Companies Embrace BPM To Drive Innovation

While many companies are investing in business process management (BPM)
solutions as a way to spur innovation and boost competitiveness, they lack the
best practices, vision and executive sponsorship necessary to realize the full
benefits of these investments, according to a survey by Virtusa Corp

As per a new survey by PRTM and Virtusa Corp, while most companies often have
basic elements of BPM in place-including systems for collaboration, workflow and
business rules, most of these elements are in early stages of deployment and are
not yet optimized. Infor­mation sources are often scattered across the
organization, and workflow and collaboration systems cannot keep pace with a
company's changing business processes. In addition, companies generally use few
metrics or data standards to support measurement of performance improvement.

“While many of the survey respondents have made some investments in BPM
solutions, few have put in place clear objectives or roadmaps to support these
initiatives,” said Kevin Nguyen, Principal, PRTM. “The lack of a clear vision
and strategy is often compounded by inadequate executive sponsor­ship,
governance and resources to support BPM projects, placing these investments at
risk.”

To gain insight into how companies are using BPM to drive innovation, PRTM
and Virtusa surveyed 125 product and service companies, including those in the
manufacturing, communications/technology, banking, financial services and
media/information industries, and conducted follow-up telephone interviews to
further explore respondents' current BPM and innovation initiatives.

Target areas

The survey found that target areas of BPM deployment span the entire
enterprise. “While we expected respondents to list conventional areas for BPM,
such as product and service platform management, custo­mer relationship
management and internal operations, many participants expressed strong interest
in areas related to product innovation,” added Nguyen. “These include new
product development, idea management, and product portfolio management-all
emerging areas for BPM applications. These surprising findings validate our
hypothesis that BPM is becoming a powerful tool for enhancing innovation agility
in enterprises today.”

While more than half of the companies participating in the survey said they
use or plan to use BPM, those that do, lack a clear plan for deploying it. Only
15 percent of the companies reported having a vision for BPM with stated goals
and objectives.

“In our experience, to get the most value out of a major new initiative like
BPM, companies need to integrate clear business improvement goals into a
multi-year roadmap,” said Marc Hebert, Chief Marketing Officer, Virtusa. “This
roadmap should set formal targets for technology and business capabilities, such
as increased revenue from new products or improved design collaboration with
external partners. Without it, companies are hard pressed to define and measure
success.”

Lack of resources

Many of those interviewed indicated they are investing in BPM initiatives.
However, those projects typically lack senior executive sponsorship. Only 24
percent of respondents reported having a VP or a senior executive in charge of
BPM.

BPM projects, surprisingly, are also found to lack strong governance
controls, with over 40 percent of respondents saying there is no clear
decision-maker in place to manage BPM programs.

About 72 percent of study participants have in place some form of IT-enabled
collaboration capability. However, follow-up interviews showed that few of these
solutions work well.

Most were knowledge-management or file-sharing systems that are poorly
struct­ured, have inadequate version control, and are discon­nected from
relevant processes. Best practice companies use colla­boration solutions that
are aligned with business processes and well integrated with workflow and the
document lifecycle.

Over half of the respondents deploy BPM solutions to facilitate innovation
agility. A variety of software vendors were named without any clear winner, with
IBM having a slight lead over Savvion, Pegasystems, and Oracle.

DQC News Bureau