their business problems. They’re looking for an enterprise and business architecture tool that increases their agility while decreasing costs, improves visibility and enhances cross-agency collaboration, offers high levels of privacy to protect sensitive and classified files, complies with the standards set forth by their respective agencies, and most importantly – is easy to use, with a fast return on investment.

Over 100 federal government agencies and more than 1 million U.S. government users (and counting) deploy Metastorm’s business process management, business process analysis, and enterprise architecture software.  As I mentioned, a key factor for agencies when selecting software is that it needs to comply with standards and regulations.  Metastorm’s Enterprise software suite is Common Criteria Certified, JWICS Certified, DARS certified, Navy FAM approved, and this week Metastorm announced that Metastorm BPM Version 9 has been awarded the U.S. Army Certificate of Networthiness – assuring Metastorm BPM meets the strict U.S. Army and Department of Defense standards for security, compatibility and sustainability. 

Throughout the years, Metastorm has seen our regional and federal government customers succeed in their business process improvement initiatives – and many accredit their success to Metastorm’s ease of use when solving such complex problems.  Last week, CivSource published an article titled, Richmond, VA. utilizes BPM to get city employees involved in budget program, highlighting the City of Richmond’s success in implementing its Common Cents initiative built on Metastorm BPM. 

Our federal customers have also leveraged Metastorm’s software to improve business processes. Metastorm Enterprise software is deployed, base-lined and accredited across almost all of the U.S. Intelligence agencies.   

In a case study Metastorm published last month, the U.S. Army Human Resources Command (HRC) uses Metastorm Integration Manager (MIM) to transfer, store and integrate hundreds of thousands of sensitive personnel records in near real time.  Prior to using Metastorm BPM the U.S. Army HRC was using a labor-intensive, time consuming process which took weeks, and even months to complete. 

Additionally, Metastorm BPM powers the Department of Justice, Office of the Detention Trustee eDesignate platform, which manages the prisoner designation process from the U.S. Courts, the United States Marshals Service (USMC), and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP).  The U.S. Social Security Administration also uses Metastorm BPM to conduct all allegations of fraud over 100,000 a year, and fraud investigations over 10,000 a year.

Those are just a few instances of how Metastorm’s government customers are streamlining and improving organizational processes, while seeing a great return on investment.  I encourage you to check out more customer success stories, resources, and solution information for local and federal governments.  Let us know if you have any questions or comments!

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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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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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Metastorm is very excited to offer attendees the opportunity to deliver live demonstrations and presentations highlighting key business challenges related to business transformation, architecting for the Cloud, and business architecture and process excellence. You can see these presentations at Booth 321– located in the Business Process Management marketplace and on the perimeter of the Enterprise Architecture marketplace in the ITxpo exhibit hall.

In addition to the in-booth presentations hosted by Metastorm, one feature presentation on the Symposium main agenda that we encourage you to attend is the Salt River Project BPM case study session on Tuesday morning at 8:00am. This is not a sponsor session, but the company is using Metastorm ProVision to drive business process excellence enterprise-wide. The session is titled, “Case Study: Growing BPM Success: From Project Focused to Business Unit to Enterprise IT.”

Over the past year, Metastorm has been consistently recognized for our unique ability to provide BPM, BPA, and EA software applications, which are market leaders in their respective disciplines, and work together as an integrated software platform, to form one of the most comprehensive solutions for enterprise efficiency, visibility, governance and business improvement available today.

So, please don’t hesitate to stop on by Metastorm Booth 321 and learn first-hand how Metastorm delivers the highest business value to customers.

Interested in requesting a one-on-one meeting with Metastorm during the event?  Go to http://agendabuilder.gartner.com/SYM20/WebPages/browseexhibitors.aspx.

If you are not attending the event, you can follow the highlights by monitoring our Twitter and blog posts next week.  Metastorm will be tweeting all week – just follow us @Metastorm or monitor the Gartner event hashtag #gartnersym.  In addition, we will be recapping conference highlights daily on the Because Process Matters blog site.  So stay in touch online!

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The Business Agility and Process Optimization Enabled by BPM and SOA contest highlights the business success stories and lessons learned to provide proof points and insights for other organizations considering or pursuing BPM, SOA or combined BPM-SOA adoption.

AmerisourceBergen is one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical services companies serving the United States, Canada and selected global markets, and works closely with manufactures of branded pharmaceuticals, generic pharmaceuticals, biotech and specialty drugs, over-the counter remedies, and health and beauty aids. 

