The Time Has Come for Enterprise Business Process Management

Computerworld - Businesses small and large are looking ahead to a good year. IT executives reportedly have a more positive outlook than they did in 2004, in part because of analyst forecasts for steady economic growth, higher productivity gains and spending increases in areas such as technology and the workforce.
As a CEO and someone who has been watching businesses for more than four decades, I offer two additional forecasts for consideration:
Forecast No. 1: 2005 will be the year when companies finally realize the power of technology to create real business value. Technology is currently used to drive operational enhancements, saving money or time. But this year, because companies are planning to invest in IT again and because CIOs are more business-savvy than ever, I'm betting that technology will finally be used to improve business performance and service quality -- by perhaps an order of magnitude beyond where we are now.
How? By enabling managers to have complete control across the enterprise and by viewing and managing the business processes that dictate how well business is run, customers are served, and products and services are innovated and brought to market. Which brings me to ...
Forecast No. 2 Enterprise business process management (BPM), the practice of dynamically aligning processes across an enterprise while using technologies to provide visibility and management at any point in the process life cycle, is a concept whose time has come.
Although some early-adopter companies in industries such as financial services already know about the benefits of enterprise BPM, most companies have only been dabbling in improving their business processes. While they have experienced cost savings or improved cycle times as a result of having visibility into just how weak some of their processes are, they have really dealt with only the individual components rather than the entire life cycle of the process.
For example, companies have used Six Sigma and other quality-centered initiatives to analyze and map out a process across a company for regulatory reporting and compliance or to identify problem areas. However, they lacked the implementation options or technology know-how to properly address the shortcomings that were identified.
The reverse also happens. Some companies have deployed a technology to address a particular problem within one department without mapping the entire process across departments or doing an analysis that could allow them to address and improve the process in a more complete way for the benefit of the whole company.
Enterprisewide Process Management: The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of Its Parts
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