Who would want to be a CIO? CEOs are not concerned with systems integration or straight-through-processing concepts, however valid these may be - they care about monitoring how the business is performing, being able to react to changes in the market, handling exceptions quickly and effectively, and having a complete view of the organisation.
Any technology purchase or investment these days is one that is deliberated with much caution and needs to reflect an immediate advantage to business, improving operational efficiency and providing rapid measurable return on investment (ROI). On top of this, new additions to the technology platform are expected to immediately form part of an integrated IT infrastructure, working seamlessly together towards delivering the business goals.
Having said that, organisations are failing miserably in achieving these goals. Automating business usually results in hard-coded business rules and procedures inside of the IT systems that lead to rigid and inflexible business processes and procedures, which hinders the company`s ability to adapt to ever-changing market conditions.
Business process automation (BPA), business process management (BPM) and business rules management (BRM) provide the necessary tools to ensure agility and flexibility for a company to adapt its business processes without intervention from the IT department.
Organisations today cannot and should not underestimate the importance of implementing an independent process layer, and how this results in an agile environment, allowing the business to adapt easily to the changing conditions of business, while reusing the company`s major IT investments.
To understand this accurately, the different needs of both the CEO and the CIO need to be recognised.
The CEO needs to reduce costs, improve business controls, provide quicker response to customers, flatten the organisation and above all else, deliver improved business processes while maximising the company`s investment within the existing infrastructures - including existing technologies, such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management.
In challenging economic times, the only effective way of achieving these objectives is to improve the effectiveness and flexibility of the end-to-end processes.
By implementing BPA and BRM technology, the business community will be able to easily create and execute potentially complex processes that are designed with customer service in mind. These deliver better quality, customer-focused processes which are more consistent, speedy and cost-effective.
BPM provides the "glue" that links the business processes to the underlying reusable service components.
Mark Ehmke, MD, Staffware SA
However, although providing technology that enables users to map out the business process in clear graphical notation is an important aspect of the solution, it`s only a part of the answer.
Being able to execute that process, facilitate fast and easy integration with legacy systems and commercially available packages, and monitor and manage how those processes are executing, are also vital components.
The CIO, on the other hand, has the task of setting up the necessary IT service infrastructure in order to ensure the needs of the CEO and the business are fully met quickly, effectively and with zero disruption to the business. Service components implemented in today`s rapidly changing technology world must be reusable, show fast ROI and bring benefits to the bottom line, without having to discard what works.
BPM provides the "glue" that links the business processes to the underlying reusable service components. This enables the CIO to provide a platform that allows the company to implement new applications quickly and to tie the front-office applications and the back-office systems together seamlessly. This reduces maintenance costs, time to deployment and makes the IT function far more responsive to the business needs.
Once this implementation has been done, an entirely separate "process layer" has been created, on top of which further business processes may be independently mapped, modelled and implemented - without any further participation from IT.
In this way, by using BPM and related technologies, the CIO and the CEO can both meet their objectives and requirements, meaning that IT can get on with the business of supporting business through managing a flexible technology infrastructure, while business can map, model, manage and if necessary change their processes independently of IT input.
* Staffware co-sponsors ITWeb`s workflow portal. Workflow applications originally set out to automate routing of documents to the users responsible for working on them. They have now become "glueware" by evolving into underlying business operating systems.
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