Mid Market company IT pressures

A recent conversation with analysts from Info Tech Research Group revealed some interesting insights about the pressures facing IT departments at Mid Market companies.

Besides the usual backlog of requests from the business that keeps increasing, they find themselves having to deal with more complex demands that are beyond the internal capabilities of the groups.  In addition, the IT skills required are becoming more broader to address the various demands, with less vertical specialization in house.

In addition SaaS tools are disrupting the way IT used to function, as business units are getting on the Cloud directly, bypassing IT, or in many cases, are getting more involved in purchase decision making. 

These pressures are causing a shift in IT skills, with companies seeing a rise in business developers, as compared to highly skilled tool developers, and a shift in IT from the business of running technology and infrastructure to the business of managing vendors and being business analysts.

Business Process Management platforms are designed to address these new realities as they can address the backlog of demands on IT due to their rapid development capabilities, they can empower the business with the help of IT, and they are easy to learn and adopt.  The next frontier for BPM platforms is Mid Market companies!

Sharepoint and BPM

I'm often asked how is Sharepoint different than a BPM Platform?  If a company already is invested in it, can they use it to automate business processes and workflows?  Here's my view on Sharepoint:

Sharepoint is not a BPMS tool, it’s a content management tool. Fundamentally, it is a content management system (CMS) for organizing information and content in an intranet or extranet.  For example, many companies use it for sharing information internally and or with the public.  Essentially you can use it to create websites, portals, store and search documents. 

After integrating Sharepoint with Visual Studio, Info Path, SQL Server, Workflow Foundation, BizTalk Server and Outlook you can then begin to have a BPMS tool that a developer can begin to work with.  It's very complex, resource intensive, requiring high skill sets and is like a development environment as compared to a BPM Platform or Rapid Development environment.   

As a result, companies that attempt to implement business process management in Sharepoint find themselves spending a lot of time, money and resources to customize it, dependent on expert developers and with a system that is costly to maintain and improve over time.

As a rule of thumb, you are asking for trouble anytime you try to use a system out of its intended purpose.

Social BPM Part 2

On behalf of Yegin Genc:

In an earlier post, we discussed how social networks and BPM had some fundamental differences in how they treat collaboration among people.  We argued that social networks enable people to interact and produce information and work within a free form, with unstructured or ad hoc activities, while BPM enforces structured workflow to improve the collaboration between people on a given business process.  Given these differences, it was hard to imagine how the two can come together under the concept of Social BPM.

One possible way for the two technologies to converge is to use social networks as a way to evaluate the structure BPM provides and to use the data for optimizing and improving the structured processes.   For example, let’s assume BPM enforced a specific structured workflow around submitting, routing and approving expense reports.  We can use social networks to see how people are actually responding to the structure: Are there deviations or exceptions? Are people complaining about the process? Are they working around the structure?  With this information, the workflow can then be optimized based on the feedback.  This assumes however that the BPM system can be optimized and improved in fairly rapid cycles as social networks operate in real time. 

Combining BPM and social networks in this fashion, Social BPM can provide a closed feedback loop to enable organizations to effectively improve and optimize their business processes.

 

 

Customer Obsessed

The recent post by Josh Bernoff, Welcome to the Age of the Customer, made some compelling points describing the industrial age we’re in now.  In their report, they assert that companies must be customer obsessed and companies that don’t adapt and change will likely fail.

“A customer obsessed company focuses its strategy, its energy, and its budget on processes that enhance knowledge of an engagement with customers, and prioritizes these over maintaining traditional competitive barriers.”

Being customer obsessed and focused has been our mantra at Interneer from the day we founded the company.  In fact our core principles are to provide outstanding customer service that are measured by high responsiveness and taking ownership of our customer’s issues as if they were our own. We act with integrity and commitment, measured by producing high quality work and delivering above and beyond with each project no matter how large or small. Interneer delivers intuitive solutions, measured by customer feedback and adoption all while enjoying and taking pride in our work, which is evident to our customers.

It’s always interesting to read an article that describes what I consider to be common sense and the only way to do business, as the wave of the future.  I hope other companies follow suit!

 

Training

Are you looking to learn about BPM or freshen up on how to use the platform? Or maybe you want to build your knowledge on macros or how to build more complex workflows?

Training is an important resource to have while using a business process management software platform. Interneer believes in providing the best quality training and support so you can gain hands on experience to start automating your business processes and workflows. Free training webinars covering introductory topics to advanced concepts are available every month in a series of instructor led classes. In each information packed webinar trainings you will learn how to create a new workflow application. Webinar classes can be taken as often as needed with prior registration and are open to all.

All webinar trainings are completely free! We highly encourage anyone interested in learning about BPM technologies and how it can apply to your organization to sign up risk free. Please register at http://training.interneer.com.

What are Professional Services?

Now that you have a Business Process Management software solution in your hands, some of you may be asking yourselves now what—where do I begin?

