White Papers

According to AMR Research, “Microsoft^© SharePoint^© is the fastest-growing product in Microsoft’s history, gaining more than 100 million client access licenses in a few years.” With its broad and growing presence, SharePoint has become a commonly accepted tool for end users, and is driving the demand for strategic applications that combine traditional content management with business process management. This whitepaper discusses how SharePoint can be transformed beyond content management and simple workflow and utilized as the cornerstone of an organization’s strategic process improvement project.

The business process management (BPM) value proposition goes far beyond simple process automation,but unfortunately, that is where many organizations end their efforts. And while automation certainly provides tremendous efficiency, productivity, and reduced cycle time benefits, automation alone cannot unlock the more significant benefits that advanced BPM deployments offer. Enterprises with greater BPM maturity (often derived from establishing centers of excellence) can take advantage of many more features — including integrated process modeling, model-driven development, monitoring, collaboration, and optimization features — that leading BPM suite (BPMS) tools provide. To capitalize on the transformational power of BPM, develop and implement a plan that advances your BPM capabilities. Specifically, move from process automation to address (in increasing order of value) IT agility, process compliance and consistency, process insight, and, ultimately, business transformation. Information and knowledge managers who use BPM software should follow Forrester’s maturity model to help advance their thinking about BPM benefits and deployment goals.

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.

Archstone is a leading provider of apartment-style dwellings, with real-estate holdings in 13 states, including 180 communities and 2,600 associates spread across the United States. Stuck using manual processes, associates relied on mountains of paper forms to handle a vast majority of the company’s on-site real-estate operations. Business managers recognized that the 1,300-plus paper forms their leasing associates used every day were artifacts of an inefficient process and launched a business process improvement initiative to drive waste out. This project opened the door for a business process management (BPM) solution from Appian that eliminated the inefficiencies of working in paper and unclogged communication channels. Key lessons learned: 1) Communicate, communicate, communicate to get user buy-in, 2) the business can successfully drive BPM with minimal IT involvement, and 3) forms shouldn’t drive the process design — think process first.

When familiar patterns are disrupted, it seems that the disruption always comes from outside of the most likely candidates for change.

This 70-page market report features an exhaustive body research from the 6-month survey of 500 companies currently using or evaluating business process management, the 70-page market report covers topics including: success factors and current practices in establishing a BPM Center of Excellence, reported Return on Investment (ROI) rate and coefficients, spending plans and priorities, and BPM vendor rankings.  Click Here to view the Table of Contents and List of Figures

Forrester Research examines Lombardi Software’s latest offering Blueprint, an online process modeling and discovery platform that blends. Forrester discusses the role of Blueprint's collaboration and documentation capabilities, tailored orientation to support geographically dispersed process discovery teams, as well as its ability to bridge the frequent gap between process discovery and execution.

Listen to  Dennis Byron, Analyst, ebizQ, and Dennis Wall, VP, Software and SaaS, Fujitsu, discuss the different scenarios where using a BPM platform in the cloud makes sense and contrast it with scenarios where keeping process automation on premise is more prudent.

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.