A company’s strength is generally a reflection of how well it is run. In today’s economy, when so many companies are experiencing financial challenges, it behooves them to look at ways to improve internally. In other words, their objective is to work smarter and be, or become, more efficient. This includes, for example, how effectively they manage their business processes and how they streamline and automate their workflows. While these two areas have become increasingly more important to understand when faced with employee cutbacks or lower revenue, they also represent excellent opportunities to improve performance. Automating workflow and business processes also will have an immediate impact on the bottom line. This article discusses what an IT department can do to support the company’s mission and help it compete more effectively in tougher economic times.

Management theorist Peter Drucker believes that process improvements transform business and lead to innovation, and they represent “the change that creates a new dimension of performance” for organizations. Business Process Management (BPM) empowers companies to align their internal processes so they provide more value to both their internal and external customers—and better fulfill the customer’s needs. Moreover, well-designed business processes become increasingly valuable in a tough economy.

A t Gartner’s 5th Annual BPM Summit in February 2008, keynote speaker Janelle Hill reflected on BPM utilization during a recession. She predicted that BPM is more likely to increase during a tough economy as it helps organizations operate more effectively and efficiently. While BPM encourages and supports innovation, it’s the dual benefit of efficiency and effectiveness that is considered the greatest “value add” from deploying BPM within an organization.

It came as no surprise to many business leaders and analysts who had already begun to feel the downturn, when the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) confirmed that the U.S. has been in a recession since December 2007. The 2009 New Year’s ball had barely dropped in Times Square before analysts started predicting which business trends would help companies succeed during this protracted recession.

Streamlining Operations

With so many external economic factors outside their control, what can companies do to ride out the recession and potentially “even” thrive? They can redirect their energy toward automating and improving internal processes. How can they do that?

Let’s talk about one such example. We’ll call our hypothetical company Better Widgets; however, the rest of the example is based on real-life examples. At Better Widgets, the IT department deals with change on a daily basis while providing essential services that support the organization and maintain its competitive advantage. IT addresses functions such as:

• Installing and implementing hardware, applications, and configuration changes
• Overseeing employee access to applications and resources
• Enforcing and maintaining internal security and auditing policies
• Managing compliance documentation.

IT, like many other departments, is measured on how well it improves productivity. When the information flow across the organization is manual, IT can (and does) face many additional challenges. At Better Widgets, the IT staff works diligently to:

• Ensure new employees have access to applications
• Ensure employees have appropriate levels of security
• Provide a consistent approval process for processing requests (hiring, purchase orders, leaves of absence, expense forms, etc.)
• Coordinate requests regarding facilities, vendors, and suppliers. They strive to eliminate errors and miscommunication and be as responsive as possible to internal requests.

Leveraging Competencies

By automating its processes, IT can improve its own departmental productivity, as well as impact the productivity of the departments it serves—and the customers Better Widgets seeks to retain. Because automation provides a more consistent method for routing and tracking the flow of requests and information, when BPM is applied to IT processes, there’s immediate visibility into:

• The status of requests
• The location, storing, and accessing of information required for company audits
• Inventory, outstanding orders, and new equipment requests.

By improving the business processes of one core group— in this case, IT—Better Widgets can operate more effectively, efficiently, and competitively.

BPM has been defined as a “method of efficiently aligning an organization with the wants and needs of clients. It … promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology.” The results of an AIIM MarketIQ report for third quarter 2008 indicated that only 25 percent of survey recipients believed BPM was understood and embraced overall within their organizations. They considered this lack of knowledge as the biggest hurdle to BPM adoption.

Other factors inhibiting an overall BPM strategy include:

• No clear BPM strategy in place
• Difficulty implementing BPM across technological and intra-organizational boundaries
• Internal politics and scope creep related to BPM initiatives
• Lack of leadership for BPM strategy.

Achieving Operational Excellence

In a recent posting on the Intelligent Enterprise blog (www.intelligententerprise.com), contributor and independent systems architect, Sandy Kemsley, concluded that successful BPM implementations are dependent on “… leaders with a vision, a disciplined culture, BPM expertise and standards, as well as the tools.” Kemsley pointed to another key strategy requiring business leaders to make the same level of contribution, thus “bringing the ‘B’ back into BPM.” Likewise, Clay Richardson, senior analyst with Forrester Research, states that, “In today’s economic climate, BPM teams are being pushed to meet the growing demand for process improvements that impact the bottom line.” Richardson recommends that companies match their process improvement requirements to the right BPM tools—and connect process improvement initiatives to key value drivers within your organization.

The impact BPM can contribute to a company’s operational effectiveness can be felt throughout the organization. Interestingly enough, as BPM initiatives mature, efficiency gains become the baseline and innovation the next target.

If you’re being encouraged to implement BPM at your company, please remember to look for a department that provides tactical gains, and does so within the company’s strategic vision. ME