Business And IT Impact Of BPM Excellence

A business process, at its highest level, is any activity that helps an enterprise achieves its goals. Packaged and industry-specific applications form the transactional backbone of most critical business processes; however, these are only part of the story. Enterprises need many other processes to meet their goals, and often some processes not tackled through packaged apps are approached in tactically haphazard ways. Over time, these processes become bloated with non-value-added activity. In short, they become untamed. Enterprise architecture (EA) gets dragged reluctantly into the support and enhancement of these untamed processes. The results are not surprising. Weak architectural approaches spawn niche products, and the use of various business intelligence (BI), business process management (BPM), business rules, collaboration, and enterprise content management (ECM) tools that are applied like Band-Aids work chaotically to make untamed processes more efficient. This report describes the benefits firms see when they take a more systematic approach to these key processes and outlines important business case metrics.