TRIP REPORT Business Process Improvement

8 11 November 2010 Cannes, France TRIP REPORT Business Process Improvement This year s Gartner Symposium/ITxpo was focused on the theme, Transitions, New Realities, Rules and Opportunities. This report offers an overview of what was on attendees minds and what they learned from Gartner analysts and one another. KEY TAKEAWAYs Many of the BPI attendees at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo reported that they are working on major process improvement and business transformation initiatives. These initiatives range from the rationalization and modernization of siloed systems as a result of merger-and-acquisition activity or regulatory or businessmodel changes to efforts to improve operating results by redesigning processes, and potentially reengineering the roles that manage them and the systems that support them. Attendees clearly recognized that processes are how the entire business works and creates business value. This reality makes business process both a unifying concept and a common enterprise language. Many attendees expressed a closely related concern with reconciling the business view of processes and its need for business process management (BPM) with existing application portfolios. Applications support processes, of course, but attendees at sessions, workshops and user roundtables recognized that an application is simply one type of resource used to execute portions of a process. With this broader view of process in mind, attendees were looking for better ways to coordinate all the resources involved in their processes and develop and implement better-managed processes. Key takeaways of the sessions and analyst/client interactions on the BPI track included the following: Processes are increasingly viewed as business assets, and business and IT leaders accordingly recognize the urgent need for BPM competencies. The dynamic process models used in BPM suites can help address and mitigate business market volatility and reduce the operational impact of various types of disruptive events. So-called best practices and a reliance on packaged applications can limit the creation of business value and reduce competitive advantage. Advancing the enterprise s ability to manage processes not simply work items or IT applications is more an issue of culture and competencies than of technology. conference Highlights Among the many presentations for the BPI track, six stood out for their level of attendance and the intensity of attendees interest: The BPM Scenario: From Operational Excellence to Adaptive Processes Enterprises increasingly recognize that business processes are essential assets, but the nature of those processes is changing dramatically. Ongoing market and business volatility, disruptive events and other pressures are driving a need for a more adaptive approach, one that extends beyond the operational excellence focus of packaged applications and best practices. The older approach to automating structured work is being overshadowed by a new focus on unstructured work and the need for new tools to better support not necessarily by automation the efforts of knowledge workers. Today s most advanced BPM suites provide a means of adapting processes to changing business environments, using dynamic process models that refl ect real-time processes and work execution and can automatically adjust to context changes, incorporate predictive analytics and enable immediate action by all business and IT stakeholders. 1

Evaluate process performance from two perspectives: Inside-out (focusing on efficiency and productivity) and outside-in (focusing on effectiveness and innovation). Expand your BPM focus to include unstructured process areas, and consider the approach Gartner describes as design by doing (see Social BPM: Design by Doing G00200281). Identify those strategic processes that will be the best candidates to incorporate explicit process management likely enabled using a BPM suite. Magic Quadrant: Business Process Management Suites A BPM suite is a state-of-the-art technology that integrates many BPM technologies to support the entire process improvement life cycle, from definition to implementation, monitoring and analysis, through ongoing optimization. This unified approach enables both business managers and IT professionals to work more collaboratively and effectively on all process design, development, execution and enhancement activities. The complexity of BPM usage scenarios makes the selection of a BPM suite exceptionally difficult. Gartner s Magic Quadrant for this market works to simplify and rationalize the evaluation and selection process by overlaying the Gartner-developed four corners framework with the four most common BPM suite scenarios (see Magic Quadrant for Business Process Management Suites G00205212): Specific process-based solution: BPM suite adoption may be driven by the need to coordinate a longestablished process and improve business performance through improving the coordination of missioncritical processes Continuous process improvement: In this scenario increasingly common in industries such as financial services, healthcare and communications the enterprise has pursued process thinking for some time and has now advanced to a continuous process improvement mentality. Redesign for process-based service-oriented architecture (SOA): The IT organization sometimes pushes business enthusiasm for BPM often because IT recognizes that BPM-enabled business agility can be dramatically enhanced by SOA. Business transformation: In this scenario, which is in some respects a culmination of the preceding three, senior business executives want to make a game changing play by rethinking entire business processes. This approach is typical of enterprises that have achieved higher levels of BPM maturity or are under severe strain from the economic downturn and are seeking to redefine their business models for survival. Recommendation: Use the scenario-based framework detailed in the Gartner Magic Quadrant to define your enterprisespecific BPM suite needs and identify the vendor and product that best addresses those needs. Roundtable: Key Roles and Responsibilities for BPM Success Becoming a process-managed enterprise has far-reaching effects on organization roles, staffing and responsibilities. An interactive analyst/user roundtable explored the roles, responsibilities and alternative organizational structures that can accelerate BPM maturity. Among the issues discussed: Why do business and IT roles need to change for BPM success? How should BPM roles and responsibilities be organized and staffed? And what are the best practices for making the transformation to a process-managed enterprise. Assess your enterprise s current state of BPM maturity, using Gartner s ITScore maturity assessment methodology (see ITScore for Business Process Management G0020538). Identity your most urgent pain points and critical issues that you want to focus on next. Review your existing organizational structure and identify the key roles that will help you resolve those critical issues quickly or move to the next phase in your BPM journey (see Role Definition and Organizational Structure: Business Process Improvement G00159547). 2

