How to Succeed In Business Services. Mike Grammage

Transcription

1 How to Succeed In Business Services Mike Grammage

2 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS 1 INTRODUCTION THE DESTINATION NOT AN EASY JOURNEY WHAT WE NEED TO SUCCEED CONCLUSION... 6

3 3 Introduction A process management platform with an underlying framework for collaboration is the key to realizing the full benefits of Business Services and properly managing the risks. History isn t necessarily obvious when you re involved in it. But our hunch is that we ll look back on the events in the shared services space in the early years of this decade and see that they marked an inflection point. These will be the years when things come together as a shared vision of the future is rapidly emerging. The alignment of buyers, vendors, and advisers around this common vision will accelerate the pace of change. By the time of the Rio Olympics in 2016, we ll look back on these formative years and realize just how big the tidal wave of change called Business Services would be. The Destination In the enterprise of the future, all support activities are set to be delivered through a Business Services unit. Support denotes everything outside core operational activities, including finance, human resources, information technology, procurement, facilities, legal, and even supply chain management in some cases. Some of the Fortune 1000 companies have Business Services units in operation already. Others have nascent units. Most are scrambling to define their Business Services strategies. This all translates to a future that will be far more multifunctional. Existing functional organizations will continue to exist: most people will still work in human resources or finance teams, for example, but there will be far more organizational fluidity. The sharp demarcation lines that define existing functional silos will become blurred. The future will also be characterized by far more hybrid service delivery models. Up to now, most organizations have opted for either shared services or outsourcing. The future and many organizations are already well down this path is about continually optimizing a mix of shared services, outsourcing, and retained activities.

4 4 Hyper-competitive global markets will drive the need for business agility, providing another explanation for why Business Services of the future will be far more complex and dynamic, underscored by these trends: Rapid and continual churn in sourcing. Long-term mega-outsourcing deals are already being superseded by multi-sourced contracts with shorter terms. Cloud-based services and other innovations from service providers will reduce the friction involved in change, accelerate automation, and increase complexity across the systems landscape. Embrace of continuous improvement, which will be widely embedded in corporate cultures, will drive continual incremental change. Risk, controls, and compliance will become ever more important and more directly linked to operational processes in an increasingly regulated world. Optimizing a hybrid service delivery model across Business Services is inherently complex. But everything points to a faster pace and greater complexity in the future. Not an Easy Journey Every organization is unique. Everyone starts from where they are, and moves at a pace dictated by their circumstances. But overall, the direction of travel is clear: we are on a journey towards a Business Services future. It s a journey over challenging terrain. Building a multifunctional, hybrid delivery model is hard going, but that s just reaching the base camp. The real challenge comes in making it work and in realizing the benefits set out in the business case. This would entail a transformational journey in every sense, requiring the development of new capabilities. Today s tools and techniques are simply not enough to optimize the complex, dynamic, and multifunctional hybrid service delivery models of the future.

5 5 What We Need To Succeed The foundation for success, and the best provision for this journey, is effective collaboration, irrespective of the starting point and pace of progress. Building and optimizing a Business Services organization hinges upon effective collaboration across functional, organizational, and language boundaries. It is the essential underpinning for transformation on this scale: client, provider, business, IT, and outsourcers all have to be working together. How do we do this? Effective collaboration starts with a common language. Luckily, we have an emerging consensus on the universal business language: end-to-end process. Business process is the language that can provide complete visibility, clarify clear responsibilities, show dependencies and interconnections, and enable collaboration on change. But using the language of process is not sufficient. There has to be a process platform supported by a collaborative framework, which can continually orchestrate the actions of all the stakeholders. This is where things begin to fall apart for most organizations. Many manage their processes as a collection of process fragments, which overlap and conflict in different formats, and by using various tools with no real version control. Others do have a complete enterprise process model; however, it s in the language of IT, which is intended to drive automation and understood only by a handful of people. Everything points to four essential properties for the process management platform that will underpin Business Services success. These properties must be: Based on the language of process. Holistic, incorporating the entire enterprise with visibility on end-to-end processes. They provide different perspectives of one reality to meet the needs of the various stakeholders and enable the optimization of all activities, whether manual or automated. Real and live on every desktop, delivering value across the enterprise, not an offline and artificial construct. Governed and wrapped within a robust, but easy-to-use governance framework that also incorporates risks, controls, and compliance. Otherwise, the process management platform is not sustainable.

6 6 Without these underlying characteristics, the process management platform will be suboptimal, incapable of enabling effective collaboration. It s possible to garden without tools or compost, but it s sub-optimal and ineffective. It s possible to feed a family without an oven or fridge or even a flame, but it s sub-optimal and ineffective. Delivering the business case for Business Services is possible without a process management platform of this sort. But it s sub-optimal and ineffective. Conclusion The rapid growth in Business Services initiatives represents a tidal wave of change. Every organization will progress in its own way, and at its own pace, but our common future will be more multifunctional, more complex, and more dynamic. And the pace of transformational change is accelerating. Process is becoming the universal business language. A process management platform holistic, real, and governed enables the effective collaboration that orchestrates the actions of the many stakeholders across the enterprise. It is possible to build and optimize a Business Services program without a process management platform. But it s difficult to see why any organization would want to do that. A process management platform with an underlying framework for collaboration is the key to realizing the full benefits of Business Services and properly managing the risks. TIBCO Software Inc. (NASDAQ: TIBX) is a provider of infrastructure software for companies to use on- premise or as part of cloud computing environments. Whether it s optimizing claims, processing trades, cross-selling products based on real-time customer behavior, or averting a crisis before it happens, TIBCO provides companies the two-second advantage the ability to capture the right information at the right time and act on it preemptively for a competitive advantage. More than 4,000 customers worldwide rely on TIBCO to manage information, decisions, processes and applications in real time. Learn more at Global Headquarters 3307 Hillview Avenue Palo Alto, CA Tel: Fax: TIBCO, TIBCO Software, and The Two-Second Advantage are trademarks or registered trademarks of TIBCO Software Inc. and its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. All other product and company names and marks mentioned in this document are the property of their respective owners and are mentioned for identifi cation purposes only.