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The consumerization of IT has ushered in a new age: the era of the super-empowered consumer. Your customers today have more choices than ever and low switching costs make it easy for your customers to seek another vendor if your business does not meet the rising expectations. In todays interconnected world, the customer has a louder voice than everand social media only serves to amplify the consumers voice. One unsatisfied customer can share her experience with millions of other people in a matter of seconds. And customer expectations are no longer tied to the industry or to the market segment of a business. Todays consumer experiences are transferrable throughout all the business entities with which that consumer interacts. If an individuals bank has the ability to provide real-time account information through a mobile application, the persons expectation is that their insurance company will provide a similar experience, such as real-time policy information. Processes are what turn isolated customer interactions into holistic customer experiences. The reality of todays empowered consumer has made it an imperative for you to provide superior customer interactions at every opportunity. You must deliver value to your customers at each point of interaction and then you must use each customer encounter to strengthen the relationship. But many leaders find it difficult to coordinate the interactions with customers. These leaders are challenged to interconnect throughout their own corporate channels, platforms, processes, departments and silos. To overcome these obstacles, you must view your customerfacing processes in a new way. It is no longer sufficient to use a project approach, in which islands of excellence provide value but do not optimize the value that waits inherent within your organization. Business success today demands a coordinated approach to process management, one that supports corporate
strategy in a more-active manner. Success today demands a holistic approach, one that optimizes the value delivered throughout your organization. What is needed is a holistic approach to business process that provides deep visibility and synchronization in both design and execution across all processes to serve the goal of delivering a world-class customer experience. Your best customers want you to succeed. Give them what they want.
When we improve or create new processes, we get closer to the customer and generate new revenue sources.
Angelo Figaro, CIO, Renault do Brasil
While process innovation is a holistic approach to process improvement, you can start from any single set of capabilities, realize value and then build out the solution over time. The foundation of a strong process innovation approach include these attributes:
The recent trend is that an increasing number of corporate-level roles now focus on cross-functional cohesiveness. This trend demonstrates the importance of looking beyond the immediate requirement at hand, in order to ensure a coordinated approach that delivers higher value to the organization as a whole. For example, Chief Medical Information Officers specifically bring together clinical systems from a doctors point of view. This means bridging diagnostic and laboratory systems, administrative systems and insurance systems so that the doctors and nurses have the information at the point of care when they treat a patient. In a broader sense, the number of Chief Compliance Officer roles in companies has increased by an order of magnitude from 30 in the year 2003 to more than 300 today.1 Functional excellence is needed, but functional excellence is not sufficient for leaders who wish to achieve and maintain sustainable business success. The world has evolved from one in which bespoke craftsmen created custom-made individual items to a world in which industrial products can be specialized. But the world today craves the individual bespoke treatmentyet on a massive scale. Internally at organizations of every kind, individual contributors must act in the shared interest of the company.
Processes can mix structured and unstructured activities, according to business needs Business rules and analytics provide flexibility for repeatable decisions that change frequently Flexible integration interconnects applications and services throughout the organization
Through robust and flexible software capabilities and industry expertise, BPM enables you to discover, model and execute your organizations business processes and BPM enables you to rapidly change, govern and gain wide-ranging visibility on these business processes. The important thing to remember is that BPM must be more than just software. Successful business outcomes can only be achieved with the involvement of the business expertise with IT expertise. Whether it is your corporate expertise, that of an industry partner working with you, the expertise of integrators and consultants such as IBM Global Services, or a combination of these, one thing is certain: when it comes to successful BPM, software is not enough. At its heart, business process management is about continuously optimizing business processes. This continuous optimization requires you to take action to improve business processes throughout the process lifecycle. The process lifecycle spans three steps:
other controls. Processes are also most effective and efficient when they are enabled with broad reuse of service-enabled IT assets. Successful optimization of wide-ranging business processes throughout the lifecycle requires that IT and business teams participate and collaborate together. Business and IT leaders must work together to develop the flexibility, processes and underlying systems that make it possible for the workforce to embrace change and to help the company achieve a dynamic business network. The best solution for business process management will provide you with the means and the tools to facilitate this collaboration, creating the visibility, engagement and efficiency you expect.
Documentation and compliance. Business process improvements are documented and are tested prior to deployment. Deployment and execution. New or improved processes are deployed in an automated, repeatable fashion with flexibility for rapid change. Analysis and optimization. Deployed processes are closely monitored and measured in near-real-time. This enables rapid response to emerging business situations and helps you to identify new opportunities for process improvement.
