Regardless of the industry, size or company, the “four forces” are enabling businesses to transform processes and technology platforms in fundamental ways. These forces are driving new business models, new sales channels, and new ways to attract and engage with customers. By leveraging these technology trends, organizations can provide better insight into the business to plan more effectively and better predict everything from demand to the delivery of goods and services.

But the question is, how do you adopt the latest technology trends to innovate quickly, while limiting the impact on your existing investments and IT infrastructure?

Integration is key.

Why Integration? Because the best approach for adopting new technology trends is to leverage your existing business logic, IT systems and services. And integration makes it possible to leverage these investments while allowing  you to adopt new technology trends quickly, with less risk and reduced redundancy in data and logic. Businesses have made tremendous investments in their current IT infrastructure and want to protect and maintain these investments by limiting potentially disruptive or risky initiatives in order to adopt the latest trends.

Register for one or all of a series of webinars that explore this topic. Whether your organization is adopting one or all of the 4 forces or developing new technologies for mobile applications, public APIs, enterprise social collaboration, big data analytics or addressing data quality, partner onboarding, or process automation, this series of webinars will provide insight into how you can drive “Innovation through Integration.”

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Having gone through this process (no pun intended) many times with many organizations, I’ve come up with 5 simple questions that help organizations determine what processes have automation potential and the possibility of offering high value results.  Here it goes:

• Do you have any  “paper heavy” processes? Is there a paper form that gets routed to different process participants as part of the process?

• Do your process workers waste time looking for forms or documents they need to complete a specific step?

• Does the process require manual duplication of data? Where maybe an email address has to be manually copied from one system to another?

• Do your processes “hang” because one of the process workers didn’t receive an email that tells them to proceed with the next step?

• Are there other “routine” tasks that are very time consuming or can halt the process in its tracks if the task owner goes on holiday or simply forgets  one day?

If you can answer “yes” to one or more of the above questions, you are looking at a process with automation potential. If you’re still not 100% sure whether a process is a good fit for automation or you want more time to  figure out the impact of such a “yes” then it’s time to  speak to the people who perform the process day in and day out.

But beware, these process owners might be comfortable with the status-quo, in fact they might find what they do today is the ideal process. It could be that many of them have already created their own workarounds to avoid potential process problems. Either way, you should gather these details first hand so you can create the perfect automation scenario that reduces error rates and significantly decreases process cycle times. Would you agree?

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Let’s start with the age old question of, what’s required to get IT and the business aligned? And equally important, how do we keep them aligned beyond the first  meeting? It’s not as simple as asking the  business to describe their requirements as a process model. Although process models are a good start and an important  approach to build on, I believe we can get much closer to an approach that business and IT can follow together.

Here is the recipe I have in mind:

1. Tools alone are not sufficient enough for successful business / IT alignment and good project results. Solid project management and communication structures, together with a good methodology, are crucial if an organization hopes to achieve good results with Business Process Management.

•  Business people need a way to capture and document processes with all the elements important to them. The tool that supports this activity has to be usable by non-developers.

2. Processes that have been created by the business need to be communicated to IT in a way that they can use the model as a starting point for the technical implementation. Without having to re-model the process from scratch. So you need a model transition from a process design tool to a full-fledged developer environment without media breaks due to different model formats and such.

3. In the course of the technical implementation of a process, the model always gets changed (i.e., to illustrate exception handling, task locking, etc.). Now IT needs a mechanism to communicate these model changes back to the business.  Why? Because the business needs to be able to understand if the original intent of the process logic is still represented in the technical model.

4. Next you need a way of comparing the technical model to the original model and also a mechanism that allows the business user to approve or reject any changes in the technical model. This approval / rejection mechanism also implies that we need the ability to go back and forth iteratively between the line of business and IT during the process implementation phase until the result satisfies both sides.

Having such an iterative approach that works through bi-directional communication between the business and IT means that all subsequent change requests can be handled in a structured way. If the business has new ideas a few months later, the above mechanism would allow for transparent collaboration. Also, if the IT infrastructure changes these changes can be communicated back to the process owner on the business side.

5. For all of the above, it is important to route and track interactions between “the business guys” and “the IT guys”. Email notifications for all involved parties and task tracking of what needs to happen next with the process model will ensure delays due to a lack of transparency don’t become a problem.

6. Last but not least, the tools should provide transparency between the process lifecycle and the lifecycle of services, as well as the data model that feeds processes. This might not be obvious to everyone immediately, but trying to manage dependencies between processes and the underlying service landscape can become a huge challenge very quickly if you don’t have a good solution in place.

Do you think these 6 steps could help better align IT and the business in their quest to communicate the right requirements and have a successful BPM implementation?

The post It’s About More Than Just Getting the Requirements Right appeared first on Reality Check.

The Deutsches Forschungszentrum fur Kunstilice Intelligenz (DFKI) examined three complex drivers for compliance externally imposed on organizations:

• heightened complexity of business processes with an increased number of process interfaces
• rising frequency of process changes
• a continuously growing amount of compliance regulations

To me, it’s obvious these drivers also drive process improvement but the question remains, “what should a process improvement/GRC platform provide to leverage synergies from both disciplines?”

#1 Technology:

A GRC solution should be built on a consistent set of data and should have a connector for all relevant regulations, requirements, and risks. The perfect connectors are processes. They visualize the relation between the assets; they enable impact analysis (which process is affected if a certain regulation changes) and they map GRC to operations and then to monitoring. The solution should also support workflows for defining, and communicating rules, instructions, controls and documentation of GRC activities. For more best practices in identifying the right GRC platform read, “Efficient Support for Internal Control Systems via a GRC Software Platform”  or visit the ARIS GRC lounge.

