StrAIT Blogging

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: 

1. Build communication into your BPM work to address the cultural and political implications that will arise.
   
2. Start up the business process competency center to ensure that your efforts will scale.
   
3. Prove the results by doing several short-duration, high-impact projects.
   
4. 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.

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