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Contributed on June 24, 2014

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Top Four Ways to Make the BPM Business Case to IT Stakeholders

Blog: OpenText

Date:


Tue, 24 Jun 2014 13:37:00 GMT-05:00


From:


bwick

Does
anyone know the challenges, requirements, and issues you face in
your job better than you do? Who better understands that when you’re
trying to resolve a case, you need to be able to instigate
workflows, collaborate with everyone involved, and be able to
check-in on the status at anytime, anywhere, and on any device?

That means that when it comes time to find a solution for
better process efficiency, it’s more often than not the line of
business driving the initiative. However since one of the biggest
challenges users reported as a roadblock in their BPM
implementation was a conflict over process ownership between IT
and business stakeholders*, it’s imperative that you get equal buy
in from the line of business and IT.

You see, even though organizations of all sizes,
business models and industries talk about the essential nature
of IT and business alignment, achieving that balance is often
easier said than done. Part of the challenge is the growing
complexity and interdependencies of business processes, as
organizations strive to break down traditional operating silos
not only by sharing information but also by creating “cultures
of collaboration” that help integrate and better leverage
essential business processes.

In particular, enterprises want to use technology to
unify and strengthen the three pillars of their organization:
people, processes and information. The successful integration of
these three elements is at the heart of long-term, demonstrable
business performance. Another key concern  IT and
business leaders have with BPM is how best to utilize it in
order to go past nice but unspectacular incremental improvements
in favor of disruptive, revolutionary enhancements that help the
organization achieve competitive advantage.

Despite the desire to do more with BPM, according to a
recent study from Forrester Research, 59% of enterprise
architecture respondents use BPM not for strategic requirements,
but rather for finding bottlenecks, refining processes and reduce
operating costs, which is not a great way to get a good ROI.
Instead, the right solution needs to have significant
functionality, high performance and can be deployed in a variety
of architectural designs for maximum flexibility while still
meeting the need for speed and agility.

Four key
components to look for in your BPM solution:

• 
  Packaged applications
  
  : Look for applications that capture best
  practices and domain-specific components, and package them
  into turnkey applications that require only configuration and
  light customization to meet the need of an organization.
• 
  Solutions
  accelerators: By
  utilizing prebuilt and reusable components, developers in the
  line of business or IT can build applications using
  coarse-grained service components and prebuilt application
  elements, reducing the time to value and utilizing service
  delivery best practices built into the components.
  
• 
  Model-driven development
  :
  Robust modelling environments to
  develop applications using BPMN-based process modelling tools,
  or CMMN-based case modelling (the emerging standard for case
  management modelling), are also important. The platform should
  also include a service-oriented architecture-compliant
  framework so developers can create, utilize and reuse Web
  services in the development of applications, and also leverage
  the enterprise service bus functionality for more complex
  integration work that goes beyond typical Web services
  integration.
• 
  Code-level
  development:
  The solution should provide
  resources and support for developers that includes code
  snippets, comprehensive libraries, reusable elements and
  services, and developer communities for
  developers to engage with others.

With these tips in mind, you’ll not only be able to find a
BPM solution that fits your needs, but also one IT can stand
behind because of its flexibility to constantly adapt to changing
requirements without reinventing the wheel each time. It’s also
important to note that the way applications are developed is
usually a mix of these for different solutions, and sometimes even
within the same solution, so it’s imperative to have all of these
available to you. Now you can work with IT and find a solution
that evolves with your organization, instead of working against
it.

Want to learn more about how to make the business
case for BPM? Download the Tech Target white paper,
“
Selling the Benefits of
Business Process Management for IT and Business
Stakeholders ” today.

*InfoWorld BPM Survey for OpenText 2014