Best Practices for Maximizing ROI for BPM & SOA: Seminars that bring you hands on experience
by Amy Larsen DeCarlo

To say the Internet has had a game-changing impact on business would be an understatement. Just a few years ago, organizations operated largely in reactive mode, producing products in response to fairly predictable demand. But the digital economy has rewritten all the rules. At a series of seminars [link to http://www.cmp-customevents.com/ibm] taking place across the United States, organizations are learning how to maximize ROI via business process management (BPM). Sponsored by InformationWeek , the Forrester Group and IBM, the seminars are designed to help businesses refine their operations to become more effective and competitive.

Today, buyers are educated consumers — about your company's products and about your competitors' products. The Web has given even the most geographically remote consumer access to products from virtually every vendor. The result is a hyper-competitive market dominated by faster product cycle times and much shorter — and less forgiving — business lifecycles.

The customer is now in the driver’s seat. In the modern marketplace, companies have to make some serious transformative changes to become more responsive and to get ahead of the curve (in other words, their competitors) in predicting the next big customer demand.

The good news: Companies that can calculate future demand in advance of their rivals have an exceptional chance to not just survive but to thrive. To reach this point, companies first need to establish a closer rapport with both current and prospective customers to understand their wants and needs, usually before they even voice them.

So how can your company leverage technology to get ahead? There are a number of critical steps you can take to get on the right path.

First, you need to outline your priorities for the coming 12 to 24 months. It's critical to understand how your IT organization can help you get projects in motion and how it can support them over the long term. Most companies today are focusing their efforts around business process innovation as a means of building a more flexible and responsive company.

Second, identify the project that's the best candidate for success; this project will serve as your platform for change.

Third, form a project committee to bring business and IT professionals together to work towards common goals. This work usually involves mapping business goals to IT objectives, and the result is typically better collaboration.

Finally a service-oriented architecture will provide a flexible foundation for getting business process innovation in place. For more information about the seminar series, please visit http://www.cmp-customevents.com/ibm.

Related Articles by Amy Larsen DeCarlo

Back to Homepage »