If you’re looking for a 3^rd party review of GRC platforms, download the latest Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance Platforms.

#2 Organization:

Technology is important but don’t forget the organizational integration. Blended teams of process improvement and GRC experts tend to get the best results. The benefits of bringing these teams together leads to better processes with lower and transparent risks, 100% regulatory compliance, faster and cheaper audits and overall higher security for less cost.

#3 Technology + Organization:

Process Improvement and GRC are one of a kind – both are about visibility, accountability and adaptability. As a matter of fact, many process improvement initiatives lead to higher risk and regulatory awareness and with this inherently define the purpose for GRC. The same principles apply to GRC. Many GRC initiatives lead to process thinking which drives the need for process transparency and management. The integration of process improvement and GRC technology as well as their blended teams are important for business success.

They don’t just need each other; they can’t exist without each other. Yes it’s true, GRC and Process Improvement are in love with each other. What about you? Do you have process improvement/GRC love stories to tell?

The post Does Governance, Risk and Compliance Management Love Process Improvement? appeared first on Reality Check.

Identify Your Allies

I love technology and I would guess many of you do too. Technology allows us to do things faster, more conveniently and more transparently. With the hope in improving our organizational performance but technology is just one pillar for improving business performance. Let’s not forget the people and the processes.

Involving the right people early and often in your process intelligence  initiative will help provide better transparency. It is true transparency can be seen as a scary thing but involving the people who have the most to gain and the most to lose will limit those fears. Don’t limit yourself to organizational domains. Involve the stakeholders to jointly define the Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) so it’s clear what processes will be measured. Be sure to align with IT to understand where the data’s coming from, and bring both business and IT together to ensure you’re all working towards a common goal.

Know Your Course

How do you measure what you don’t know? It’s like a doctor recommending a treatment before you have a diagnosis. Start by measuring the “as-is” state, watch how your processes behave over time, identify the weaknesses and then think about a solution. (don’t go at it alone) When you’ve taken the steps and gathered process KPIs over time, you can validate your next move and make a strong case for future investment.

Commit to a Strategy

I can’t talk about the importance of KPIs enough but I think I missed one important point. It’s critical to map your KPI’s and your process performance to your corporate strategy. It shouldn’t be too difficult since operational processes, support the tactical objectives and strategic goals defined in your corporate strategy. Right?

Don’t feel bad if you can’t make the connection quite yet, what might seem easy in theory, is quite difficult in practice. Not many organizations have been successful ensuring their corporate strategy directly impacts their process performance KPI’s. Which is what makes process intelligence so important, not to mention it’s a management’s dream.

Share your steps to Process Intelligence, we’re all looking for a smoother road to success.

The post The Forgotten Principles of Process Intelligence appeared first on Reality Check.

But it was the customers I’ve worked with over the past 15 years that gave me the Reality Check I needed to realize the full value of BPM and SOA together. Their use cases helped me understand the next evolutionary phase of business process was moving beyond automation to create flexible business processes. Companies that get the most out of their BPM efforts have identified the ‘Top 10 Reasons to Use SOA as a Foundation for BPM.’

1. Automate processes across business functions: Processes that need to execute across functions are often hampered by a lack of interoperability of underlying systems. SOA services eliminate such issues by provisioning standard interfaces to automate processes.
2. Automate new processes with greater speed: With a well-designed SOA that exposes business capabilities as services, new processes can be quickly implemented simply by wiring process steps to the correct services.
3. Change processes quickly in response to business needs: With loosely coupled SOA services, re-wiring a process step from one service to another can be done with minimal impact to the rest of the process and can even help analyze the feasibility of proposed changes.
4. Avoid costly business errors:  Businesses can reduce risks by using proven SOA services to implement business processes that are robust and less prone to errors.
5. Focus on improving business processes—not integrating systems: SOA services abstract out the complexity of underlying systems, enabling BPM to focus solely on improving processes.
6. Align IT investments with business needs: With an SOA, it is straightforward to prioritize building services needed for key business processes and to establish service-level KPIs. That maximizes not only the alignment with business needs but also the return on IT investments.
7. Adapt running business processes dynamically: With an SOA, it is possible to establish a layer of mediation to dynamically match the process step to the right service and enforce any SLA based on the context.
8. Gain deeper visibility into your business: Implementing business processes on an SOA foundation means the business services are executed as business transactions flow through the process. By placing probes on these business services to collect service performance and other metrics, companies can gain real-time visibility into their business that otherwise would be hard to achieve.
9. Adopt cloud-based services faster: Do you want to quickly innovate your processes by incorporating a Software as a Service (SaaS) application or a specialized Application Program Interface (API) from a cloud vendor? With the right SOA infrastructure in place, both internal and external services are used the same way at the process-step level.
10. Deliver business processes via mobile devices: With an SOA, companies can expose needed capabilities through a mediation layer between mobile applications and internal systems. This method helps preserve the integrity of internal systems and provides a way to enforce other quality of service requirements.

By using SOA as a foundation for BPM, companies across the globe continue to achieve better customer service and become more competitive by breaking down organizational silos and automating systems and processes across lines of businesses. If you have a lesson learned by implementing SOA as the foundation to your BPM efforts, I’d like to learn from you and I’m sure others would as well. Please share your thoughts here.

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