IBM Software Thought Leadership White Paper

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Achieve process innovation through business process management

A more thorough approach to BPM interconnects processes throughout your organizationand beyond

Achieve process innovation through business process management

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.

A fresh approach: process innovation

Process Innovation is how organizations use technology to improve and transform their day-to-day business operations. Expect a transformational approach to business operations that is enabled by simpler yet powerful governance, visibility and collaboration. When you can combine structured or improvised processes with your specific business rules and analyticsand then interconnect this information throughout departments something remarkable happens. You gain the ability to provide a powerful foundation for consistent customer interactions. When you can engage your business users in process improvement directly, visibility and control improve throughout your interconnected processes. It becomes easier for your colleagues to make quick decisions. Process innovation can transform your business operations right from the start, because it is a moresystemic approach to visibility, governance and collaboration. Transformation begins with coordinated visibility. Too often, silos stifle a companys ability to innovate. And too often, employees ability to respond to change is inhibited because business leaders possess inconsistent views of the actual work that is occurring within their organization every day. Process innovation takes a holistic approach to process improvement that enables you to manage for the shared interest of your organization, rather than simply managing individual islands of excellence.

Achieve process innovation through business process management

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

Put the BPM in process innovation

Your processes are what make up your organization. It is your business processes that enable you to successfully execute upon your business strategy and ultimately embody your companys true source of differentiation. Business Process Management (BPM) is a core discipline of process innovation. Organizational leaders seek ways to drive measured growth and meet rising customer expectations. At the same time, IT teams require the ability to deliver greater flexibility to their business while they manage costs. These needs are converging, pushing organizations towards an interest in BPM solutions. All businesses today have process inefficiencies. An estimated USD488,000,000,000 has been lost by the Fortune 500 companies just in process inefficiencies.2 What if you can save just five percent of the funds that are wasted on process inefficiencies at your company and re-invest that money into innovation for the business? Start with one process project, gain the result and move on to other BPM projects.

Achieve process innovation through business process management

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.

Business Process Management from IBM

IBM Business Process Management software makes it possible for organizational leaders to identify manual, disjointed activities and turn these activities into streamlined, repeatable processes. This approach enables your teams to design their processes in a way that better addresses customer needs and the IBM approach encourages your executives to break out of their silos for a more-efficient and interconnected work environment. The IBM solution provides a platform that makes it easier for IT and business teams to work togetherwhich in turn helps to ensure that the best-possible technical approach can be identified in harmony with the needs of your business. But many IBM customers discover that the most important aspect of this BPM software is that it serves to control the vast amount of change and complexity that inundate their business on a daily basis. The IBM approach helps you to identify ways to simplify internal processes so that they work together to delight your customers and enrich overall company value.

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

Achieve process innovation through business process management

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

IBM Blueworks Live

Organizations handle process discovery in a variety of ways, ranging from structured to unplanned. Typically, it is common for process discovery to be done rather informally using pen and paper, or employing a simple spreadsheet to document and understand the current-state process.

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

Achieve process innovation through business process management

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

IBM Business Process Manager

IBM Business Process Manager provides federated visibility throughout all participants in a process. The result: empowered knowledge workers who can control the work that they perform. Designed to enable business-led change, IBM Business Process Manager is simple enough to engage process participants, regardless of their role, yet powerful enough to scale to support enterprise-wide transformation. This IBM solution includes tooling and run-time to help you model, assemble, automate, monitor and optimize your business processes. Expect comprehensive, fully-interoperable and consumable business process

Achieve process innovation through business process management

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

IBM Business Process Manager

Mobile

Coaches

Portal

Business Space

Optional Microsoft Add-ons

Process Server Core BPM

BPMN Process Rules Performance Data Warehouse Deploy BPEL Measure

Advanced Integration
ESB Adaptors

Governance / Visibility
Define Improve

Repository
Shared Assets Server Registry Versioned Assets
Network Multiple Process Centers

Process Center
Process Designer / Optimizer

Process Center Console

Integration Designer

Achieve process innovation through business process management

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.

IBM Process Center delivers centralized visibility and governance

Strong governance holds great potential to drive competitive business success. The best approach to governance is one that can provide the repeatable and reliable security your team needs to manage change with more confidence, even in todays complex and dynamic environment. IBM Process Center is an asset repository unlike any other. IBM Process Center is a smart BPM repository that centralizes process deployment visibility and control throughout your environments. This makes management of process change easier and provides consistency and repeatability to ensure that your processes execute as designed. The IBM approach to governance delivers a unified, modeldriven environment that helps you to stay in synch throughout the entire lifecycle, from model design to deployment. This fosters a collaborative environment in which process designers

A fresh approach to BPM can create business success

In todays business environment, adaptability itself could well become your companys biggest competitive advantage. That is why IBM offers an approach to BPM that is specifically designed to drive adaptability and transformation, even when budgets are restricted. Designed to deliver the insight you need to manage business processes, IBM software offerings are of interest to leaders who wish to achieve results quickly.

Achieve process innovation through business process management

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.

10 Achieve process innovation through business process management

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

Software services help your organization to thrive

IBM Software Services for IBM WebSphere offer more than just incremental process improvements; these IBM software services deliver smarter processes that create smarter work effort. Expect visibility of your business processes. Expect the expertise that helps you drive change with confidence and flexibility. The methodology of software services for WebSphere delivers a foundation that supports your constantly changing, dynamic business environment. In todays challenging economic times, you must realize rapid time-to-value for your technology investments. This software-services team helps you to accomplish that goal.

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

For more information

Learn more about IBM business process management software at: ibm.com/bpm Additionally, IBM Global Financing can help you acquire the software capabilities that your business needs in the most cost-effective and strategic way possible. Well partner with credit-qualified clients to customize a financing solution to suit your business and development goals, enable effective cash management, and improve your total cost of ownership. Fund your critical IT investment and propel your business forward with IBM Global Financing. For more information, visit:
ibm.com/financing

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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