Grounded Approach
Disabused of the wild promises of the business process re-engineering (BPR) brigade that dominated the 1990s, many organisations are with the ABS in striving anew to streamline their processes and make them more efficient. And they are redesigning key processes to incorporate Internet and Web technologies.After surveying businesses worldwide in 2001, US IT consulting firm Cutter Consortium says companies are saving money and streamlining business processes in order to do more with less during the economic slowdown and to ensure they survive and thrive in the Internet economy. In the 1990s, BPR was touted around the world by gurus like Michael Hammer and James Champy. Some companies used their theory to improve costs and efficiency dramatically; many more failed. Now the term "re-engineering" has fallen from favour, but organisations are showing strong interest in BP redesign or BP improvement, buoyed by the availability at last, via the Internet and e-mail, of the tools that can support the changes Hammer and Champy were on about . Today, says Cutter Consortium senior consultant Paul Harmon, author of Who's Profiting from Business Process Redesign, leading companies are positioning themselves to reap the benefits.
"With the fall of the dotcom companies, business process redesign has re-emerged," Harmon says. "In effect, established companies are trying to figure out how they can take advantage of e-mail, the Internet and the Web. They realise that they aren't going to change their companies into dotcoms. Instead, they are going to revise their business processes in incremental ways to take advantage of new technologies."
In a sense it is those technological advances that are at last freeing organisations from looking at IT solutions purely in technological terms, says Toll Holdings solutions development manager Andrew Rossington. Toll, Rossington says, purchases "incredibly complex and powerful" products to make life easier as it strives towards presenting a single face for the highly diverse group, and believes it is not that difficult for skilled people to use such products to put together. But Rossington says too many companies have neglected the analysis of the process in their drive to get solutions out to customers (see "Keep on Trucking", CIO February).
Rossington concedes in the B2B space or the integration space that effort becomes complicated by a factor of 10, because the organisation must consider not only business processes dealing with other business processes, but systems dealing with systems as well. But he says complexity should be no barrier to diligence in this area.
Frith says there are two main drivers for the current interest in business processes.
1. Organisations today have made significant capital investment in technology platforms, for example the enterprise-wide implementation of a workflow engine to drive costs out of an operation. Automation, however, will not achieve the step change in cost reduction benefits most organisations are seeking if existing processes are simply automated.
2. To ensure the return on investment is commensurate with the outlay, organisations are having to take another look at whether policies and processes are suitable. This means redesigning process flow into standard streams and identifying common process functions, simplifying business rules and identifying exceptions.
Organisations like Toll are responding to both. And very often, the CIO must drive the new thinking.
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