AmerisourceBergen has deployed over 200 processes using Metastorm BPM! To govern its business process management initiatives, AmerisourceBergen has created a Center of Excellence and has seen millions of dollars in savings to date.  In one of its most recent projects, AmerisourceBergen was able to leverage Metastorm BPM to extend and augment is new SAP implementation.

At Metastorm, we are dedicated to building software that helps organizations focus on the right business improvements to drive business change, optimization and effectiveness.  We are very proud to see AmerisourceBergen, and all of our customers, recognized for their commitment to implementing strategic business process improvement initiatives.   Check out AmerisourceBergen’s customer success story to learn more about its success in deploying BPM in the pharmaceutical industry.

Metastorm solutions can be tailored to fit all of your organizational needs.  Visit our solutions page to find more information about how your organization can benefit from implementing Metastorm’s leading suite of Business Process Management, Business Process Analysis, and Enterprise Architecture software.

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The CommonCents project was developed using Metastorm BPM and designed to increase government efficiencies by including employee feedback in addressing budget shortfalls in fiscal year 2010 and 2011.  Within two weeks, the Department of Information Technology was able to design and deploy a web-based application that allows city employees across all levels to provide feedback and cost-saving ideas about problems they have discovered in the budget.  

Leveraging Metastorm BPM’s proven solutions, CommonCents allows users to create a process that generates email notifications and to-do lists that are assigned and distributed throughout a review team, who then filter all incoming suggestions into specific departments based on its objective.  From there, the ideas go through an in-depth cost-saving analysis and assigned to specific members of the department team.  If a suggestion is believed to provide tangible cost-saving benefits, it is then assigned to the Deputy Chief Administrative Officer and the Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) for approval.  

Implementing the CommonCents program has enabled employees to offer suggestions in an easy, effective and timely manner and provided over $2 million in overall budget savings!  Metastorm BPM has allowed the city to create greater efficiency and reduce cost, while improving employee and citizen satisfaction. 

The city has been a long-time customer of Metastorm and we are extremely pleased to continue to contribute to its success.  Over the past few years the city has relied on Metastorm BPM to streamline, automate and manage several key processes and operations.  For example, Metastorm BPM has helped the city design and deploy several processes including a Security Access Privilege Request process that provides access to computer technology and resources for 5500 city employees, a Change Control Notification process that tracks and manages the release of changes and systems applications, and a Status Report process that gathers, tracks and manages all projects and initiatives happening in the city for the CAO.    

Metastorm looks forward to continuing to work with the city to help it identify areas of improvement and build a strong network of integrated and well-managed business practices. To learn more about how the City of Richmond has leveraged Metastorm BPM to gain better control over processes, read the city’s complete customer success story.  If you are interested in finding out how Metastorm Enterprise products can help local and state governments, check out Metastorm’s solutions for regional and local government resource center.

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As the economic recession has lagged on, industry analysts, vendors and practitioners have seen business process management (BPM) solutions succeed.  Mainly because these solutions offer organizations valuable tools to design, integrate, automate, optimize, monitor and improve both human-centric and system-centric processes.  With organizations reporting 10-20% return on investment per process project, investing in a BPM solution is a smart decision that will produce immediate benefits during the recession, as well as position your organization to effectively and efficiently respond to change once the economy has improved. 

By implementing a BPM solution, your organization will have control over key operational processes across the enterprise, inevitably giving users the ability to improve the quality of work produced on a daily basis.  Executives will gain visibility into the business operations across all levels, enabling them to identify redundant, complex, and underutilized process areas which will significantly decrease overall costs.  Additionally, BPM tools mitigate risk by allowing users to monitor operations.  Processes can be documented, enforced through process automation and business rules, and monitored and audited by users from all levels of the organization.

BPM tools also offer the resources to develop standard, automated processes, proven to increase productivity to a fraction of what it was before.  By automating processes, your organization will be in the position to do more with less by saving money and increasing agility. These improved processes allow your business to reduce overhead by eliminating redundancies or reusing resources that are no longer needed to meet objectives.   

What I find most important in this recession is that BPM solutions offer all users the visibility into organizational practices, capabilities, processes, and activities, allowing them to make better, more informed business decisions.  Don’t let this economic downturn force your organization to make decisions it will later regret.  Investing in a BPM solution will help your organizations cut costs now, position you to respond to change in the market place, and prevail when we approach an economic rebound. 

If you are interested in learning more about Metastorm’s BPM and EA solutions tailored for the economic downturn visit our recession and rebound solutions page, where you can read solution overviews and customer success stories.  Also, I encourage you to download Metastorm’s eBook “Two Smart Investments in a Recession and a Rebound” and watch our onDemand Webcast “Key Ways to Maximize the Value of Your IT Investment in Challenging Economic Times.”

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