Da una ricerca sulle Banche di SAP

In an interview with The Banker in September 2007, Thomas Balgheim, the head of SAP's global banking line of business, mentioned the lack of progress in banks' ability to execute on strategy. In the 2007 EFMA/SAP research, 46% of the responding banks said that they believe that their IT systems fall short in supporting the achievement of business strategy. That's a significant increase from 2004, when 36% thought their systems fell short. But banks expect to do better: The 2007 study found that only 6% think that their systems will fall short three years from now.

The 2004 study found that banks had high expectations for their systems at that time, and yet, their dissatisfaction actually increased in the ensuing three years. There are a variety of reasons that might explain that disconnect. For example, we might assume that:

* Banks weren't able to execute as planned.
* New types of customer behavior had a strong impact on the services delivered by the banks, which required banks to adjust their IT support.
* The market environment changed more, and in more unexpected directions, than banks thought they would.

Looking at banks' actual situation in 2007 and their plans for 2010, the research shows that:

* Banks think that the gap between expectations and reality will largely disappear due to recent adjustments to IT services.
* The momentum of market development could be built into the business strategy on top of the 2004/2007 gap resolution.
* Preparations made between 2004 and 2007 have not yet contributed to IT service, but should do so in the 2007-2010 timeframe.

Meanwhile, IT is being called on to support business targets that have changed, and continue to change. For example, banks now tend to see cross-selling as key to growth, as opposed to the past emphasis on mergers and acquisitions. Customer-focused strategies aim to understand and manage customer behavior and the customer's perceptions of the bank, which supports cross-selling, retention and new customer acquisition. These factors have helped bring analytics and business warehouse support to the forefront-something that wasn't widely foreseen in 2004. Banks are also interested in the synchronization of customer engagement across different channels, which requires the reduction or elimination of siloed data management.

The research also provides a sense of what banks need to do to support their business goals, and to keep the gap between IT expectations and reality from growing larger. For example, it seems clear that strategies built entirely on in-house systems don't guarantee competitive advantage. Meanwhile, standard applications are less cost-intensive in terms of development and maintenance, and can typically be implemented fairly quickly. They also don't tie up as many internal resources, so banks can focus more on innovation. Most of the respondents said they are open to using standard software, especially in human capital, supplier management and financial processes.

As they consider these issues, banks should look at the experience of other industries that have made the transition to standard software and used it to achieve greater efficiency while preserving the ability to create competitive advantage. Banks face significant and growing IT issues, and the lessons learned in those industries could help them move more quickly from strategy discussions to execution.

Trend di mercato

Le iniziative per migliorare i processi di business stanno diventando una priorità per manager di business e IT
Quello del BPM è un mercato in forte crescita: IDC stima che tra il 2006 e il 2011, il suo valore aumenterà di dieci volte, passando da 500 milioni a 6 miliardi di dollari. “Ci aspettiamo una crescita rapida del mercato sia a causa dall’ampliamento delle implementazioni vecchie che dalle nuove”, spiega Maureen Fleming, program director for business process, integration and deployment software di IDC.
Dopo il forte consolidamento avvenuto nel 2006 il numero dei fornitori di software di BPM è passato da 150 ad appena 25 nel 2007; e i grandi vendor di software si stanno sostituendo ai piccoli 'pure play' con un'offerta che unisce il BPM a collaborazione, portali, gestione dei documenti, SOA, architetture event-driven e business intelligence.
Il BPM è sempre più usato per gestire processi che abbracciano diverse applicazioni: la ricerca di BEA dimostra che il 65% delle implementazioni di BPM integra tre o più sistemi e il 60% dei clienti completa la prima implementazione in meno di sei mesi.
Tra i fattori critici di successo, indagini di mercato e ricerche sui clienti mostrano che le sfide organizzative - come le politiche interne, la gestione del cambiamento, la mancanza di competenze degli analisti business e l’allineamento organizzativo - pesano più dei cambiamenti tecnici che possono ostacolare l’implementazione BPM.
La principale evoluzione tecnologica del software di BPM è rappresentata dall'integrazione di strumenti di collaborazione e social computing, che permettono agli utenti di partecipare alla realizzazione, gestione e monitoraggio delle applicazioni come mai prima d'ora. Le principali soluzioni BPM supportano oggi funzioni per i processi collaborativi e sociali che oggi sono dispersi in e-mail, documenti e discussioni.
testo ripreso da CW

BPM Basic for Dummies

Che il BPM stia diventanto un fatto assodato è dimostrato anche dal fatto che è appena uscito negli US il libro "BPM Basic or Dummies" .

Sostiene Gartner

"BPM (Business Process Management) is THE big idea for 2008 and beyond.
Why?
Because enterprises that put processes front and center consistently outperform those that don't. They're quicker to adapt to changing business conditions.
They're more responsive to their customers.
And they're seizing opportunities that are lifting revenue and profitability to a whole new place"

TeamWorks in ALLIANZ

Dal summit Gartner di Las Vegas ecco il riassunto dell'esperienza ALLIANZ ,scritto da Sandy Kemsley:

Presented by Tim Rolfing IT Director of Allianz of America Shared Services on how they use (Lombardi’s) BPM. Allianz Life is a 3000-person life insurance organization that’s part of the huge Allianz group of companies.

Their initial drivers for BPM date from 2005:

• The ability to scale efficiently, based on projected increases in premiums and employees.
• Leveraging common processes, since they had a number of duplicate functions due in part to their growth through acquisitions. They also had 500-700 systems that were in use throughout their organization that needed to be rationalized.
• Need for transparency into operations, both to have a view of the end-to-end processes in order to look for areas of process improvement, and for real-time operational process monitoring.
• Employee job enrichment, by automating some of the routine tasks done by people, thereby allowing people to focus on customer-centric activities. This also allowed the human-facing tasks to be done anywhere in the world, certainly a bonus for a company that’s part of a global organization.

They’ve implemented an impressive number of processes in a short time:

• Securities application processing
• Money processing for applying premiums
• Life insurance underwriting
• Survey response tracking
• New (insurance) product implementation, which improved the cycle time to implement a new product from over 50 days to 12 days, and removes IT from the critical path
• Application document search, sort and prioritization within specialty queues to allow SLAs for specific applications to be met; failure to meet the SLAs can result in financial penalities
• Service recovery and customer complaint handling, including some historical analytics to determine if these have detectable patterns, such as product or broker

They have a number of other ones lined up for implementation in 2008

He ended with some lessons for success:

• Look for small processes with significant impact
• Plan for a deployment time frame of no more than 60-90 days
• Keep the first pilot project simple
• Follow an iterative methodology rather than trying to boil the ocean in the first version

They keep the BPM project teams small, and have found a great deal of improved efficiency through their implementations. They have a BPM center of excellence that they use to train the business side. The technical teams have done the Lombardi technical training, and found that the week-long training was adequate for their needs. He wouldn’t talk openly about their vendor selection process, but stated that there were significant differences between BPM products. The business owns the process and maps it down to a specific level of detail (in Blueprint, I believe) before turning it over to IT who “move it over to the BPM tool” — presumably, they’re using Blueprint for modeling by the business, which still requires export/import to get to Lombardi’s TeamWorks execution environment, so round-tripping would definitely be impacted.

Allianz presenta la sua esperienza con Teamworks al Gartner Meeting

Come sapete in questi giorni a LasVegas si sta svolgendo il "BPM Gartner summit" .

Sandy Kemsley sta seguendo in real time le sessioni sul suo blog.

Qui l'intervento di Allianz.

Referenze Teamworks