BPM 101: Making Rapid Change Work for the Business
by Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Adapt or perish; this is the first rule of doing business in a fast-changing economy. Whether an organization is in rapid-fire expansion mode or battling the economic demons that presage a recession, uncertainty and change are intrinsic parts of doing business in a global economy. Companies must respond to shifting variables quickly or risk losing out on prime profit opportunities and ceding valuable competitive ground to more adroit rivals.

Those that succeed know how to apply innovation to respond quickly to myriad shifting challenges, including a constantly evolving competitive landscape, new regulatory mandates, and the consumer’s increasing power. Companies need to make difficult changes to modify products and improve processes. These changes may involve repackaging offerings and expanding into new geographies, or stripping down existing products to lower prices. The actions associated with making these changes may be painful, but companies can significantly reduce or eliminate the difficulty associated with business change by introducing business process management into their organization.

Business process management (BPM) suites built around a flexible, service oriented architecture (SOA) are helping companies better leverage technology resources in order to optimize corporate operations. To be truly effective, BPM tools should provide the insight companies need to monitor processes and event streams, looking at both technical and human elements. To be truly effective, BPM tools should be able to assess the process in question from end-to-end, which means examining it across lines of business and even outside the enterprise into a partner’s or customer’s environment.

Organizations typically start by capturing their current business processes as graphical process model that are then evaluated in the context of current needs and future anticipated market changes. With this starting point, companies can conduct process simulations and study various “what if” scenarios to better capitalize on new revenue opportunities, market segments, product configurations, and so on. This evaluation can be done with out deploying the process, saving time, money and IT resources. IBM WebSphere Business Modeler, which uses a drag-and-drop interface to create or import process flow data, provides both simulation and collaborative capabilities needed to make a case for process change. The tool also makes it easy to share information about the associated benefits and pain points with key stakeholders. The result is a practical way to evaluate the advantages of process changes and make educated IT investment decisions which will benefit the company’s bottom line.

But it isn’t enough to simply map out theoretical scenarios; to effect real change you need to deploy process changes into the production environment. Deployment doesn’t need to be an arduous process. IBM makes available a rich set of pre-built business process resources and industry-specific best practices which can be modified to fit a particular business’ needs. These resources help accelerate business process improvements and provide the means to react quickly to changes.

Using IBM’s WebSphere Business Monitor, organizations can continually track business processes in the production environment. WebSphere Business Monitor tracks key performance indicators (KPIs) in real time, feeding the information back into the Business Modeler application to measure real results against expectations. IBM also provides dashboard views into business activities on an ongoing basis so business and IT managers can track KPIs and other process data in real time to gain more insight into business performance and events. Users can also compile historical trend reports from this data to spot potential problems before they become a bigger drag on the business. Organizations can harness information from these tools to make continuous process improvements.

BPM provides a mechanism to eliminate the isolation between various business and technology elements in order to react in a faster and more cost-effective manner to the evolving marketplace. Applying a mix of automation and human decision support optimizes both the human and technology resources involved in improving business processes. BPM can help an organization alter its operational activities to become more agile and, therefore, more responsive to its customers. This gives the company the means to cut operational costs, improve quality, and exploit new revenues streams. The result is business which in even the harshest of markets will outpace its competitors to succeed over the long term.

To learn more about how to elevate your competitive position by applying BPM, tune into the IBM Webinar “BPM 101: Achieving Business Breakthroughs with BPM’ starting March 19, 2008. This informative discussion will shed light on how to make the changes a business needs to outpace rivals, outlast economic challenges, and maximize profit potential.

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