Business Process Management Implementation

Adopting and adpating to the new revolution of conducting organizational functions is a challenge. A tool being relied upon by many is business process management. BPM represents the future of business technology. But which business process management software yields the best on-going benefits, efficiency and dynamic organizational behavior? Adopting the best practice approach both in software applications and in BPM deployment improves the chances of successfully utilizing BPM and seizing the benefits of reengineering an organization for performance in the new world.

Best Practices

 

Tried and true methods for implementing processes, for example, represent the best processes to implement BPM. Other examples include best practices for CRM, human resource development or organizaitonal development.

Best practices are instantly adaptable solutions. They optimize processes to meet primary objectives, eliminating the need to "re-invent the wheel. They are important in change management, because best practices enable organizations to be rapidly responsive given the current economic climate and the related rate of change. BPM best practices enable organizations to meet multiple challenges in an organized fashion. Rather than resorting to management by crisis, companies can navigate through difficult issues and develop strategies. By leveraging best practices from  existing business process management deployments, organizations can more easily:

• Develop objectives for BPM applications
• Support implementation of BPM
  
• Respond effectively to BPM feedback
  
• Adopt an ongoing dynamic amethod to business performance
• Create a goal-oriented management focus throughout the organization
• Set responsibilities and expectations for planning and goal achievement
  
• Manage operational goals and communication in line with key underlying objectives
• Promote transparency and accountability
• Formalize assumptions on the environment and its drivers

BPM practices are not just tools for competitiveness; they are effective methods for achieving efficiency in all areas, even uncompetitive or non-revenue-generating ones. Using BPM best practices in payroll, for example, helps to process paychecks efficiently, without making a company more competitive in market terms. By keeping costs low through efficient system design, though, helps to boost the bottom line.

 

BPM Software Applications

 

The core processes of BPM, IT and best practices give organizations control over the lifecycle of processes to achieve business agility. For example, many IT software solutions use the best practice approach for process support. Employing a formal standard for best practices to optimize corporate goals empowers IT departments; they can instantly access adaptable solutions and service organizational needs to provide customer value. Best practices in IT provide organizations with a logical framework to:

• Automate and streamline tasks
• Align IT to business processes
• Employ a framework for establishing and following policies, steps and rules
• Act on findings

Best practice BPM software also enables organizations to:

• Manage IT departments at consistently maximal efficiency levels to meet key goals (e.g., cost efficiency and profit maximization)
• Create IT department accountability for business performance and results
• Measure business performance and effectiveness
• Isolate and underline areas to implement cost cuts, enhancing quality and growth
• Provide customers with helpful information
• Locate procedural loopholes and superfluities
• Organize IT needs optimally with maximal efficiency and control

Implementing BPM Using Best Practices

 

To maximize BPM's potential, companies must implement business process management throughout the enterprise. Best practice BPM implementation strategies are relevant to any solution or application, regardless of software type or industry. Essentially there are four inter-related components in the strategy to successful business process management implementation. These are:

1. Conduct a test-pilot run
2. Involve other key departments
3. Plan for organizational change
4. Establish core expert group

 

Best Practice #1: Conduct a Test-Pilot Run

 

The best practice approach involves identifying one departmental project in line with key corporate objectives for the pilot run. This project can vary from one organization to another, depending on where its critical focus lies. For example, the help desk in an insurance company might focus on improved customer service, or a mortgage company trying to gain a competitive edge by fast processing times might focus on processing new mortgages.

The pilot run establishes the benefits of BPM implementation. By quantifying the findings and extrapolating them enterprise wide, companies can establish the benefits that BPM could yield to the entire organization.

Best Practice #2: Involve Other Key Departments

The best practice approach simultaneously involves professionals from other key departments so that they can:

• Benefit from the same solution
• Access interdepartmental process efficiencies
• Cut implementation, support and training costs

Involving other departments in the pilot run ensures that the same effort is invested in BPM implementation across the entire company.