Business Rules Are King Business rules are everywhere, embedded in applications, integration tools, governance systems and, of course, employees heads and most are entirely unmanaged. Managing business rules effectively enhances processes, increases business agility and helps manage risk. It also helps prevent unacceptable risk and manages the risk directly related to doing business and to recognizing and seizing the opportunities created through risk. Managing rules involves deciding which rules should guide core behavior and can be used enterprisewide, and which rules need special variants because of local or customer requirements, geographical compliance issues and other concerns. Recognize the value of rules, flows and processes as metadata-driven assets. Learn the principles of business rule management and understand that it requires far more than a simple technology purchase. Focus on the real business rules the volatile, relevant, game-changing decision points. Monitor the technology market closely, because it is in a transitional stage. Integrate business rule management and BPM, because skills, roles and technologies overlap. Advancing Business Process Management Maturity Many enterprises have conducted successful business BPM projects, but establishing BPM as an ongoing organizational development program is difficult. Becoming a process-centric enterprise depends on your enterprise s structure and culture, process competencies, methodologies, metrics, and governance, as well as its installed technology and architecture. Attendees at this session learned that process maturity is a journey whose destination, path and rate of advance depend heavily on an enterprise s business goals, starting point and internal and external business conditions, and whose success requires a focus on delivering value at each stage along the way. Gartner s interactive ITScore maturity assessment methodology makes it possible to assess your current BPM maturity level across six dimensions. Enterprises can map their own journeys by tailoring the BPM maturity model to their specific cultures and needs, and set expectations for what remains to be learned and experienced. Identify a few experts early in the journey who can stay at least one step ahead of others. Adjust your plans to the needs of the specific project, and recognize that not every project needs to achieve the highest level of BPM maturity. Promote successes your own, and those reported in external case studies. Workshops The Gartner-developed ITScore maturity assessment methodology which has now been applied across a broad range of business and IT disciplines was the subject of an interactive workshop that was one of the best-attended and best-received BPI events in Cannes. The majority of the participants placed their enterprises and internal organizations at comparatively low levels of BPM maturity, many reporting that their approaches were still technology-centric. The participants broadly recognized that the starting point had to be understanding the enterprise s current maturity level. From there, their interest and concerns quickly centered on the people aspects of implementing a successful BPM maturity program. The need to communicate constantly with stakeholder and the entire enterprise and especially to note quick wins was seen as key to increasing buy-in and momentum. Metrics and measurement were also regarded as important tools for promoting successes, identifying areas where attention is needed and helping to establish process ownership. Establishing process ownership and embedding it in people s roles was another major discussion points. Incentives tied to performance metrics for example, completing a process within a specified time were viewed as a good start, though one that would not necessarily go beyond an individual s contribution to measure the end-to-end process. 3

