Business Process Management Helps Companies Work Smart and Fast

BALTIMORE – The economic decline is continuing to pummel hospitals in the form of reduction of reimbursements, rise of uninsured patients and decrease in number of elective procedures for insured patients.

In this environment of balancing shrinking budgets, staff reductions and patient safety, hospitals are more open to generating efficiencies using IT. Process improvement is a good investment in times when companies need to improve efficiency.

According to an article in Heath Care IT News, "Streamlining administrative processes while continuing to invest in patient care is not mutually exclusive. Business process management, or BPM, can provide a clear view of processes across all systems, including billing, accounting and other legacy systems. "The end goal is to improve business processes running on software, doing things in the smartest and fastest ways, which automates processes, reduces resources and increases accuracy.

An additional benefit of implementing BPM is being able to document and track data in real time, which improves the process for compliance certification and audits."

By using IT to help their businesses fix process issues, C-level hospital executives can "step up and be the champions," especially in this economic environment.

No World Borders' team of BPM experts have cross-industry and cross-technology experience to help your company improve operating efficiencies, reduce cost, and improve process.

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Innovation is a Team Sport

Indifference, hostility, and isolation are among the major obstacles to a healthy innovation environment

BusinessWeek said it well. "In most companies, just about all the cards are stacked against the nurturing of innovation, especially the kinds of new ideas and disruptive innovations that generally lead to major changes in the marketplace and within the business.

Following are some of the behaviors observed in companies throughout the years that have convinced us how difficult it is to create an environment in which innovation can flourish.

Indifference

While just about every CEO and senior executive of a company pays lip service to innovation, many do not really mean it. They mouth the words—it would be politically incorrect not to embrace innovation—but they do little beyond that.

That's not because they are not good, smart, and highly competent people. It's just that innovation is not a part of their DNA. The majority of executives make it to top positions by being very good operational managers: meeting sales objectives, improving products and services to keep up with competitors, supporting existing customers and acquiring new ones, managing mergers and acquisitions, achieving the required financial results quarter after quarter, and so on. These management jobs are very tough and getting tougher, given our rapidly changing, fiercely competitive, global business environment. Being a good manager takes very hard work, attention to detail, and organizational discipline.

But as executives rise up in the organization, other skills become increasingly important. They need to transition from being a manager to being a leader.

Management is about business results and processes. Leadership is about people. The key quality you need in good leadership is passion—the urgency to attack and solve the complex problems that all organizations face. To do so, you need to be surrounded by highly talented people, and you need to find a way to transmit your passion to them, so they will buy into your vision of the future, perform at the highest possible levels, and come up with innovative solutions to the challenges of achieving the vision.

When skies are blue, a company might be able to cruise along with top managers who are indifferent leaders. Such managers are typically executing tactical, incremental strategies where the critical ingredients are good, disciplined management as well as operational excellence. But once the skies begin to darken, as they inevitably do, such managers will get into deep trouble, and often end up taking a business down with them. Their most talented innovators and strategists, those whose skills are now badly needed to help set the business on the proper course, have either long departed or become so disenchanted that they have nothing left to give.

Hostility

In general, managers who do not actively encourage new ideas and innovations in their organizations do so because of indifference. They will typically listen politely to your new idea, provide some encouragement, and offer good advice. If they are being honest, they will tell you they barely have the time, energy, and budget to help much beyond a pat on the back now and then.

But some managers go beyond indifference. Their initial reaction to any new idea is negative, if not downright hostile. This is particularly true if the idea comes from someone outside their own organization.

Some of them also exhibit characteristics that many of us would associate with being a bully. Typically, the corporate bullies I have met have achieved their high management positions because, despite their poor interpersonal skills, they are very good at other parts of the job. Sometimes, they are excellent innovators themselves, but given their autocratic tendencies, innovation for them is a one-man or one-woman show. They tend to be poor team players: Collaborative innovation is not for them.

Such hostile behavior is hugely detrimental to a healthy innovation environment. People championing new ideas, especially if they are potentially disruptive new ideas, are going against the grain of what the business is currently doing. Rejection is painful, especially coming from people in positions of authority. Senior managers can nurture those new ideas through positive words and actions, or they can stop them on their tracks by being overly negative and combative.

