Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Businesses Today: Change and The Need For Adaptability

The businesses environment today is becoming more complex, more competitive, fast-paced and unpredictable. To compete and succeed, businesses need to create synchronized business and IT resources that must be flexible to accommodate change and adapt to the change quickly. The biggest challenge facing enterprises today is how to deal with the speed and magnitude of change. Change is becoming the norm and not only the exception anymore. Business agility and adaptability is a requirement.

The business challenges make enterprises must have ability to respond with flexibility and speed to new opportunities, external threats, customer demands, competitor actions and regulatory changes. This requires getting the right information at the right time to the right person, to enable better business decisions quickly. Delivering this information requires an integrated enterprises infrastructure that leverages existing IT resources and enables new capabilities and functionality to be added quickly. The infrastructure must be a flexible and agile environment that can capitalize on change in both business and IT. Today, businesses have to become adaptive and responsive.


To stay competitive, enterprises need to make changes quickly and efficiently, with different perspective:
  • A retailer requires real-time supply chain, lower inventories, stronger order fulfillment, more inventory turns and increased sales.
  • In the financial services sector, needs to consolidate its information system to enable them provide and share a real-time services into cash flow, their customers can exploit to see investment opportunities and avoid unforeseen shortfalls, and enhanced self-services.
  • A communications provider needs to deliver many of new, personalized, content-rich services to improve customer satisfaction and build customer loyalty.

How to get there: BPM

So, how quickly can your enterprise identify and respond to change, and turn it to your advantage? To response the question, enterprises need to integrate and synchronize business and IT resources to capitalize on change. With the right technology choice, IT can support businesses to face the challenges. IT will enable them to improve performance, increase agility, increase revenue, reduce cost of operations, and ensure security and continuity of business operations. Enterprises need a technology that can enable them to become more adaptive and agile. Business Process management (BPM) system is the solution. BPM is a technology to orchestrate and optimize flexibility of business processes along with the overall integration strategy of the enterprises.

According to Janelle Hill, a Gartner analyst, BPM is seen as a way to improve corporate performance goals by making the key processes better. These include:
  • Model breadth and depth of interdependencies between workers, systems and information
  • Integrating and automating the interdependencies for process optimization
  • Coordinating and managing end-to-end, cross-functional processes, not application silos
  • Adjusting organizational structure and incentives to foster new behaviors.

Business Process Management (BPM) can cut the costs of doing businesses by increasing the automation of IT. BPM cut costs by between 7% and 8% and saving U.S. businesses $117 billion dollars a year on inventory costs alone, according to The Yankee Group. BPM is the key to the success of giant enterprises such as Wal-Mart and Dell. They use BPM technology to support and improve their daily operations. BPM technology can make enterprises flexible in a rapidly changing world, and creating to closest thing to an adaptive enterprise. The key to an adaptive enterprise is the effective management of collaborative business processes throughout their life cycles. Experts agree that BPM systems must have four tenets:

  • Modeling, graphically defining or designing the structured definition of each business process
  • Integrating, connecting process elements so users can exchange the information to achieve goals
  • Monitoring, controlling the performance of their current processes and the performance of personnel who are executing these processes
  • Optimizing, analyzing and monitoring a business process, to look for inefficiencies, and it enable users to take actions quickly and to change the process to improve effectiveness and efficiency.

By implementing BPM, enterprises gain a comprehensive view of them. Easy access to business-relevant information gives enterprises the insight they need to respond rapidly and effectively to opportunities, threats, and changes. Enterprises can integrate and optimize end-to-end business processes that span traditional IT systems' boundaries. A successful BPM implementation will enable enterprises to optimize all its resources, including people, processes, assets and technology, and gives the enterprises a significant competitive advantage.

Conclusion

In a rapidly changing world, across every industry, businesses environment is becoming more complex, more competitive, fast-paced and unpredictable. To compete and succeed, businesses have to become an adaptive and agile enterprise that can accommodate change and adapt to the change quickly. To compete and win, businesses need technology that can help them to meet today's business challenges. BPM is the solution. BPM is a technology to orchestrate and optimize flexibility of business processes along with the overall integration strategy of the enterprises. By implementing BPM, enterprises gain a comprehensive view of them. Easy access to business-relevant information gives enterprises the insight they need to respond rapidly and effectively to opportunities, threats, and change. Enterprises can integrate and optimize end-to-end business processes that span traditional IT systems' boundaries. A successful BPM implementation will enable enterprises to optimize all its resources, including people, processes, assets and technology, and increase the enterprises’ competitive advantage.

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