Maybe, it’s simply that you need assistance in documentation and or maybe you’re researching your options in BPM solutions and inquiring about what services are offered.

Professional Services provide customers and partners with the expertise and skills to assist in implementing your BPM solution. Professional Services are available to assist with implementation including requirements, design, configuration and testing. In addition, Professional Services can assist with installation, support, training and documentation.

Please visit http://www.interneer.com/products-services/professional-services/ for more information.

Social BPM

On behalf of guest author, Yegin Genc:

Integrating social network software into business process management platforms, aka Social BPM, has been one of the new hot topics in the BPM blogosphere. As social networks began to pervade into our personal and business lives, such talk was inevitable. But whether Social BPM is going to stick around is not as clear. I believe the root of the doubts is in the conceptual differences between the two phenomena. Social networks enable people to interact and produce information and work within a free form, with unstructured activities. They are geared towards improving the effectiveness of communication during collaboration. BPM, on the other hand, is mostly about providing structure to the way people collaborate so that the collaborations are efficient.

Given such a fundamental difference, it is logical to be pessimistic about the  future of social BPM and argue that the integration of social networks and BPM can only go as far as providing a social network screen within a BPMS system, with some minimal integration points, like showing pictures of people next to their assigned activity, ability to chat with someone live, and seeing whether they are present or not.  Although these features are beneficial and can improve collaboration, they are hardly a revolutionary improvement to BPM capabilities.

In future posts, we will explore some potential ways that Social Networks can make a real impact on BPM.

Business Process Management (BPM) Applied to Research Grants

In the world of research, funding is primarily driven by research grants that are issued by various non-profits or federal agencies. Medical research, science laboratories, engineering and science institutes, and universities all receive funding similarly.  The institution typically applies for a grant and is then awarded or denied the grant based on the merits of its proposal and their reputation.

The process of applying and tracking these grants, the many details, legal agreements, approvals and so on,  requires heavy documentation and constant communication amongst colleagues, is very time consuming and manual.  Workflow management is a perfect solution to streamline these processes.

It can start with automating the process of initiating the grant application, organizing the flow of information and documents between the various people involved and ensuring the deadlines are met through notifications and reminders.  In addition, business process management can provide visibility into the status of every grant and its corresponding approvals, streamline the process of receiving legal sign offs and help finalize details of receiving the awards.

With business process management the process becomes clear, accountability increases through visibility of all steps in the process, award rates increase and funds are received much faster.

BPM = Optimized Processes

As I reflect on my days working for a Fortune 500 company, I realize now how beneficial BPM software would have been to that kind of business and to my own individual success. My days at the company involved many long frustrating hours producing manual work while running into consistent bottlenecks.

In my sales and marketing position, one of the responsibilities I dealt with was handling 100+ distributor contracts, compensations and co-op marketing accounts.  This involved heavy paperwork and workflows. Work was performed manually, utilizing Excel spreadsheets and Access databases to complete ad hoc reports and more.

I remember one specific case every month, the distributors within the network were entitled to subsidies. In order to process those I had to pull ad hoc reports from an Access database then analyze, print and route them to the designated personnel for approvals in various departments including our own. Since this was all performed manually, paperwork was regularly lost and distributor subsidy payments were consistently late sometimes months behind.

Looking back now, if I had access to a BPM Platform at the time, I would have simply created and customized my business workflow, with the appropriate users and activities.  All of the users would have then logged into the same platform, submitted their reviews and approvals, and the system would have kept the process flowing and alerted users to ensure adequate response times and accuracy. A BPM implementation would have helped optimize and improve communication, productivity, accuracy and time.

Are you part of “Shadow IT”?

The concept of “Shadow IT” users emerged about five to ten years ago as more and more business users began to support their application needs bypassing IT, performing functions such as modeling, reporting, data management and even application development using desktop tools like spreadsheets and access etc. These users are not officially part of corporate IT but can be as much as 78% of the total IT staff, according to a study conducted by Booz Allen Hamilton in 2003.

The appeal of desktop tools is that they are accessible within the business user’s control and enable them to create value and respond to particular business process needs quickly.  Unfortunately, often times these tools cannot be shared, don’t scale to the enterprise and are not database-driven.  They also lack distributed reporting capability thus contributing to information overload. The data is often duplicated or spread across many different computers through a plethora of spreadsheets.  Users relying on these tools find it difficult to enforce accountability or gain visibility into the current processes within the organization. 

BPM platforms emerged as a solution to this problem; empowering the business user to maintain control over their business process automation needs while enabling IT to maintain control over the platform and infrastructure.  This provided a win-win solution for both groups.  However, many BPM platforms grew too complex and are firmly now IT tools primarily requiring scripting, coding, advanced database design knowledge – skills sets that are outside the typical business user reach with some minor features for modeling.  Today we now see a split in the BPM market between solutions that are targeted towards business users with simplicity and speed of implementation; while others are targeted towards developers with complex integration and scripting.

It will be interesting to see how the split evolves.