Question: What sort of value do organizations achieve from Enterprise Architecture?

Answer: Almost every article, blog post, seminar, and book about enterprise architecture (EA) includes some mention of the need for enterprise architects to demonstrate move value to the business.  The truth is that few architects get much practical, actionable advice on how to do that. Many business leaders don’t really understand the value of various frameworks and taxonomies and have a difficult time understanding the attention to detail that architects focus on when developing their modeling methodologies. Not only do business leaders not understand, but many are unwilling to take the time to learn. I’ve seen business mangers glaze over when architects start talking about something as simple as their modeling assumptions.

The most successful companies embrace architecture as a way to instill a discipline that drives the translation of business strategy and vision into the enterprise to facilitate the change needed to reach the broader business goals. Architecture also defines the path for an organization to evolve as it implements those the necessary changes. In today’s hyper-competitive global economy organizations cannot depend on a few “individuals” to instinctively make the right decisions to manage and execute this type of large-scale change. Especially when companies are focusing on objectives like improving customer experience and consistency across all channels of communication, the focus on individual contributions can actually impede the success of the broader goal.

To expand on this point, take a minute to read a recent blog post by HP’s Terry White, which cites research by Dana Gartner, president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research. Among other important things it suggests that to fully realize the value of architecture, “there’s a cultural shift that takes place in an organization, when it commits to doing business in a new way, and that cultural shift starts with abandoning a culture of heroes and accepting a culture of discipline.” Organizations have to strive for a higher level of maturity and embrace a new culture of discipline before they can fully realize the value of architecture.

This is not to say that organizations with less maturity don’t derive value from EA. Organizations  have demonstrated millions of dollars in savings with architectural initiatives focused on Application Portfolio Management, IT management, compliance and improving the effectiveness of key processes.  So my answer to this question is the value that organizations can achieve from EA initiatives depends on the business problem you are asking your architecture team to solve. Companies who view EA as an essential discipline for business transformation derive significantly more value than companies who take a more narrow view.

In fact, many of our customers who have taken the time to connect with the business teams have also seen an increase in their penetration and acceptance by the organization. However, keep in mind that this requires constant coaching. Realization of a deeper value of transformation can be accelerated when architects become more skilled at identifying key business leaders that understand the value of leveraging best practices, standardization, process optimization, or other capabilities enabled by good architecture. I recently had a conversation with one of our larger customers, one of the world’s largest financial institutions, who told me that he needed to have 150 conversations with key business leaders to open the door to another 150 conversations that he needed to have to drive the kind of value his team was able to deliver.

What do you think? Stay tuned for our next question in this series and feel free to let us know what questions you’d like answered.

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How does this notion of human and machine translate to success in the business world? Legendary fighter and advisor to the movie Sugar Ray Leonard tells us that we are actually seeing a story about relationships in Real Steel. That is, the importance of the relationship between Hugh Jackman, the ex-boxer now “corner man” and Atom, his robot fighter. It is that enabling (some might say co-dependent) relationship that leads to their success. Herein lies the lesson learned for business — while automation is required, it is not sufficient for success. I have seen that hold true in my world of business process solutions where adaptive case management and knowledge workers team up to drive productivity.

Customer Experience is the Competitive Battlefield
Industry leading companies, in insurance for example, are using the relationship between the knowledge worker and their case management systems to compete on the basis of the experience they provide to their customers. As a raving fan of adaptive case management (ACM), I have had the opportunity to see firsthand implementations that reflect the Real Steel lesson.

A critical first step is modernizing the legacy systems (yes, the automation) which drive most insurance companies in terms of core administration and where the sheer number of transactions handled and paper generated each day interferes with service to the customer. When taking on new business policies, ACM provides the all-important balance between automating out manual inefficiencies that lead to frustrating customer experiences and using technology to improve the service provided by humans, all the while assuring transparency and adherence to regulatory requirements.

By enhancing the legacy systems and providing information and content in context, ACM helps insurers effectively manage their complex enrollment and underwriting processes and the associated “paper” across multiple systems. For example, with commercial and life products, new business needs to be presented to the underwriter in a single view with multiple systems and third party data sources as well. Adaptive case management helps these insurers improve underwriter productivity and make more timely and informed decisions that in turn impact the customer experience for the better.

Case Study: A Tipping Point for Capturing New Business
One life insurance company whose implementation I reviewed provides a perfect success story for new business capture. The firm had reached a productivity tipping point in their processing of new applications. They faced a situation where they would have to hire four people for every 100 new applications received, in large part because staff had to physically move paper throughout the organization — file it, track it and retrieve it when requested — and the necessary information was not readily available to progress the application forward. With typical applications containing between 10 and 100 pages, depending on the complexity of the package, and the company receiving between 600 and 900 applications every week, they knew making a change was critical.

