Collaboration is central to the way modern businesses work. The concept of working together to create better products and services in quicker times, complemented with joined-up customer services, is well understood and yet difficult to put into practice.
But while businesses talk of collaborating with each other to create improved outcomes, many still fail to create a cohesive environment in their own organisation, projects and processes. Evidence of the problems this causes is everywhere.
A 2012 study by McKinsey of 5,400 large IT projects found that 17 per cent go so catastrophically wrong that they threaten the very existence of the organisation. It revealed that on average 45 per cent of these projects ran over budget and 56 per cent underdelivered against expectations.
A separate study, conducted in 2011 by Said Business School at Oxford University, showed that one in six projects cost triple the original estimate, while Boston Consulting Group claims that between 40 and 50 per cent of projects overrun on cost, time or don’t meet stated requirements.
What’s going wrong? The problem is almost as old as business itself: a series of divides between the different departments within organisations, typified by the lack of understanding between the people who run the business and those who run IT.
How do we get people who obsess about scalability, security, re-use and fault tolerance to converse fluently with people who spend all day thinking about return on investment, client satisfaction, value for money and growth?
The business-IT divide is frighteningly common, as is the wider problem of different groups of people working under the same organisation in siloes and who fail to understand each other. This way of working has a negative ripple effect impacting on the whole business.
Modern BPM should speak the language of collaboration – that’s why Bizagi brings business and IT closer together
Take customer experience, for example: it’s clear that having a single, unified view of the customer across multiple departments drives faster response times, enables better service, and improves cross-sell and operational efficiency.
At Bizagi, we believe that effective business process management (BPM) is the bridge. This should incorporate conduits for communication and flexible automated processes that can adapt quickly to changing business conditions. This is true business agility.
The ability to create flexible processes driving competitive and cost advantage, while keeping your core systems as standard as possible, is every company’s dream.
We think that BPM gives businesses the chance to rise above technical complexities by creating a common language for business and IT – the language of business processes.
Consider the example of prized Bizagi customer, adidas. In a matter of three months, adidas’ process automation connected the areas of supply chain, marketing, finance, retail and e-commerce globally, incorporating more than 500 operations and over 400 factories worldwide.
With these functional areas now working together, the business reduced costs, improved operational efficiencies and enhanced customer service. The results were obvious within a few weeks of the new system being incorporated.
Another client, Prince Sultan Military Hospital in Saudi Arabia, automated patient registration and identification processes, increasing staff efficiency by 60 per cent and reducing human errors by 80 per cent.
The list of examples goes on and on, but the unifying factor is that greater efficiency and communication under the banner of BPM creates an environment for better business and happier customers. Organisations that ignore this formula could find themselves being overtaken by leaner, more agile competitors.
Bizagi, which stands for business agility, is run by software entrepreneurs who are experts in BPM. More than 300 global customers gain significant competitive advantage by using Bizagi’s platform to streamline mission-critical processes (cross-functional, complex and international) as well as mundane daily routines.
For more information, please e-mail marketing@bizagi.com or visit www.bizagi.com
