Quelle: CIO, USA
Credit giant TransUnion's nascent mortgage and personal loan businessis growing fast, and Executive Vice President and CIO Len Lombardowill not let technology slow it down.
"We don't want any software package putting restrictions or dictatinghow our business can act," says Chicago-based Lombardo. "Our productguys are very creative, and there's so much competition out there.We've got to be able to react."
Lombardo's need for speed and flexibility rings true in nearly anybusiness. Ideally, companies should be able to quickly automate theirbusiness processes while also being nimble enough to optimize thoseprocesses over time. In practice, companies often find themselvesbound to the business rules hard-wired into their enterpriseapplications because modifying the software is so difficult.
Business process management (BPM) software seeks to turn the tables.BPM tools are designed to let CIOs and end users take aprocess-centric approach to IT projects and to track the effectivenessof those corporate processes. With many companies doing the sameamount of work with fewer employees, business process efficiency maywell be the next stage of business-IT innovation.
Process Improvement by Design
Although workflow-oriented software has been around for years, a newgeneration of BPM software is spreading beyond the leading-edge userset. Founded in 1992, the Business Process Management Group--aU.K.-based user organization--boasts more than 2,500 members, 200 ofwhich joined during the past few months.
Vendors of many stripes--integration middleware, workflow andenterprise applications--are converging on BPM as well. Because somany software products now include embedded workflow engines, aprecise definition of BPM is tricky. But the most common feature setincludes a business-process-modeling tool, a run-time engine toexecute and monitor processes, and a development environment withconnectors to enterprise applications.
Many experts argue that BPM is the killer application for Webservices. Once Web services becomes more commonplace, end users andbusiness analysts without extensive training should be able to designand build process workflows that tie together, or "orchestrate,"several prebuilt services. IT organizations, relieved a bit of theapplication backlog, will then have time to focus on IT infrastructureand system-to-system process automation--or at least that'sthe hope.
But perhaps most compelling, BPM technology is versatile enough forall manner of applications. Just ask Shell Oil.
Shell U.S. Tax Organization in Houston wasn't in the market for BPMsoftware when it had a mandate to cut its monthly financial reportingtime in half and provide a clear trail in case of audits. The coreproblem--common to large enterprises--was the heterogeneity of thesystems involved, including geographically dispersed divisions runningprimarily SAP R/3 but also J.D. Edwards and Oracle Financials, saysJohn Antaki, former technology adviser for the Tax Organization who isnow a managing partner with Matrix5 Consulting in Houston.
Shell found that TeamWorks, the BPM software from Lombardi Software,could handle the enterprise application integration capabilities foundin many middleware products but didn't require extensive coding--theapplication was up and running within three months. And because theteam could quickly prototype business processes with the tool,financial analysts and IT people focused more on evaluating how theyworked, rather than the technical underpinnings of thesoftware.
"The key is the business process," says Antaki. "The effort is indeciding which area of the business process you want to automate andfinding the bottlenecks that have the greatest challenges."
Shell recouped its $1 million investment in fewer than six months andhelped derive more value from its $1 billion SAP investment, Antakisays. Now the company is looking to roll out BPM software in otheroperations, including exploration, refineries and financial services,he says.
Beyond automation, examining business process in a BPM implementationis also a significant benefit, according to users. "The tool andmethod force you to look at processes and understand how they work,"says Philip Parker, CIO and vice president of Addison, Texas-basedUnited Surgical Partners, a chain of surgical facilities. "As aresult, you tend not to automate what exists; you tend to ask, Whatdoes the process need to do?"
United Surgical has implemented one BPM application using softwarefrom Fuego that normalizes data from multiple financial reports. Goingforward, Parker expects his IT and business analysts will spend 80percent of their time documenting and analyzing processes for newapplications, with the remaining effort to be split between tuningexisting processes and creating new components for the BPMsystem.
Old Wine, New Bottle?
Business process automation in software, of course, is nothing new.But the convergence of many vendors around BPM is creating a hotlycompetitive market.