Determine your immediate-priority issues and concerns and use the ITScore maturity model to define your areas of focus and next steps. Many process problems are inadvertently introduced at organizational boundaries. Identify an organizational boundary-crossing issue and gather baseline data to highlight the weakness. This is key to moving from Level 2 to Level 3 process maturity. Conduct a business process improvement proof-of-concept project to demonstrate value, build a business case for a process-based approach and share it with executives. Many proofs of concept can be done without changes to the technology environment, simply by eliminating outdated activities and duplicate data collection. Keynotes Welcome address, opening remarks and Gartner analyst opening keynote On the first day of Symposium, an ensemble of leading Gartner analysts took the audience through the impact of the industry dynamics that shaped this year s theme: Transitions: New Realities, Rules and Opportunities. We learned about the three new realities of our age: 1) the power of unprecedented choice; 2) a wild, open world as evidenced by the growing influence of social media and context-aware computing; and 3) a shift in mind-set from seeking outputs to ensuring outcomes. We were then taken through the three new rules of this new era: 1) smart control, which will replace the complete control that IT has historically had of its environments; 2) intelligent business, which will replace traditional business intelligence; and 3) IT dynamism, the migration of IT projects from being built to last toward IT projects that are built to change. Finally, we heard about two new opportunities: 1) the fusion of multiple existing and emerging technologies to create new business value; and 2) the wide-open opportunity to lead the initiatives underpinning the new opportunities will it be IT? Business line executives? Functional executives? There s no clear answer. Gartner Research Senior Vice President Peter Sondergaard also took the audience through the four broad trends that Gartner believes will alter IT and drive economic change: cloud computing, social computing, context-aware computing and Pattern-Based Strategy. What People Asked About The BPI track attendees at European Symposium/ITXpo attendees in general indicated they were attending the sessions to gain an understanding of What s going on? and then How do I start with BPM? as reflected in the following two general questions: How do I do BPM if I have packaged applications? Gartner s BPI analyst consistently advised attendees to recognize that an application is not a process. A packaged application may well be a big part of a process, but there are many other aspects to business processes and their management. Automating processes with applications is becoming secondary to the need for more dynamic business processes that coordinate rather than automate knowledge work. New dynamic business models and strong BPM suites offer tools to support unstructured business processes. How can I measure process performance and benefits to the business? A first step is to engage the entire enterprise in an analysis and discussion of end-to-end processes. Gartner estimates that 90% of process problems occur at gaps for example, between organizations, time zones, physical units and siloed systems. Discussions of this type can, at minimum, uncover problems that are easy to fix, such as duplicate data and effort and unnecessary process steps. Highlight the cost and time savings to be gleaned from such initial improvements. Build on this beginning and work with process owners to define business-oriented process metrics and industry benchmarks for comparison. 4

Things to Watch For The emergence of business process benchmarks. Enterprises are beginning to place pressure on vendors and consultants to share benchmarks. Vendors are currently selling the benchmarking information they have, but as in other areas, the increased enterprise pressure will force vendors to make benchmarks more readily available. Use these benchmarks both to evaluate your business processes and to make a business case for process improvement. An increase in unstructured work processes. More and more business processes require large concentrations of knowledge workers, and many of the enterprises represented at European Symposium/ITxpo employ large numbers of knowledge workers. Analysis, decision- making, negotiation, collaboration and other unstructured work cannot be automated, yet still needs to be supported. Look for tools that increase productivity without forcing too much structure. Checklists are one example of a technique that increases but does not force structure. The emergence of discrete new trends and technology. Hot trends such as social networking and communities and technologies such as cloud computing should be tracked. However, there is a danger in thinking of them as independent. The relationships between many of the emerging trends and technologies will provide the real advantages for creating and managing business processes. GARTNER Business Process Improvement COMMUNITY analysts Michele Cantara Research VP Focus Area Business Process Management John Dixon Research Director Focus Area Business Process Management Ian Puddy Sr Managing Partner Focus Area Sourcing Jim Sinur Research VP Focus Area Business Process Management 5

ITXPO SPONSORS FOR THE Business Process Improvement SYMPOSIUM COMMUNITY AT&T Global Network Services Autonomy Be Informed BT CA Technologies Cordys EMC Fadata LTD Lombardi Software Orange Business Services PNMsoft Software AG Tieto Virtusa 2011 ITxpo Sponsors Airwatch Architecting the Enterprise ArcSight Autonomy Boole Server BT Computer Associates UK Ltd Cordys Fabasoft Fadata AD Interactive Intelligence Interoute Communications ISYS Search Software itsystems AG OPNET Orange Business Services Perceptive Software Planview PNM Soft Portwise Qualiware Red Hat GMbH Sitecore Softex SonicWall SQS Software Quality Teamquest Thinprint AG Vidyo Wipro Symposium/ITxpo 2011 The World s Most Important Gathering of CIOs and Senior IT Executives It s not too early to start planning for next year. We hope to see you again 7 10 November 2011, in Cannes, France. Keep up with the latest news, alumni benefits and registration details as they are unveiled for this exciting event by visiting gartner.com/eu/symposium. Upcoming Business Process Improvement Role Event Gartner Business Process Management Summit 7 8 March 2011, London europe.gartner.com/bpm As a Symposium/ITxpo attendee, you qualify for our exclusive offer to register at the discounted rate of 1,895 that s 300 off the standard registration fee. To receive this special offer, register with priority code: SYMPD. You can also pass a special offer along to colleagues: they can save 300 on the standard registration fee when they register with priority code: SYMRAC. To take advantage of these special offers, visit europe.gartner.com/bpm or call +44 20 8879 2430 2010 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Gartner and ITxpo are registered trademarks of Gartner, Inc. or its affiliates. For more information, e-mail info@gartner.com or visit gartner.com. 6