Underpinning this cycle of continuous process improvement is the need for robust governance. Governance helps to ensure that business processes are operating consistently and that the processes comply with internal policies, external regulations and
Seek out visibility. You cannot improve what you cannot see. Get the visibility you need to make a positive difference for your business. Business process management from IBM offers a performance data warehouse that empowers business users, who can more easily optimize business processes. Monitoring and analytics are clearly presented and built-in performance data delivers the near-real-time visibility that creates value rapidly Seek out meaningful governance. Manage change confidently with governance that makes a difference in the real world. The IBM approach to governance delivers a unified, model-driven environment that helps you to stay in synch throughout the entire lifecycle, from model design to deployment. Centralize process deployment visibility and control throughout all your environments with a BPM repository that is unlike any other. Seek out collaboration. Work is not done in a vacuum. People need to interact, share ideas, ask questions, seek help and share best practices. As work becomes even more spontaneous and unstructured, collaboration capabilities give your workers the ability to quickly get the help they need to move work forward. This requires simplicity and ease of use to ensure that the non-technical business users are engaged in process improvement. IBM business process management solutions offer rich and intuitive collaboration capabilities that help business users to collaborate. They can even identify a subject matter expert and interact with that expert in the moment, when help is required.
IBM Blueworks Live is an innovative software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that enables a regular business person who has little technical skill to automate processes that he might currently run over email. This ability gives that business person more control and improved productivity using a social, collaborative approach. Blueworks Live combines the best of two previous IBM BPM in the cloud offerings: the community from BPM BlueWorks and the process documentation of BPM Blueprint. On top of that, Blueworks Live adds in exciting automation capabilities to create a first-of-its-kind offering to help you improve processes. Employ the lens of process improvement to improve business agility at your organization. IBM Blueworks Live is accessible enough for the masses and powerful enough for your most avid process analysts. Expect institutionalized innovation and quick adoption. The performance of IBM BlueWorks Live helps you to manage the unstructured series of activities of your business people activities that currently are conducted through documents and spreadsheets. With IBM Blueworks Live, you can gain the benefits of visibility, understanding, insight and control. When you possess one shared repository of your business assets, you can take action toward more-knowledgable, business-led change. With Blueworks Live, the result can be dramatic: business agility, more quickly achieved.
A case study: IBM process innovation and BPM in action
Jiangning District (Jiangning) is an emerging, modern Chinese city with the vision of being a technology hub. City leaders desired to support urban growth. They wanted to deploy a
digital urban management system to optimize unit grid, urban facility and event management. City management had the necessary technology infrastructure, but the solution was complex and posed several challenges, including:
Difficulty obtaining accurate information because of a lack of collaboration among key functional departments, dispersed data collection centers, diverse processing departments and dated information Inefficiencies because the organization handled major business processes manually Inability to adhere to local mandates because they required greater visibility into the business processes
expertise and superior architectural design. City leaders appreciated IBM leadership in SOA-based industry solution frameworks and the Smarter Cities solution. Jiangning city teams received deep consultation services and leading solution and product enablement and were able to experience right away the exciting IBM capability in human-centric process solutions in city management. The city improved alignment, scalability and visibility. The IBM solution helps Jiangning leaders to align with federal and local government mandates while the leaders deliver the scalability and flexibility their colleagues and partners required. The IBM solution provided greater visibility into processes for both line-of-business and management stakeholders. Jiangning leaders were able to integrate key processes to improve efficiency. With process innovation and business process management from IBM, these leaders enabled the sharing of relevant information throughout crucial decision points.
These challenges made it difficult for Jiangning to achieve the required precision management target and represented obstacles to the leaders vision of growth. Jiangning leaders began looking for robust software solutions to integrate systems, improve collaboration among functional departments and offer a comprehensive view of business processes to line-of-business (LOB) management. City leaders turned to the only business process management (BPM) vendor that could offer such integration along with the visibility required: IBM. IBM delivered an integrated solution with a low total cost of ownership (TCO). This IBM solution will begin delivering significant benefits to the district within just four months. The city gained a competitive advantage. Jiangning evaluated a number of competing solutions before deciding on IBM. The district chose IBM solutions because they provided proven
management for service-oriented architecture (SOA) and non-SOA environments. IBM Business Process Manager provides visibility and management of your business processes. The solution is designed to be easy to deploy, so you can use
it immediately upon receipt, or you can use this IBM solution in an easily customizable configuration. Time-to-value is rapid. User productivity can begin to improve right away.