A flurry of pureplay BPM startups have cropped up, such as Fuego,Intalio, Lombardi Software, Q-Link Technologies and Savvion. Workflowproducts from companies such as FileNET and Staffware, originallyoriented toward document management and end user workflow, are nowbeefing up their wares with better connectors to enterpriseapplications.
Meanwhile, integration middleware vendors, such as Tibco Software andWebMethods plus Java application server vendors IBM and BEA Systems,are eyeing BPM as a growth area. Even enterprise application vendors,including SAP and Siebel Systems, are introducing workflow enginesinto their suites.
The crowded playing field makes vendor choice tricky for CIOs. Asupplier's pedigree--end-user-oriented workflow or back-officeapplication-to-application integration--will help determine howappropriate a technology is for a given application, analysts say.Often, IT executives need to choose between a best-of-breed productthat connects well to third-party software or go with a BPM productfrom an incumbent vendor that integrates tightly with a company'sexisting architecture, says David McCoy, vice president and researcharea director at Gartner in Stamford, Conn.
"The problem is you have these vendors who think it's their God-givenright to have process management inside their products, but they'renot doing anything in a standardized way," says McCoy, who predictsthat many companies will have as many as eight different tools thatsupport process management within two years.
To help the situation, numerous BPM and workflow standards have beenproposed by various industry groups during the past year. In July,Microsoft, IBM and BEA threw their weight behind BPEL4WS, or BusinessProcess Execution Language for Web Services, an XML-based language formodeling a business process. Other standards include the businessprocess modeling language (BPML) and ebXML (electronic business usingextensible markup language).
Analysts say that it will take some time for one dominant standard toemerge, and that in the near term it's unlikely that a singlespecification will address all business process standards scenarios,such as internal automation versus business-to-business.
Even with standardization, analysts warn CIOs to pick supplierscarefully and expect industry consolidation. As a sign of things tocome, IBM in September acquired longtime partner Holosofx with thegoal of integrating Holosofx's business process modeling and trackingtools with IBM's MQSeries Workflow and WebSphere applicationserver.
Getting on the Same Page
Considering that most business process modeling in enterprises is donewith Microsoft's Visio diagramming tool, one of the key benefits ofBPM is the ability to create a live link between business models andproduction systems, say analysts and vendors. Having a single businessprocess diagram that both business and IT workers use, either forprocess modeling or coding, helps drive alignment between business andIT. And once processes are effectively documented and reviewed,businesses gain a lot in process knowledge.
"You're actually capturing best practices," says Antaki of Shell Oil'sexperience with BPM. "So if you have high turnover, new people arecoached to perform to the same standard and level as the top person inthe organization. You get a productivity improvement."
In fact, BPM advocates say CIOs should measure return of BPM projectsnot only on reduced cost but on process improvement. "The next levelof business enhancement or rate of return is in process. You've got tobring about change in the process level," says John Koenigs, presidentand CEO at Savvion in Santa Clara, Calif. In effect, innovating at theprocess level makes the CIO a businessperson, says Koenigs.
But despite growing interest, BPM tools still haven't caught onbroadly with end users and business analysts, who ultimately know themost about business processes. Allmerica Financial, an insurance andfinancial services company in Worcester, Mass., decided to avoid theindustrial-strength, back-end process automation offered by manyworkflow and middleware vendors. Instead, CIO Greg Tranter spent about$50,000 building its first application using a desktop-oriented BPMproduct from Nobilis Software. He expects subsequent applications willlet business users automate and modify their own processes withoutIT's involvement.
"What ends up happening is that business users like to changeunderwriting guidelines very frequently if they see things changing inthe market. This lets them change things on the fly," saysTranter.
Not all companies have technically savvy end users or strong processorientation. Still, companies such as United Surgical Partners aremaking the jump to BPM, in part to make the company's existing staffmore productive but also to understand more about their corporateprocesses. United Surgical Partners' Parker is devising a centralizedBPM application to gather key performance indicators from theunderlying systems and provide alerts or reports to topmanagement.
"We're in a constant process improvement model," says Parker. "If westop improving, we're in trouble."