Today, with their new technology solution in place, the company is able to handle more applications and is growing the business with no increase in staff. Knowledge workers now have instantaneous access to the status of a file, the ability to view documents within the file, and can immediately review any of the reports related to the case, all in real time with the agent or broker. And, the company’s underwriters have increased their capacity by 20 percent.

The technology investment and improvement initiative have also enabled the company to engage an entire new sales channel by marketing term life policies through several large financial institutions and respond rapidly and efficiently to high volumes of new customers.

The Customer Moment of Truth Calls For High-Tech & High-Touch
Effectively capturing new business is critical to growth. Handling subsequent claims is the Insurer’s “moment of truth” for customer retention. Being there for customers in their hour of need and doing so efficiently demands a combination of high-tech and high-touch service. An insurance carrier’s reputation is built on the ability to effectively process customer claims, and reputation can make or break the business. Not only reputation is at stake, for insurance companies spend nearly 80 percent of their income on claims. Studies have confirmed that claim settlement times are directly correlated to both customer satisfaction and the severity of the claim, so efficient processes are a must.

With P&C claims for example, there is a great deal of third party data that is aggregated during the claim management process in order to determine the settlement amount and resolve the claim. This is exactly what led one worldwide insurer to unify their decentralized claim functions and improve their cycle times using business process and case management technology. In just one of their multi-site auto claims departments in a single country, they were handling 230,000 or so new claims per year. To further complicate the process, more than 10,000 documents a day relating to active claims, such as forms, letters and faxes, arrived in a variety of haphazard ways, from different sources, at different times and at different offices.

The solution the insurer implemented brings all the claim information together and routes it to the right knowledge worker desktop, automatically assigning claims, smoothly channeling incoming information, bundling documents and exhibits connected to the same claim and prioritizing the work. By leveraging the right technology, the company has been able to reduce paper-induced costs and request delays as well as the number of “missing in action” items. With improved claim decisioning, their customer claims experience in terms of turnaround time and consistency is now a competitive advantage for them instead of a burden.

Not only can ACM drive improved assessment and faster settlement times that decrease the severity of the claim, it can enable brokers and claimants to track progress of claims, provide self-service from first notice of loss (FNOL) to status inquiry and information provision, and support transparent decision making to minimize the risk of fraud or manipulation. In addition, adaptive case management is perfect for filling the “white space” in today’s claims systems to improve handling for fraud investigation and better support the process undertaken once a claim is identified as fraudulent.

Achieving Better Business Outcomes
For insurance and many other industries, changing the way a company does business with their customers means finding new ways of handling information to achieve the most effective business decision making environment. Adaptive case management does just that, enhancing the knowledge worker’s ability to perform their highly skilled, highly nuanced and often ad hoc and unstructured work activities. Thus, the result of combining humans and ACM technology is better business outcomes and a win in the battle to better serve the customer.

One review of Real Steel said the takeaway from the movie is “Do what you love and don’t ever stop.” With that in mind, watch for my next article in this ACM series — The Truth About Agility — about the value of continuous business process improvement and adaptive case management.

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While many corporations have enabled millions of their customers to access a portion of their business operations through mobile apps, millions of their employees don’t have mobile access to the processes that support and drive those customer interactions.

At our recent User Summit, the talk of the show was Steve Russell’s mobile and social BPM demo.  If you want to see it for yourself, click here. (Better yet, if you’d like to see the mobile capabilities in person, invite a Sales Engineer in for a visit, we’d be happy to show it off.)

After that demo, I had the opportunity to hear firsthand how several customers intended to deploy mobile processes and the unique benefits those capabilities would bring to their environment. Here are five ways those customers thought mobile access to their BPM processes would drive value:

1. Real-time reporting of inventory – A customer in distribution intends to add mobile process access to their inventory reporting in order to gain instant visibility, ensure PCI compliance, and deliver superior customer service.
2. Access to information when a laptop or workstation is unavailable – A customer from the manufacturing industry has workers who frequently must perform essential maintenance tasks on large machinery far from any work station. Currently, the workers complete their work from memory and then go back to the work station to record their actions, risking error and noncompliance—mobile access to the maintenance process will eliminate costly fines.
3. Expedite new matter intake – Law firms are constantly challenged with keeping new matter intake processes moving forward with lawyers frequently out of the office. With mobile access to their new matter intake process, law firms can gain a competitive advantage by eliminating the bottlenecks and getting new clients onboard faster.
4. Accurate incident management – By equipping employees with access to the incident management processes via mobile devices, an engineering firm expects to increase their reporting accuracy and speed response times.
5. Consistent user experience – Several customers said that they already had developed a mobile application for other areas of their business and were eager to hook the HTML 5-based mobile capabilities into those existing mobile interfaces to deliver a seamless experience for their users. The result? Happy employees and happy customers.

So, how will you benefit from mobile BPM? The possibilities are endless.

