BPM—A Whole New World of Opportunity

In the fast moving world in which we operate, there are many sources of frustration. How many times have you had a great idea, only to be beat out by your competition before you could bring it to fruition? Or worse, watched your competitors take advantage of an opportunity that you did not even know existed. How about losing a customer because you could not address their needs? Or perhaps losing a customer when you did not even know they needed something? Ouch. That is not only frustrating but downright embarrassing.

Innovation, time to market, knowledge, and ability to execute—all of these things differentiate the leaders from the followers. You may have great ideas or great intentions, but without the processes to bring them to fruition you are left with mediocrity.

Organizations spend a great deal of time focusing on improving efficiency and productivity—and I have even written articles in the past on the value of these areas as easy wins for business process management (BPM) initiatives. But there is another focus you can choose to take with BPM—one that will help you become more agile and one that will open up a wealth of new opportunities.

Now You See It, Now You Don't

In the ideal situation, you would have a strong strategy and operational plan in place against which you could execute throughout the year, while at the same time being able to take advantage of new opportunities as they arise without completely disrupting your day-to-day performance. To do this successfully requires several factors and capabilities to be in place: visibility into opportunities that exist in the market; innovative thinking that allows you to create your own opportunities; accurate knowledge that allows you to identify the most profitable opportunities; and the agility to seize and execute on the right opportunities faster than anyone else.

Very few organizations possess these characteristics, and as a result they miss opportunities—lots of opportunities. Every opportunity has a lifespan. This lifespan is the time during which the opportunity provides value. This lifespan is often referred to as the window of opportunity. The majority of high-value opportunities have a very short lifespan and that is why visibility and agility are so critical. You need to first know that an opportunity exists and then you need to be able to very quickly take advantage of it before it disappears—now you see it, now you don't. Missed opportunities are a constant source of frustration for executives and management teams in any industry.

The key to seizing opportunities versus missing them lies in visibility and agility. First you need to know that an opportunity exists, preferably before anyone else discovers it (visibility); and second, you need to be able to quickly respond to the opportunity and adjust your business processes to take advantage of it (agility). Business process management technology combined with a process-centric view of your operations can help you transform your organization to be more forward-looking and better equipped to respond quickly to market changes, issues and opportunities. At a high-level, BPM helps you achieve this through a combination of three things: 

• Process automation and integration allow you to close organizational and system gaps by streamlining a process from end-to-end and removing inefficient silos. Closing these gaps increases collaboration and also opens up broader visibility across the process so that people are able to monitor the big picture at all times on a real-time basis. This creates a whole new level of visibility and empowers people to take advantage of this increased knowledge to proactively respond to issues and opportunities. It also allows for faster response times so that decisions can quickly be transformed into action.
• Process analysis and flexible design tools allow business managers to report on and learn from actual results at both the process level as well as the line-of-business level. The close tie that a BPM suite affords between process and analytics can be leveraged to drilldown from a dashboard level into the process detail behind a critical key performance indicator (KPI).This insight allows business managers to identify areas of the process that are inefficient, but it also empowers users to identify new opportunities for leveraging processes to improve overall performance. Flexible process design tools allow business and IT users to easily update and apply process adjustments on an almost real-time basis. This blending of analytics and process design results in greater intelligence as well as the agility needed to implement rapid change.
• Process simulation capabilities allow business managers and analysts to model process changes and simulate results. As part of a BPM suite, the simulation is based on actual process data and incorporates actual process flows, roles and performance metrics, thereby ensuring an accurate picture of the situation and the impact that a change in any of these areas will have on overall organizational performance. Process simulation in this context allows you to proactively model change to foster opportunities, and it allows you to quickly assess the level of risk associated with taking advantage of a new opportunity. Greater visibility and faster response times help you close the window of missed opportunities. More accurate knowledge about how your organization operates lowers risk and enables informed, effective decision-making. Combined, these capabilities as delivered via effective business process management afford you greater opportunity and greater potential for success.

The Snowball Effect

The ability to take advantage of new opportunities is critical to market leadership in many ways, including financial performance, innovation and strategic advantage. But there is a secondary, even more powerful impact that occurs when you are able to execute effectively on an opportunity: it can create and make available to you a new set of opportunities that may