Gaining the edge

Cutting costs and improving efficiency have long been the watchwords of modern business and to support these drives, a host of technologies have sprung up and been embraced by companies across the globe - to varying degrees of success. Of these, business process management (BPM) has been quietly evolving and today has the potential to transform businesses in ways it was unable to a few years ago. Firms are not only now concerned with cost and efficiency, but must also have the ability to be more agile if thay are to seize and hold the competitive edge.

Until now, BPM has been thought of primarily as a way of generating greater efficiencies in a business and, if carried out correctly, increasing visibility through understanding business processes. This has worked largely by consultants mapping and documenting processes and then identifying methods of improvement. Such an approach has tended to look at specific areas of the business or else been carried out in a more general way across the business as a whole.

However, the new breed of BPM products and approaches recognise that BPM needs to reach far deeper into an organisation if it is to deliver maximum results. Processes should be viewed as an organisation's core assets because, while an organisation needs to manage its knowledge to stay in business, the competitive edge is measured by what it does with that knowledge more than just what it knows.

There is no competitive advantage in having the same processes as everyone else. The first users of packaged applications from suppliers such as Peoplesoft and SAP may have had an advantage, but now every major player has something similar because in a sense they represent broadly generic processes. The real trick of BPM is to focus on unique processes and use the new developments in modelling, simulation, deployment, integration and analysis technologies to improve these processes. However, to make sure that a sustainable competitive advantage is gained, such process improvement needs to go a step further.

But what does process improvement mean, and what are the benefits of using it? First, it means improving process efficiencies and ultimately costs. And second, it means improving business process integration, which ultimately provides greater client responsiveness. In addition, it is about improving business process control and transparency, which reduces the risk exposure of them not being done appropriately. And finally, it means improving process flexibility and agility, which drives superior competitiveness.

Perhaps the most important aspect of these is the final one because ultimately it is an organisation's agility that allows it to go in the direction that executive strategy has dictated.

So what is meant by business process agility? This involves considering what many management gurus describe as the key resources assets of any organisation, such as the vision, leadership, management, people and infrastructure. The truly agile organisation is one where people and infrastructure are fully aligned, executing and delivering on processes according to leadership and strategy, and more importantly can immediately re-align whenever changes are made. The latest business thinking describes such organisations as being highly dynamic and in a sense virtual and almost amorphous in their make-up - something which can be described as the fluid organisation.

However, that is rare. While changing market dynamics dictate changes in direction and strategy all the time, people are somewhat slower on the uptake, and systems are notoriously difficult and costly to change. So those organisations that do this better have perhaps the greatest business asset of all. Without agility, businesses are forced into a reactive stance, relying on luck to ensure they are not left behind in latest market trend.

Asset delivery

So how can enterprise-class BPM aid agility and deliver such an asset to businesses? A truly agile enterprise is marked and measured in two ways. First, by the speed with which it can re-align, re-organise or change processes, as a result of a change or tweak in strategic direction. And second, by the quality of those changes.

By ensuring an organisation's human and system resources are kept in-synch with the company's direction, BPM can provide management with the confidence that their key resources will not be a restraining factor on their overall company flexibility.

In today's business environment, as technology, processes and business goals have become more closely tied than ever before the evolution of BPM as a business discipline has allowed for the management and delivery of an agility that permits organisations to attain and retain their competitive edge. It also guarantees that the next few years are going to be an interesting time indeed for industry.