Getting your processes under control

We sit down with two experts of AgilePoint and Pegasystems in the field of business process management (BPM) to get their views on implementing and optimising a chosen solution.

“As organisations look to do more with less, they are looking to invest in innovation to improve their processes and operations”
-Jesse Shiah

CXO. What advice would you offer an organisation looking to roll out a BPM solution? Should it be introduced step by step and how should staff be assisted with the transition?
Jesse Shiah. Organisations should think big when they start the selection process of rolling out a BPM solution. The first thing to recognise is that achieving process excellence with BPM is not a technology issue but most importantly a people and culture transition and transformation challenge. However, the right BPMS could help to ease this challenge. Unlike many enterprise applications that are for a targeted group of users, a BPM solution shall and will touch everyone in the organisation and become an indispensible part of how they work daily. A BPMS solution that can help organisations leverage its existing assets and people's existing skill sets (such as Visio and Microsoft Office tools) for BPM can greatly facilitate user buy-in and reduce risk in roll out. A metadata-based, model-driven BPMS that aligns with SOA and turns 'process' into an enabling technology for business users is key to truly align Business/IT and achieve sustainable BPM success.

John Everhard. With real case studies showing the high levels of ROI associated with BPM, it is now time to consider BPM as an enabling technology. This change in thinking should drive the adoption of BPM across the organisation in a continuous pursuit of positive results such as reduced operational costs, increased sales, and improved customer retention. This approach doesn't mean you have to map and model all of your business processes up front; rather, it means think big, start small and grow BPM adoption incrementally. First, we need an effective BPM leader, with the vision and passion for change, charisma and good persuasion skills. Then create a small team made up of business, analysis and IT staff who effectively drive the initial projects to successful implementation. Training in the chosen BPM technology is essential and, after the first couple of successful projects, the organisation should create a centre of excellence that becomes the enabler for wider adoption of BPM solutions across the organisation.

What are the main challenges managers face when introducing BPM and governing it in order to achieve the highest ROI possible?
JE. The first step is to ensure you have some realistic measures of the current situation, cost of operation, sales volumes, products per customer, customer satisfaction metrics and general business performance measures. This allows you to determine the return on investment in BPM over time. Any good BPM solution should provide business performance dashboards and KPI measurement to enable a closer focus on business improvement, identifying bottlenecks and potential process improvement opportunities in real time.

Once the flexibility and power of BPM becomes evident, usually half way through the first project, it is vital to maintain governance of project scope and change requests. If you have chosen a BPM solution that is designed to support iterative process design, development and deployment it is less important to get everything absolutely right first time. Fast iterations with incremental change are more effective than painstaking analysis of every possibility within a business process up-front. Organisations will always be surprised by what they find when they have basic control and visibility of processes in production.

JS. One of the most commonly seen challenges managers face is that successful BPM initiatives require bringing together people of different disciplines, such as business process analysts, subject matter experts, and IT, to work together in an end-to-end, collaborative manner that is very different from the traditional waterfall, hand-off approach. Further, the nature of BPM will inevitably incur iterative improvement cycles from process discovery to deployment and thereafter. A BPMS that can facilitate the multi-disciplined team to quickly adapt the process implementation changes from user interface tweaking to back-end integration point reconfigurations is key to shorten the implementation and change management cycle that will lead to the highest ROI. A metadata-based, model-driven BPMS can best facilitate that goal.

Has BPM adoption been affected by the recession - has it forced organisations to look at shaking up their processes and slash costs?
JS. Based on our observation, we have not seen BPM adoption being dampened by the recession. As a matter of fact, we have seen many organisations actually deeming BPM an imperative initiative during this down economy to help them derive differentiated competitiveness such as saving cost through automation efficiency, gaining better insight (e.g. together with BI) into operations to pin-point improvements needed, making better and timely business decisions, integrating with and serving partners and customers more effectively, etcetera. As organisations look to do more with less, they are looking to invest in innovation to improve their processes and operations. As identified by leading analysts, BPM adoption is one of the most significant investments organisations are making during this time to remain competitive. Organisations also striving to tap into previously unattained business agility values are turning to BPM for the solution.

JE. Organisations deploying BPM broadly across their organisations and who are mature in the use of this technology seem to have weathered the financial crisis more effectively than those who are yet to deploy BPM or who have only deployed piecemeal. There seems to have been less 'shaking up and slashing' in these organizations and more fine tuning or rational decision making. What has become evident in the last 12 months is the increased interest in BPM technologies, even from organisations who have tried small deployments of BPM and who are now back in the market looking for mature, enterprise-class BPM. The speed of decision making when considering a new BPM investment has slowed, obviously all investments are under greater scrutiny and proof of ROI is definitely at the forefront of most BPM selections now. Some organisations who find themselves in full fire-fighting mode to secure against the financial and compliance demands they face are struggling to give sufficient executive time to make decisions on technology purchases.

Can you give an example of where you recently introduced BPM for a customer and the difference it made to their operations?
JE. BAA (British Airport Authority) analysed their IT needs and decided to deploy an Airport Collaborative Decision Making (A-CDM) solution to gain control of the aircraft turn-arounds at Heathrow. They had 480,000 aircraft movements in 2008 so needed a solution to provide better real-time information to allow joined-up decision making across the organisations involved in the turn-around process. In response, Pegasystems' PRPC BPM suite was seen as providing an agile, fast development solution to enable their future vision of A-CDM. The first iteration took just 12 weeks and forms one of the core components of BAA's Total Airport Management programme. The BPM solution feeds a live operational dashboard, providing a central view of what is happening to aircraft from initial descent into Heathrow to leaving Heathrow's controlled airspace. This allows involved organisations to input and download information according to service level agreements and to take action as soon as they fall behind pre-agreed goals, before deadlines are exceeded. Euro control predicts if 50 major airports saved one minute per taxi time per aircraft, a solution such as BAA has deployed would save 145,000 tonnes of fuel annually and 475,000 tonnes of co₂ - a massive ROI.

JS. With AgilePoint and SharePoint, SLG (a global logistic service provider), was able to expose its underlying supporting IT applications to the business process layer to empower its project managers and business stake holders to make changes directly to processes and collaborate through SharePoint. The result is an unrestricted ability to respond to changes on demand instead of involving weeks of IT coding as was required in the past. The result is that SLG is now able to respond to business requirement changes five to 10 times faster and cheaper. EquaSiis leverages AgilePoint and SharePoint to deliver world class business and IT services sourcing, and procurement and management capabilities to Fortune 500 companies through software and services. AgilePoint's true model-driven architecture delivers process-based enabling technologies for SharePoint. The result is significantly reduced time and cost required to create and maintain SharePoint based complex workflows and dynamic composite business applications by up to 5 times.

Jesse Shiah is the co-founder and President and CEO of AgilePoint (formerly Ascentn). Shiah has over 20 years' of combined technical and business experience in the software industry with emphasis in strategising the direction of emerging software companies for growth. Prior to founding Ascentn, Shiah held management positions at various institutions and startups.

John Everhard, European Technical Director of Pegasystems, has more than 30 years' experience in the IT industry and has worked for large commercial organisations in the energy and financial services markets, as well as a number of software companies and consultancies in Europe and North America. He specialised in applying technology to improve the design, build and deployment of software.