Mike Slater, UK Country Manager, Software AG, discusses the most common process management pitfalls and suggests strategies to improve business performance

Many businesses are seizing new opportunities by embracing the best of process management. Obstacles to this bright new world typically include misaligned organisation, inadequate technology and outdated IT systems.

These barriers often mean businesses don’t even consider the opportunities and cost savings that can be achieved. Yet, by grasping a few key areas of misunderstanding and addressing them directly, organisations can avoid the pitfalls and achieve tangible benefits.

Business Process Excellence (BPE) is well placed to overcome this lack of clarity and bring closer alignment between business needs and IT, delivering significant rewards.

To stay competitive, today’s CFOs and CIOs need to strike the right balance between ‘keeping the lights on’ and making strategic IT investments. While this may result in a few miscalculations, there are a handful of fundamental, potentially deadly process management mistakes that should be avoided at all costs.

 

1. Failing to put the client first

Improving customer experience should be a top priority for all business and IT executives, yet this is not always the case. To deliver the best possible service, organisations should consider the customer’s needs from the outset. Often, systems are brought in to serve a particular business function without proper consideration as to whether they actually meet customer requirements.

When combined with business-oriented processes, the capability to process volumes of data to understand exactly how and what can be done to improve the customer experience has vast potential. By evolving operations with business process excellence, the organisation will develop the necessary capability to improve how it is perceived.

 

2. Letting chaos rule

Many enterprise architects and business process professionals still don’t accept that today’s business processes are seldom neat, tidy and structured.

Achieving good business insight requires an in-depth understanding of the relationships between process and data. Here, clear processes are vital to defining and extracting business intelligence. Allowing chaos to reign can come at a great cost.

Equally, good process management will allow an organisation to see problems before they appear, enabling it to deliver outcomes, at minimum cost.

 

3. Disjointed relationships

The cloud is nothing new in IT. Many companies have begun to push core business processes into hybrid configurations mixing onsite and offsite solutions to deliver the required capabilities. Many organisations are overlooking the need to maintain intelligent data relationships across platforms.

Organisations need the capability to support business processes end-to-end, independent of the platform style or location.

Without a coherent process view, business break-downs are unavoidable, which ultimately can affect both customer experience and profitability.

 

4. Inappropriate infrastructures

Like any construction, business processes needs a supporting infrastructure. Without the ability to guarantee effective communication between applications, there is essentially no way to decipher business intelligence.

This needn’t mean replacing an existing system but involves utilising a system that sits on top of existing infrastructures, minimising disruption to the existing IT landscape.

Yet whether using old methods or new tools, solving problems by simply ‘building another app’ won’t create the more agile infrastructure needed to track changing business needs.

BPE-driven solutions can deliver tangible value in as little as 60 days. Creating sustainable improvement in flexibility needn’t be difficult or expensive but is about getting the right focus and executing with purpose.

 

5. Lack of good mobile device management

The rapid development of tablet devices, smart phones and the subsequent growth in consumerisation of IT and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) strategies has given enterprises the opportunity to become more flexible. Employees using mobile devices no longer need to be physically present in the office and are now able to work from anywhere, with anyone, from any device.

Managers are able to use mobile devices to access information, perform tasks and monitor processes in real-time. However, there is a potentially serious issue beneath the surface.

A significant role must be played by integration software to ensure that data is transferred efficiently between mobile devices and back-end systems. Missing out this aspect invites workarounds and bypasses of process constraints, ultimately resulting in loss of control, management visibility and reducing the ability to react to business conditions.

 

6. Misguided metrics

Good systems and processes are essential when gathering company data, extracting intelligence and using it to manage the business.

Metrics must be consistently monitored to ensure the business is continually improving and that targets and objectives are met.

Here, process visibility is key to address issues and potential problems. Achieving effective visualisation shouldn’t involve wading through log files or endless Excel spread sheets.

Information should be simply presented via dashboards that are up-to-date and by raising issue alerts automatically on events of business significance.

 

7. Limiting continued process improvement

It doesn’t matter how good the design of the IT application or business process management solution is if the staff members working with it are untrained. Process intelligence is the next logical step following the introduction of business process management, providing essential business insight by measuring how the operation is actually performing.

By identifying problems, process intelligence creates the foundation for identifying a solution, be that through process change increased supporting context information to the users or with additional training.

Through the correct technology, systems and appropriate support, business process management becomes business process excellence and it’s this advantage which will empower an organisation to really succeed in today’s competitive marketplace.

It is essential that enterprise architects and business process professionals have an in-depth understanding of the relationships between process and data and they are equipped to deliver the results needed.

Success requires willingness to listen, insight to understand and flexibility to deliver solutions that meet the needs of the business.