NEW
Social
Mobile
Coaches
Portal
Business Space
Advanced Integration
ESB Adaptors
Governance / Visibility
Define Improve
Repository
Shared Assets Server Registry Versioned Assets
Network Multiple Process Centers
Process Center
Process Designer / Optimizer
Integration Designer
To empower business users, IBM Business Process Manager provides easier, more-intuitive access. Your business users can prioritize and work efficiently with tasks. A process coach guides your business users through the steps of a process, further streamlining task completion. With built-in monitoring and analytics, business users can more-easily optimize business processes through simulations and comparisons. IBM Business Process Manager fosters greater collaboration between business and IT. A unified model-driven environment makes it possible for your colleagues to seeand to work fromthe same process version. This enables the people who know your business best to manage change confidently.
and integration developers can take advantage of each others work, and provides you with a governance mechanism that makes it easier for business users to control and share processes.
The IBM difference: A BPM repository unlike any other Better govern the deployment of process and services to production runtime throughout your environments using centralized control. Employ a scalable repository and control center to manage the process artifacts, applications and services that are created as part of your BPM program. Change with confidence to ensure that your processes are repeatable, more reliable and more secure. Use a shared library of all process assets that facilitates drag-and-drop reuse and collaborative implementation. Install and track deployed versions of multiple processes throughout a variety of runtime server environments.
Many leaders who introduce IBM process innovation to their employees are surprised at how quickly the BPM tools are embraced by employees. IBM puts a strong focus on human behavior along with a longstanding focus on technology. The IBM team knows that your best employees possess the knowledge and the desire to improve their daily work processes. Now, as easily as they send an instant message to a friend, these employees can add value to your business. As quickly as they send a Twitter update, the individuals in your workforce can reveal to you what they know about your most-complex business processes.
BPM is not just about technology. BPM is about changing the culture of your organization to be process-aware. To succeed in this endeavor requires deep engagement and participation from all participants. That is why the IBM team has taken a great deal of focused effort to make sure that IBM products do more than deliver the functions that are required to do business at scale these daysthese products help you to optimize how those functions manifest themselves within your organization. You learn how people use the functions and which people will want to use a particular function. Do not settle for less when you select enterprise software. Position yourself for success. IBM products are specifically designed to foster a high level of engagement in the software.
The redesigned IBM Process Portal provides an engaging interface that delivers customized information to users.
BPM is a common starting point for process innovation initiatives. IBM Business Process Management works together with other components of the process innovation portfolio, providing a robust process solution that brings together BPM, business rules, business events, analytics and Integration to fully optimize processes throughout your organization. Combine structured or improvised processes with your organizations unique business rules and analytics, and then interconnect this information throughout departments. Take advantage of an approach to process management that is singularly powerful because it harnesses the desire of knowledgeable individuals to make business betterand does so in a continuous, intuitive manner. Take action to provide a powerful foundation for consistent customer interactions.
Next steps
Business transformation need not be difficult, expensive or slow to deliver. When the nature of change is seamless and accessible, true business transformation can begin. Real growth can be fostered. With business process management software from IBM, you get a fast path to value. Some customers see substantive returns in as little as three months. Customers who deploy on IBM System z are primed for especially fast success. The sooner you engage IBM, the sooner your business transformation can begin. There is no reason to delay; IBM offers a variety of ways to learn more, to engage quickly and to encourage rapid time-to-value. Get a trial at no charge of IBM Blueworks Live at Blueworkslive.com Try IBM Business Process Manager at no charge. Visit the SOA Sandbox at ibm.com/developerworks/downloads/
soasandbox/ibmbpm.html
Sign up for a three-day process improvement workshop. Your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner can help schedule this collaborative meeting that brings together your business and IT representatives with experts from IBM. Assess opportunities to improve a specific process. Open up your stakeholders to new ideas; give them a more detailed understanding of your existing business and identify a clear path for improvement. Find the best entry point. Discover BPM services from IBM to help you get started in an expeditious manner. Visit:
ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/services/discoverbpm.html
Notes
Copyright IBM Corporation 2012 IBM Corporation Software Group Route 100 Somers, NY 10589 USA Produced in the United States of America June 2012 IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, Blueworks Live, WebSphere, and System z are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at Copyright and trademark information at
ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml
This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates. It is the users responsibility to evaluate and verify the operation of any other products or programs with IBM products and programs.
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Rethinking Marketing, JanuaryFebruary 2010 Harvard Business Review Tech CEO Council Report Oct 2010: BPM improvements can be expected to yield savings of up to 5% of sales; CNN Money U.S. Fortune 500 Revenues, May 2010 Please Recycle
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