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I had my process and case management hat on when I watched the video. I noticed how people we actively collaborating on projects including some process oriented work. I noticed how they were working from a single “workspace” that surfaced itself on many different devices and/or objects. They were working, collaborating, and communicating from their workspace.  Notice in the office scene, there is not a single phone on the desk – just a light, desk, chair and “workspace.” 

As we look toward the future, I see case and process management solutions fitting easily into this kind of environment. Our persona-based and smart business workspaces are already unifying work and communication environments for knowledge workers today. Our mobile business process management (BPM) solutions are already enabling them to get work done from anywhere.  As I watched the video and related it to my knowledge of our BPM solutions, I thought “we are well on our way.”

Curious to learn more about BPM without boundaries?  Check out our new mobile solutions, here. If you would like to continue this converstaion, feel free to leave a comment below or reach out to me on Twitter @weekstweets

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1.  Close the gap between EA and BPM

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

2. Gain support from senior executives

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

3. Prioritize and manage initiatives

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

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

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

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

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

1.  Business Process Modeling

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

2.  Business Rules Management

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

3.  Collaboration

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

4.  Process Optimization/Simulation

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

5.  Human Interaction Management

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

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

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

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Organizational leaders spend countless hours analyzing, planning, and mapping out how specific people – in a variety of departments and locations – will all come together to achieve common strategic goals related to profitability, customer service and support, market leadership, business agility, and competitive differentiation.  However, much like your personal new year’s resolution, you get busy and the daily and unexpected demands of your work week take over and things begin to fizzle out.  You assume you are all working towards these goals, but the fact is there is a disconnect.  Oftentimes, what your organization needs is take a step back and figure out exactly how effective you are at executing these strategies.  Getting fresh ideas for your approach could be as simple as attending a thought leadership conference and networking with others who face similar challenges.

To jump start our new year, Metastorm will be the lead sponsor of the IQPC Next Generation Business Process Management Summit in Orlando, FL, January 17-20.  At the event, Neal Lohmann, director of business transformation will take part in a six-member BPM panel debate, which will discuss the reality of customer-centric business operations, whether IT or operations drive business process management initiatives, how to combat resistance to change, and ways to implement business process excellence strategies to achieve results.

Metastorm customer, Spring Garcia, special staff supervisor at the State of Louisiana Office of Community Development Disaster Recovery Unit, will deliver the keynote address of the event.  Attendees will be able to hear how the Disaster Recovery Unit of Louisiana uses the Metastorm BPM software suite to align their strategy with execution, ensuring that critical systems and processes are operating when they are needed the most – in times of life-threatening crisis. 

Whether or not you are able to attend the event in person, you can access some of the online resources available from IQPC and Metastorm.  In this podcast interview between Laura Mooney, vice president corporate communications for Metastorm, and Diana Davis, editor for Six Sigma and Process IQ, Laura discusses how organizations can work together in 2011 to mend the gap between strategy and execution. Laura explains that organizations need to enhance the collaboration between the people who come up with strategic objectives and the people who are executing these objectives on a day-to-day basis.  By pulling these groups together and determining the right way to reach the targets, organizations will achieve enterprise-wide visibility and eliminate siloed departments, practices and information.     

To register and find more information about Process through Process Week and the Next Generation BPM Summit, go to http://www.bpm-summit.com/.   To access additional online resources from Metastorm, visit http://www.metastorm.com/ and click on Downloads for access to podcasts, whitepapers, videos and customer case studies.   We hope you have a successful start to your new year!

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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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Business process analysis and management software enables organizations to design and implement optimal customer service processes, resulting in a world-class customer chain that supports all points of interactions between the business and the customer.  When Hewlett-Packard needed help converging and simplifying complex, global customer service processes, they turned to business process analysis and management software to get the job done.  In a recent video interview, Bill Riordan, customer service and support manager of Hewlett-Packard, shares how they are successfully deploying business process management tools to uncover and transform their global processes. HP’s customer service programs provide support for 132 countries.  Using software as the basis for their BPM infrastructure, they were able to identify and analyze 1,500 disparate global processes and improve and consolidate them into 100 universal processes.

Watch more customer video interviews and read over 100 customer success stories.

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In this video interview, Tom Holmberg, senior business process analyst for Allergan, provides insight into how business process initiatives have become powerful investments for Allergan’s long-term organizational goals.  Holmberg explains how Metastorm’s combined platform of enterprise architecture, business process analysis, and business process management became a priority within their organization.  Using these combined strategies, they enhanced their organizational structure and identified opportunities to deliver more optimal business results. Implementing business process initiatives helps users see into their current organizational structure and ensure that they are deploying the most efficient time-to-market processes—thus, optimizing their organizational structure and producing a competitive market advantage.  

Check out the complete season of Metastorm Customers Speak Out on our Metastorm Media YouTube channel, subscribe to the Metastorm iTunes Podcast, or visit the Metastorm customer testimonial page.

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