Isolation

I strongly believe innovation is a team sport. The 2004 National Innovation Initiative report observed that innovation "is multidisciplinary and technologically complex. It arises from the intersections of different fields or spheres of activity." That is why it often takes a group of people who are not only highly talented but who bring together diverse skills and points of view in order to successfully tackle the kinds of complex problems we face in the 21st century.

But perhaps even more important, a collaborative approach to innovation helps provide the energy and emotional support that new ideas need in their very early stages. New ideas are almost always rough and ill-formed at first. In my experience, nothing works better than bouncing ideas off other, supportive people. This back-and-forth dialog is crucial in helping to shape the idea into something more concrete, understandable, and actionable. Then it is more ready to face the tougher challenges and criticisms from line management and others in the organization.

That is why isolating people in organizational silos is one of the biggest obstacles to innovation. Companies that are serious about innovation do everything possible to break down silos and encourage communication and collaboration across the organization and beyond.

Fostering innovation is very hard, especially if the innovation is disruptive in nature. A spirit of innovation and collaboration does not come naturally to an organization. For such a spirit to take hold, it must become an integral part of the company's culture. None of this is easy, but it is what a company must do if it truly wants to create a healthy environment in which innovation can flourish.

Inspired by BusinessWeek and Irving Wladawsky-Berger, who retired from IBM last year after a 37-year career at the company. He is presently working on technology and innovation with IBM and Citigroup, and is a visiting professor at MIT and Imperial College.

The Long Tail of Process Automation

The phrase The Long Tail was first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article^[1] to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com or Netflix. Businesses with distribution power can sell a greater volume of otherwise hard to find items at small volumes than of popular items at large volumes. The term long tail is also generally used in statistics often applied in relation to wealth distributions or vocabulary use.

The long tail theory can also be applied to process automation and process management. Organizations have thousands of interconnected business processes. This patchwork of process and logic includes human tasks as well as computerized activities that access and update enterprise systems and applications. While all of these processes work collectively to support the goals and strategies of the organization, enterprise software has typically been targeted toward high demand process that are roughly similar across the organization (CRM, ERP, HCM, sales force automation, etc.) For each process automated in one of these enterprise software applications ther are hundreds of highly customized, unique organizational processes that are nota dequately addressed by these systems. These processes are often being managed through e-mail, MS Excel, faxes and telephone calls or handled by custom coded software written by external consultant or internal IT organizations.

The Internet reduced inventory and distribution costs making selling niche products profitable. Similarly, BPM (business process modeling) helps meet niche requirements in areas where historically, enterprise software has fallen short, making the automation of all types of processes more affordable and cost-effective.

Commoditized processes such as order fulfillment and invoicing commonly lack variance and often they are the staple of rigid, off the shelf software such as traditional ERP (enterprise resource planning) software.

Typical processes that are roughly similar activities that differ across organizations are require some customization such as capital planning and IT provisioning due to minor variances, they may be streamlined by pure-play BPM software products.

Unique processes require highly specific activities that are organization-specific and often create sustainable competitive advantage, such as strategic sourcing, customer engagement management, have a higher cost of customization, and therefore require specialized knowledge and tools.

A recent MIT Sloan Management Review article, titled "From Niches to Riches: Anatomy of the Long Tail," examines the Long Tail from both the supply side and the demand side and identifies several key drivers. On the supply side, the authors point out how e-tailers' expanded, centralized warehousing allows for more offerings, thus making it possible for them to cater to more varied tastes.

The Long Tail may threaten established businesses. Before a Long Tail works, only the most popular products are generally offered. When the cost of inventory storage and distribution fall, a wide range of products become available. This can, in turn, have the effect of reducing demand for the most popular products.

For example, Web content businesses with broad coverage like Yahoo! or CNET may be threatened by the rise of smaller Web sites that focus on niches of content, and cover that content better than the larger sites. The competitive threat from these niche sites is reduced by the cost of establishing and maintaining them and the bother required for readers to track multiple small Web sites. These factors have been transformed by easy and cheap Web site software and the spread of RSS.

No World Borders BPO / BPM team can help you determine which processes, tools and team members will help optimize your value stream projects. Whether you are optimizing your loss mitigation process in a mortgage servicing company or improving your Internet marketing and lead development plan, we have lived through these projects before and we can add immediate value.