Managing Information to Create Business Success
How Information-Based BPM Works With Content Management

First, some definitions: Business process management (BPM) is a discipline that confronts inefficient, rigid and error-prone enterprisewide business processes. It provides techniques, methods and tools to model, automate, implement and optimize these processes to improve operating effectiveness and agility and bolster business results.

Enterprise content management (ECM) is a discipline to manage and publish structured and unstructured content created by humans and applications in a meaningful way. It uses strategies, methods and technologies to capture, archive and deliver content according to an organization’s business processes.

BPM and ECM must work together to bring agility to the business, flexibility to changing environments and the ability to manage information to create business success.

The Need for Change
The market for technology is characterized by: pervasive networks, providing information anywhere and at any time; the emergence of new, disruptive business models; intensifying competition; and customers who require instant information. The ability to consistently manage and deliver information to create positive customer experiences has become a differentiating factor. The management of information must deliver positive customer experiences across employees, functional departments and interaction channels; it should be a focus of the strategy, not a byproduct of it.

Unfortunately, typical business environments present obstacles: vertically driven, stove-piped applications and business processes; independent and isolated business units; a variety of business models; extended value chains; multiple networks and platforms; and many customer touch-points—in short, a recipe for complexity. Add to this the imperative to leverage existing IT assets, minimize risk in transformation and the desire for incremental system evolution versus “rip and replace,” and it is no surprise that business and IT executives need to manage this complexity. But they are overwhelmed.

Businesses need to align their business strategies with technology in a holistic fashion. The core of any enterprise is the processes that drive day-to-day operations. These create information and inevitably lead to some form of output (whether it’s electronic- or paper-based).

Most core business processes cross departmental, organizational and application boundaries. Consider the fulfillment phase of an order-to-delivery process: Even if the ordering process executes to the satisfaction of the customer, an inferior delivery fulfillment process (delayed order acknowledgement, incorrect billing, poor documentation, etc.) will lead to an unhappy customer, who is likely to dispute the bill, repeatedly call or email customer service and possibly seek a new vendor. At the heart of BPM lies the idea that the more flexible, clear and manageable the enterprise’s business process modeling, design, implementation, execution and monitoring, the greater the likelihood of success toward an organization-wide, information-based, customer-focused strategy.

ECM, in concert with existing IT infrastructure, can unify technology with information-based business processes and workflows to fill voids and cross gaps to deliver information and create an integrated customer-focused environment.

So Why Isn’t BPM Working?
Businesses are managing processes and embracing ECM methodologies. Why then, aren’t they achieving greater success? To begin with, some organizations are managing a legacy of business processes and technologies that were poorly designed or were designed under different business assumptions. Error-prone, manual, costly, highly constrained, business processes and information management systems are, unfortunately, common for many organizations.

Businesses must have processes, methodologies and technologies that are dynamic enough to adapt to an ever-changing environment. Business processes and technologies must work well today and in the future. In a typical organization, the knowledgebase of currently implemented business processes is limited. Core business processes are often not documented and archived. In many cases, business processes were implemented hastily, often only to automate or streamline activities within a specific organizational unit or line of business... and not people. Compounding these factors is the fact that the IT systems that automate legacy processes are complex, hard-wired and were never designed to adapt to changes in business processes and information management. It is often the case that a core business process is buried in the code of some well-intentioned or home-grown application, its logic accessible only by technical personnel and modification constrained to this proprietary logic.

Enterprisewide processes, such as managing structured application content (utility bills, ATM receipts, system reports) and unstructured content (text documents, still images, video files) which extend across organizations are becoming more and more common. This has created another element of complexity; enterprises are now struggling to break down existing line-of-business silos and eliminate redundancies created by multiple deployments of similar (and often identical) processes and technologies. The end goal is to simplify business process management, provide a consistent view of their operations, enhance the customer experience, increase business process reusability and reduce operational costs. Expanding to include partners, suppliers, distributors and the like requires modification of existing systems by extending their capabilities to support them. Last, but not least, most business processes involve human interaction. Many business process automation systems are designed to support processes that are either largely human-driven (such as business workflows) or completely automated (such as back-office IT processes). Business processes that include a combination of both—which most successful, customer-focused organizations do—and do not include enterprise content management methodologies and tools are not easily managed and often fail.

Achieving Information-Based BPM
By analyzing the challenges outlined in the previous section, one can quickly identify a number of key requirements:

• An environment for modeling and designing enterprisewide, information-based business processes;
• An engine that orchestrates and executes information-based business processes across departments, lines of business and applications;
• Ability to gain insight from and about implemented information-based business processes—monitor and collect business-level metrics on how processes are performing and what can be improved; and
• Flexibility to modify processes and workflows to address key issues and new business requirements, and react to the insights gathered through process-based analytics.

Information-based business process management (I-B BPM) helps organizations analyze, capture, model, design, automate, implement, control, review and optimize enterprisewide business processes and information workflows that involve both people and systems. Deploying I-B BPM is best viewed not as a one-time, big-bang project, but rather as an iterative process to continuously monitor, analyze and fine-tune as the business environment changes and as process-efficiency metrics are accumulated. This approach gives organizations and their information-based business processes an opportunity to grow and expand simultaneously.