Forrester Business Tech Forum Stresses Lean BPM
Posted by Margaret Dawson on October 9, 2009
Forrester’s Business Technology Forum 2009 in Chicago just wrapped up, and the main message was clear: Companies have a great deal of pain around business process management and in trying to implement ”lean” processes. This year’s theme was all about “Lean”, which Forrester states is the new business technology imperative.
In a nutshell, a “lean” process is one that:
1. Eliminates Waste and reduces costs
2. Adds Value to the organization
3. Increases Flexibility for the business
To get there, all the analysts stressed that IT has to become BT (business technology). And as we’ve all heard for years now, IT better make sure it’s not only playing nice with the business side of the house but showing true business impact (as in revenue) with any technology or process it implements.
My favorite keynote was easily the one given Friday morning by up and coming analyst Clay Richardson, who worked with others at Forrester to create a Lean Performance Indicator (LPI) scorecard to see if your business processes are bloated, anemic or lean. In addition to Richardson doing a great job of using humor to keep our attention at 8:30 in the morning, his presentation included some helpful tips and ways to figure out how well your organization is managing business processes and how to get more lean.
What I found interesting is that most of the IT execs here are focused on business processes and BPM (business process management) within the enterprise. But as good as any business process is behind the firewall, if you can’t extend that process to your business partners, suppliers, customers, etc., you’re still only capturing part of the potential value. Some analysts clearly get this and incorporated the necessity of improved customer experience with the business process improvement. It reminded me of something Jeff Bezos was always saying when I was at Amazon.com — ‘ if it isn’t improving the customer experience, it’s not a priority.’
So companies should focus on processes that improve the customer experience and, at the same time, differentiate you from the competition. The question is how can you extend your processes to that customer or partner community and further leverage the money already spent on the countless ERP, CRM, SCM and other applications.
Selfishly, I find this a perfect case for B2B integration, and specifically, integration with a SaaS-based solution. Hubspan’s integration platform can take that business process and automate critical processes across your entire supply chain, customer base, logistics providers and other strategic parties, without any changes or additional investment in your applications or middleware.
It will be interesting to see if the “Lean Business Process” discussion continues to evolve and embrace the cloud, SaaS, SOA and integration.
Tags: business process automation, Clay Richardson, Cloud-based Integration, customer integration, Forrester, global supply chain, Hubspan, Integration Platform, SaaS, SOA
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