Process Management
The Ideal Meeting Place for Business and IT
Popular open standards are essential, not because they fulfill the latest buzzwords recommended by technologists, but because the alternative—proprietary process or project environments, no matter how attractive initially—will have more difficulty surviving the test of time. Of course, this advice is true of almost any software investment, but it is vital with process technology because any force that pushes IT or business into separate tools reinforces the long standing cultural gap and runs counter to the collaborative benefits process management can yield.
The pace of change in software development tools, driven especially by open source projects, such as Eclipse, is a fracturing force when it is applied against proprietary vendor environments. The vibrant open source community evolves new features literally by the day, not the quarter. Developers must gravitate to environments that deliver the best concentration of value for time spent. Many tools, whether commercial or open source, already offer Eclipse plug-ins or intend to in the foreseeable future. Process software that does not interoperate well with popular development standards risk becoming tools used only by business people.
Eclipse has won the development environment war for a number of reasons, but one is especially important in process management. It provides a proven, shared environment for projects of all types, not just coding. Version control of project timelines, managing requirements documents, forms design, database administration, report development/analysis and many others are all convenient today from within Eclipse.
Business projects will increasingly involve process modeling and related techniques, and therefore, increasingly integrate business with IT. This is especially true for business managers who can accept the shift toward more formal thinking about business as a set of systems, as well as IT personnel who can clearly see opportunities to help the business from a systems perspective. As the skill sets between business and IT merge, with process in the center, Eclipse provides a natural environment for both roles.
Same Process, Different Perspectives
Even within a shared environment, business and IT each provide a unique contribution to the process design. Since the process model serves as the basis for future improvement, business analysts can contribute cost, risk, performance standards and other metrics as part of the standard template for the process.
Because the process model is a detailed blueprint for each possible occurrence that will occur day to day, these business parameters are used later in reports to gauge the performance of each occurrence. Similarly, IT has technical details—such as server addresses, application names, objects and data layers, which must be precisely laid into the same blueprint.
Consider the example of a new financial account opening process, performed by financial institutions hundreds or even thousands of times every day. A new account form comes into the organization via the Web or a paper scan. Some forms contain information triggering a review by a department head for VIP accounts, while others go straight to automated validation. The business analyst contributes to the process model in order to differentiate cost metrics from the original processor of the application versus that of the department head. In this case, the cost metrics become part of the process model.
The IT role contributes to the shared model by specifying the exact applications screens and other technologies involved for the original processor and department head. Both roles contribute to a rich, shared process model of the business from two perspectives. The overall process flow, main decision points, activity names and other important structural features are the same for IT and business.
Even the straight-through, or "pure," system activities may have cost or other business expectations specified. Typically, the IT person specifies the detailed handling of the automated parts, including how to recover if an interface fails to function, as in the case of a B2B partner. In a process-centric environment, even something this technical might solicit some input from the business side, since the recovery process itself probably has some business impact worth understanding. The process management mindset and related technology makes these new levels of IT and business interaction feasible.
Crossing a Trusted Bridge to New Places
There are various reasons most organizations still struggle with communication between business and IT. Perhaps the first step forward is to acknowledge that solving old problems usually requires new ideas and time. The powerful effects of process management revolutionized manufacturing and supply chains in the 20th century. Now, the focus has turned to the knowledge-driven business office.
If business and IT do not collaborate to continually improve their shared view of the processes that comprise operations, they will still try to achieve their goals, but probably in more isolation and each with a less complete view of the whole. Process management is not easy, and though technology is required, it is not a panacea. However, not using process management as a bridge between business and IT is a prescription to stay trapped in the past.
As increased competition and risk intensify in business, the ability to consistently improve interactions and holistically connect the entire organization is becoming more critical. Achieving personalized customer interactions while following carefully considered best practices is a major factor for business success in the 21st century. Many adopters of the process-management discipline, empowered by appropriate technology, are finding process management the ideal place for business and IT to meet for a breakthrough.
With annual revenue exceeding $4 billion, SunGard is a global leader in software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector. SunGard also helps information-dependent enterprises of all types to ensure the continuity of their business. SunGard serves more than 25,000 customers in more than 50 countries, including the world’s 50 largest financial services companies. Visit SunGard at
www.sungard.com.
SunGard EXP helps empower large organizations to capture, manage, store and deliver content in order to automate workflow, enhance processes, track productivity, promote collaboration and deliver time-sensitive client communications. EXP features industry-leading technologies to create a comprehensive, single-source solution for the enterprise content management industry. Offering single department to enterprisewide solutions, EXP uses a proven implementation methodology that helps ensure the predictability of results. Visit EXP at www.sungard.com/exp.