Business Process Improvement
Internal IT must extend reach beyond ITSM
When I think about the various IT Service Management, or ITSM, frameworks (a collection of best practices) I am concerned that they are very heavy on a contractual mindset and very light on a relationship mindset. I am not saying that we don’t need service level agreements or any form of commitment from IT to their customers. I am saying that if a contract is all you have for a relationship with a customer that relationship is destined to become adversarial very quickly. I am saying that IT must have an informed consultant relationship with all of their customers. To do that a number of things must happen.
What are the roles?
The diagram above summarizes the major components of a successful collaborative relationship between IT and its customer base. First, we must be clear on our definitions. Customers are simply those people who consume IT services delivered over some IT infrastructure. IT simply refers to that group responsible for providing for the IT needs of their customers. The business domain skills pool is a little less simple. It is a group of domain experts, either dedicated to such a pool or contributors to that pool virtually. These people are also IT customers themselves. Of course, the IT group is also their own customer. The diagram shows each group overlapping with the others. That is intended to reflect the close working relationships which require sharing some common vocabulary and concepts.
Cross training
I believe this to be core to success. In order for communication and collaboration to happen, everyone involved must share at least some core vocabulary. There is always a challenge to get hard core IT folks to learn business topics, whether it’s manufacturing, service, or consulting skills. It’s also always a challenge to get hard core business folks to understand enough IT vocabulary to have informed conversations about new topics like cloud computing, virtualization or security. Neither of these groups needs to be experts in the other’s field. They just need to be able to have intelligent, informed conversations and collaborate.
Those customers not involved in the domain expert pool also need some education but at a much higher, more general level. They primary obligation is to be able to clearly articulate their needs to IT support staff. The domain experts also need a high level understanding of Web 2.0. They will also need to have a general understanding of Web 3.0 as it occurs.
BPI consulting
This brings us to the discussion about the basic behavior of IT staff as they collaborate with their customers. Those “front line” IT folks must earn the trust and respect of their customers. They must be good partners and team members as the business works to improve their business processes (BPI), using IT tools to their best advantage in a way that makes business sense. I have always liked the analogy of an artist. It is the responsibility of IT to understand a broad range of IT tools (the palette) but also how they can be applied to solve business problems (painting on a canvas). Not all IT people need to be able to do this but a few must have that level of understanding.
Conclusion
The preceding discussion is above and beyond the formal notions of IT operations required by the ITSM frameworks. My point is about relationships, not just contracts. We need IT to make and keep their performance commitments to their customers and to employ best practices where ever it makes sense. However, we should extend our vision of IT’s responsibilities beyond formal contractual and procedural constraints. At the end of the day, success ultimately comes through relationships between people.
Thanks to being here. Stay tuned…
BPM is a Matter of Survival
The folks at Appian recently released a copy of a research note from Gartner, Inc. I have included a copy of it in the Files section of this blog. The key findings are listed below.
Key Findings
- Companies that use BPM create business process models that identify process redundancies, hidden costs and avoidable risks. Companies survive by using cost savings from BPM efforts to fund critical business operations.
- Applying BPM enables process visibility, allowing better collaboration among the activities being performed.
- For struggling companies, compliance is often another burden. BPM is well-suited to drive costs out of compliance and regulatory work.
- Simplifying the administrative work of your employees can increase morale and enable them to spend time on high-value work. It can also help companies in survival mode do more with less.
Recommendations
- Gain a competency in BPM now.
- Before you wield the cost-cutting axe, construct a high-level business process model to understand the impact of head count and resource cuts across the enterprise so that you do not decrease process efficiency and inadvertently drive up costs.
- Use BPM to manage your business case justification and measurement processes.
- Identify processes where costs may be high and there is not a focus on measurement. Target one of these processes for your first or next BPM project, and demonstrate tangible results.
Survival Actions
Put BPM to work immediately:
- Identify your most-valuable business processes.
- Select from that set the business processes necessary for survival and where money may be wasted.
- Target one of these processes for your first or next BPM project.
