White Papers

Change is the only constant. So said the ancient Greeks over 2,500 years ago. To be more precise, Heraclitus is famous for his doctrine that change is central to the universe, stated simply in his famous saying from approximately 500BC, "You cannot step twice into the same river." If anything, most of us would now observe that not only is change all around us but the pace of change is itself accelerating. The time available to respond to change or to effect change seems to be shorter and shorter.

Organizations of all types are today under increasing pressure to adapt frequently and in aggressive timescales. So why is this pressure increasing? What is agility and why is it imperative? How can your organization become more agile?

21st Century Pain Points: It seems the more technology transforms the way you run your business, the higher the bar of customer expectations is rasied, and the faster the pace of change accelerates.

 

Research firms and industry analysts have written extensively about the importance of enterprise agility.  Agile solutions and enterprises can adapt to change, market trends and evolving standards and regulatory requirements at a greatly reduced expense and time to market.  In the case of independent software vendors (ISVs), agility is absolutely critical.

After all, ISVs must address the issue of agility internally as well as on behalf of their clients.  ISVs seek agile strategies and solutions that can quickly adapt to changing market and customer requirements. Achieving this kind of agility, however, is not so easy when products are mature and rooted in older, traditional development methodologies (which is the case for many ISVs today.)  Where does one start? Who or what must start it? What exactly does agility accomplish in the end?  These are just a few of the many questions that organizations face as they consider this quest for agility, as well as what enterprise agility means to ISVs today, what experts have to say about agility, plus the human and technology resources required to achieve it.  In addition, special attention to BPM technology and its role in enterprise agility.

 

Two recent Forrester surveys highlight the increased
adoption rate of business process management (BPM) technology and
processes within enterprises. And while both surveys confirm that BPM
has achieved mainstream status in the business world, the success rates
of BPM implementations continue to vary considerably. BPM centers of
excellence (COEs) are playing a key role in determining the level of
enterprise satisfaction with these efforts, and enterprise architects
should actively support the concept and operation of BPM COE efforts to
help their enterprises achieve higher levels of BPM project success.

In these lean economic times, business process professionals watch their budgets get slashed, while at the same time, the hunger for business process management (BPM) and process improvement continues to accelerate across the enterprise. To meet these conflicting demands, business process leaders should audit BPM projects to eliminate common budget-busters that cause projects to become bloated and unmanageable. Successful teams have zeroed in on Lean strategies that eliminate unnecessary waste typically encountered during process discovery — the first phase of a BPM project that scopes requirements for the process solution. These strategies: 1) put process leaders in charge; 2) often employ new collaborative tools like Lombardi Blueprint and IBM BPM BlueWorks that streamline process discovery; and 3) embrace Agile approaches like Scrum and Feature Driven Development. The result? Reduced friction among key process stakeholders when defining and prioritizing features for the BPM solution — ultimately yielding dramatic cost and time reductions for process discovery.

Daryl Plummer, Gartner Inc., and Farhat Ali, President and CEO of Fujitsu America Inc., examine the link between business agility and process improvement with innovations in process discovery to jump-start BPM initiatives.

Join Forrester Research and Fujitsu in an interactive discussion around how Dynamic BPM Platforms can help respond to market conditions quickly and continuously optimize processes to help the bottom line in challenging economic times.

In the 1990’s, workflow vendors created quite a bit of confusion in the market when trying to define workflow and how it could best be utilized. Today, that situation is being replicated in the BPM industry. Ask 10 different vendors to define BPM or BPM suites, and you will likely get 10 variations of the definition, even though all vendors use the same basic terminology to explain it. Organizations need help sorting through this confusion in order to discover why a BPM suite is a different, and more important, application for process improvement.

This brief outlines a specific plan and set of tactics for initiating an enterprise BPM deployment. While a complete enterprise BPM roll-out is a multi-year effort, this brief is focused on the plan for the first 180 days of your enterprise initiative.

As market forces continue to change, business leaders are searching for the best ways to deal with uncertainty and deliver improved performance. They realize that human capital represents one of their most important assets. Knowledge work now accounts for 25% to 50% of all work, with the percentage growing. This paper addresses how businesses are taking a hard look at adaptive case management solutions to better serve knowledge work requirements, reaching beyond traditional technology and mindset to be more dynamic and collaborative.