Control the playing field with BPM

The world of modern professional sports is ruled by data, and professional sporting organisations are behaving more like medium to even large businesses. Managers of professional sports teams are perfect examples of how visibility into key data and metrics enables the control over processes needed to deliver top performance. Items such as career statistics for players, transfer and injury reports, and historic win/loss data – all drilled down a granular level – aid long-term planning and team development. Sports team managers have both long-term and real-time visibility into the performance metrics that matter, and total control to adjust strategies and resources based on that insight. Why should business be any different?

Business process management (BPM) technologies deliver the same type of detailed visibility and control to business managers and executives charged with driving their organisations to the top of their fields. Process innovation enabled by BPM is badly needed in a world of competitive pressures, shortened deadlines, limited resources, and heightened expectations. Process improvement delivers on all these counts – and according to research from Gartner, 67 per cent of CIOs surveyed stated that they view BPM and process innovation as the primary method to gain greater efficiencies and increase margins.

But anything short of a holistic view of business processes will fall short of the mark. Regardless of how effectively a process is executed in terms of speed and repeatability, its business value is marginal if the human decisions embedded in that process are faulty. When that mindset is applied with a comprehensive BPM suite the result is a tremendously powerful ability to adapt processes on the fly. By connecting people to people, applications to applications, and people to applications, BPM makes organisations more agile so their employees are better equipped to respond to change.

Innovative BPM enables deep collaboration in both the development and runtime environments through portals, attached discussion threads, document management capabilities and configurable task views for teams and individuals. Sports managers know the equipment they provide must be highly functional. To be truly useful, a BPM solution must be easy to use. Anything short of a 100 percent web-based approach – where business analysts can make significant changes without involving IT and end-users can interact with intuitive interfaces – just won’t cut it. The system must be natively-designed to reduce (or eliminate) deployment and integration headaches.

Employing all of these BPM principles can have a dramatic effect. For example, a financial services company can innovate all processes within a loan origination system through automation, increasing its visibility and control over the approval process. Increased efficiencies come through the automation aspect and also through the ability to track applications through the entire process in real-time, and take informed actions if needed to ensure finalisation by a set deadline. This means the best possible service for customers. Outsourced professional services firms – who increasingly deliver their services via on-demand, web-based models – can increase efficiency and control over processes in support of implementation and service delivery for clients. By streamlining system-to-system integration, back end workflows and human-centric processes on a global basis, these firms can realise benefits like greatly increased control of permissions, leading to greater data protection and regulatory compliance assurance. BPM can increase global visibility into financial auditing processes, making it easier to monitor and sustain compliance while also reducing on-going compliance costs.

Business managers today are often not armed with the same visibility and control sports managers use to gain competitive advantage. Vital decisions about corporate objectives and how to reach them are made – and then executives sit back and wait to see if things work out as planned. BPM changes the game for business performance through process innovation, creating a process-managed enterprise that is able to respond to changing market, customer, and regulatory demands faster than its competitors. And in business, just as in sports, speed, agility and teamwork are what counts.

About the author

Justin Thomas is Managing Director, EMEA, at Appian, an innovative global provider of business process management technology.