BPM can be a powerful tool that plays a critical role in the survival of your company — it can reduce costs, ensure compliance, avoid mistakes and create the visibility needed to manage processes as assets to your enterprise. Initial projects can produce impressive results. You cannot, however, simply focus on one-off projects. You will need to assess the impact of cuts to the process overall, not just isolation in one area. To scale and integrate BPM into the fabric of your organization requires attending to the discipline of BPM and putting the constructs in place to support the practice of BPM. Although much of the survival work will focus on projects that generate significant results, resources must also be allocated to communicating and making BPM repeatable and scalable. For step-by-step information about building an effective BPM program.
When building a BPM program, be sure to pay attention to some critical elements:
- Build communication into your BPM work to address the cultural and political implications that will arise.
- Start up the business process competency center to ensure that your efforts will scale.
- Prove the results by doing several short-duration, high-impact projects.
- Educate your organization about BPM — build the skill set, and strive to embed continuous process improvement into everyone’s job.
Laying the groundwork for BPM and proving results are powerful and can become a platform to elevate BPM to its true potential — BPM as one of the strategic management disciplines — and enable your organization to move from using BPM to survive to helping your organization to thrive.
StrAIT Advisors recommendations
This research note includes some specific savings example, which is always helpful and should be valuable to you as well. I recommend that you take these observations and recommendations seriously. For those of us that have been around a while, we remember recessions past. As usual, there were many jobs lost. And as usual, as the economy recovered many companies found their experience inventory in core areas had been depleted. This lack of experience where it was needed most seriously hurt those companies. It took them years to recover.
Download a copy of this research note and share it within your organization. It’s clear, direct and important.
Agility, process focus and adaptability
I’ve just been watching a presentation from Gartner and Fujitsu on the need for a process focus to support agility and adaptability. Once again it’s being delivered by our friends at ebizQ. While the video quality is unimpressive and the talking heads are unnecessary (to me at least) the sound is good and the message is useful. I have added a link to that presentation in the Files & links list on our Resources page.
One point that struck me is the need for CIOs to focus more on business process improvement and the IT infrastructure that supports that goal. Gartner claims that BPM will be a CIO’s top priority for some time to come. That makes sense to me and is consistent with my own experience and observations.
This won’t be a lengthy post since I just wrote one yesterday. I found this presentation useful and wanted to get the word out to you as quickly as I could.
Talk to you later…
20% Savings! Really?
Originally posted on 7/15/09.
Recently, I read an article by Gartner with a title referring to a 20% cost savings in the first year after a BPM project. Being in the BPM consulting business, I was delighted with the title alone and have included a version of the article provided by ebizQ in the Files section on my Resources page. It can also be found on the ebizQ site at http://www.ebizq.net/news/11095.html?rss . If you’re a Gartner Group client you should check out their article directly at www.garter.com . I’m sure it will be more detailed. Obviously, one of Gartner’s motivations for publishing this information so that it’s available to folks who are not Gartner customers was to drive interest in one of their BPM summits. That’s not a problem for me if the information is useful and accurate. I do think this information is useful and accurate. By no means do I think that those savings claims will be true for everyone. I do think that the pursuit of improving BPM for any company will lead to impressive results. If I didn’t I wouldn’t be investing in a business to help clients get there.
I do differ on one of their points. The article states that organizations which adopt BPM without establishing a business process competency center find their efforts don’t deliver the promised results. I ran manufacturing organizations, process technology organizations and IT organizations for many years. Based on firsthand experience and observation in the real manufacturing world I believe that BPM has to be at the core of the manufacturing or service organizations to be sustainable, not in an external group. Sustainability is the key. I believe that the client is best served if, instead, they have what I call a Business Process Architect. That should be a person on the client’s succession plan to be the COO and have significant leverage or ownership in the company’s operations (service or manufacturing) organizations. That person doesn’t need a competency center.
Other than that one point, I think this article has merit. Consistent with this article, our SLR methodology strives to institutionalize a continuous improvement mindset broken down in to two distinct parts. First, the step change component which is the combination of RUP and Lean approaches and an ongoing Six Sigma type continuous improvement component. Both become must a part of the corporate culture and be sustained. This ends the overt StrAIT Advisors pitch for this post.
I believe that most of the points made in this article are worthwhile so Gartner gets gold stars from me. I hope you found this post to be valuable. See you next time…