The Time has come for Enterprise Business Process Management

Businesses small and large are looking ahead to a good year. IT executives reportedly have a more positive outlook than they did in 2004, in part because of analyst forecasts for steady economic growth, higher productivity gains and spending increases in areas such as technology and the workforce.

As a CEO and someone who has been watching businesses for more than four decades, I offer two additional forecasts for consideration:

Forecast No. 1: 2005 will be the year when companies finally realize the power of technology to create real business value. Technology is currently used to drive operational enhancements, saving money or time. But this year, because companies are planning to invest in IT again and because CIOs are more business-savvy than ever, I'm betting that technology will finally be used to improve business performance and service quality -- by perhaps an order of magnitude beyond where we are now.

How? By enabling managers to have complete control across the enterprise and by viewing and managing the business processes that dictate how well business is run, customers are served, and products and services are innovated and brought to market. Which brings me to ...

Forecast No. 2 Enterprise business process management (BPM), the practice of dynamically aligning processes across an enterprise while using technologies to provide visibility and management at any point in the process life cycle, is a concept whose time has come.

Although some early-adopter companies in industries such as financial services already know about the benefits of enterprise BPM, most companies have only been dabbling in improving their business processes. While they have experienced cost savings or improved cycle times as a result of having visibility into just how weak some of their processes are, they have really dealt with only the individual components rather than the entire life cycle of the process.

For example, companies have used Six Sigma and other quality-centered initiatives to analyze and map out a process across a company for regulatory reporting and compliance or to identify problem areas. However, they lacked the implementation options or technology know-how to properly address the shortcomings that were identified.

The reverse also happens. Some companies have deployed a technology to address a particular problem within one department without mapping the entire process across departments or doing an analysis that could allow them to address and improve the process in a more complete way for the benefit of the whole company.

Enterprisewide Process Management: The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts

When companies manage and complete the entire life cycle of a business process, they rapidly see the connection points between people, systems and processes that facilitate the sharing of information and resources and result in improved collaboration among employees, partners and customers.

Imagine a world where managers can directly monitor and manage the exceptions in the processes that span the enterprise. They could apply their domain knowledge and experience to the continuous improvement of such processes. They would have the perspective required to analyze and model the workflow across functional silos and geographic areas and the tools to create, modify and monitor processes up and down the value chain.

As business conditions shift, the manager who is monitoring processes via information dashboards, simulation tools or e-mail alerts to their handheld devices could execute changes on the fly to respond to competitive threats or market opportunities. For example, a retail manager can make changes in the amount and location of a line of inventory as easily as dragging and dropping objects and linking them together.

So how do businesses become agile, process-managed companies in 2005? Below is a checklist of best practices to help organizations ready themselves for enterprise BPM.

Set up infrastructure to support efforts. To harmonize overlapping business processes, share resources and lower total cost of ownership of technologies, more and more organizations are establishing internal "enterprise groups." These groups, which are familiar with the overall business goals of the company, are charged with looking across the organization at workflow, resources, people and processes to find synergies, integration points and ways to support the overall effort toward end-to-end BPM

Select a BPM partner. There are several vendors that provide services ranging from analysis and process mapping to management and automation. In selecting a vendor for enterprise BPM, companies need to look at capabilities that cross the life cycle of business processes and combine analysis, mapping and execution. Vendors must provide visibility, management and tooling into processes at any point in their life cycle -- from the highest-level operational business rule to the most granular activity, individual task or transaction detail.

Ensure that the software tools selected combine capabilities from analysis to management and execution. In 2005, the tools to truly enable process improvements on an enterprise level are available. Business process management, which represents a convergence of analysis, integration, business-to-business and workflow technologies, allows companies to dynamically analyze and model the flow, not just of data and people, but also of systems, infrastructure and physical resources. You must be able to graphically define, depict, simulate or build processes in alignment with business objectives.

Conduct an enterprise audit of BPM-related initiatives to determine how to extend projects across the enterprise. For organizations that have implemented Six Sigma or other analysis-based performance initiatives, BPM allows integration across departmental and functional boundaries. BPM tools are especially good when various processes need to be connected across an enterprise -- something traditional approaches simply can't consider. Conversely, analysis tools can augment a BPM system already in place by applying methodology to solve difficult and complex problems and identifying gaps in performance.

Make business process improvement a part of every line executive's responsibility. In order to fully implement and execute on enterprise BPM, everyone from product development and manufacturing to marketing and customer service must be able to monitor and manage his processes across the enterprise and, therefore, accept that he will be evaluated based on the performance of those processes. To that end, key performance indicators need to be put in place to measure and monitor the productivity of the process.