Best Practice #3: Plan for Organizational Change

BPM implementation affects many aspects of the organization. From finance to service integration, companies must:

• Analyze, find and assess the level of change
• Determine how the change will be implemented
• Determine how systems will be used forthwith

BPM Best Practice #4: Establish a Core Expert Group

Concentrating expertise from IT departments, systems integration staff and key business users within the organization into a core discussion and action group brings shared experiences and fosters best practice discussion. The core group is also responsible for BPM:

• Evaluation
• Research
• Implementation

Conclusion

 

BPM best practices have much to offer companies, giving them a leading edge in difficult market conditions. Companies using best practices in BPM while focusing on key processes can navigate any economical climate. Using BPM best practices, companies that work this way remain consistently agile. In essentially what is a top-down management approach, these organizations meet the ideal objective of best practices and BPM; namely, maintaining continual flexibility, innovation, accountability and competitiveness to meet key corporate objectives.

Manuel Castells’ The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture

In dealing with and managing the impacts of the revolution one must attempt to understand the drivers behind the change. So much of gaining understanding relating to this complex topic lies in letting go of past concepts previously relied upon and at the core of many of our belief systems. Dr. Felix Stalder (See  http://research.openflows.com), an expert in a variety of issues surrounding technology and its connection to society, published these reflections on Dr. Castell's book Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture http://annenberg.usc.edu/Faculty/Communication/CastellsM.aspx . It is enlightening literature for people to begin to understand the truly mammoth ground swell of change occurring at present and evolving more rapidly than many can grasp. Academic in nature, the observations shared by Stalder and Castell are enlightening indeed.

The Network Paradigm: Social Formations in the Age of Information by Dr. Felix Stalder

 

The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. I. M. Castells (1996). Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 556 pp., ISBN 1-55786-617-1

The Power of Identity, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. II. M. Castells (1997). Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 461 pp., ISBN 1-55786-874-3

The End of the Millennium, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Vol. III. M. Castells (1997). Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 418 pp., ISBN 1-55786-872-7

Manuel Castells’ The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture (1996, 1997 and 1998) is unrivaled in ambition: to make sense of the global social dynamics as they arise out of a myriad of changes around the world. It is a cross-cultural analysis of the major social, economic and political transformations at the end of this century. It is presented through interrelated empirical case studies whose number and variety are truly enormous–the bibliography alone fills 120 pages–and threatens to overwhelm the reader at times. Nevertheless, the trilogy is prodigious and sets a new standard against which all future meta-accounts of the Information Society will be measured. It will be indispensable reading for anyone interested in a grand narrative of the present.

Castells’ main argument is that a new form of capitalism has emerged at the end of this century: global in its character, hardened in its goals and much more flexible than any of its predecessors. It is challenged around the globe by a multitude of social movements on behalf of cultural singularity and people’s control over their own lives and environment. This tension provides the central dynamic of the Information Age, as "our societies are increasingly structured around the bipolar opposition of the Net and the Self" (1996, p. 3). The Net stands for the new organizational formations based on the pervasive use of networked communication media. Network patterns are characteristic for the most advanced economic sectors, highly competitive corporations as well as for communities and social movements. The Self symbolizes the activities through which people try to reaffirm their identities under the conditions of structural change and instability that go along with the organization of core social and economic activities into dynamic networks. New social formations emerge around primary identities, which may be sexual, religious, ethnic, territorial or national in focus. These identities are often seen as biologically or socially unchangeable, contrasting with the fast-paced change of social landscapes. In the interplay of the Net and the Self the conditions of human life and experience around the world are deeply reconfigured.

The trilogy concludes more than a decade of research, spanning from new social movements and urban change (Castells, 1983; 1989) to development of the high-tech industries and their organization into technopoles, clusters of high-tech firms and institutions of higher education, such as the Silicon Valley (Castells and Hall, 1994), to comparative analysis of the fastest developing countries in the Asian Pacific Rim (Castells, 1992), to research conducted in Russia before and after the 1991 revolution and the demise of the Soviet Union.

It details the diversity of social change interlinked around the globe which created the Information Age and integrates the often seemingly contradictory trends into a comprehensive analytical framework. The theoretical abstractions are developed through a broad and detailed empirical analysis "as a method of disciplining my theoretical discourse, of making it difficult, if not impossible, to say something that observed collective action rejects in practice" (1997, p. 3). This makes his account highly accessible and richly textured.