Process People Q&A with Raju Oak, Kleinwort Benson Private Bank, Part 1

In this two-part Process People interview, we welcome Raju Oak, head of process services at Kleinwort Benson in London. Raju is part of the transformation and systems services group within the company. Kleinwort Benson is a provider of banking and financial services to corporate and private clients in the UK and Channel Islands.

Process People: Describe in as much detail as possible the problem or need on a project level that first made you consider BPM and/or Lombardi as a viable solution.

Raju Oak: At Kleinwort Benson, our organisation faced four challenges that we needed to address quickly:

• First, our reliance on ‘point applications’ to satisfy functional requirements for the business resulted in us having a large, expensive and fragmented IT landscape. It was soaking up a large percentage of our budget and it constrained our responsiveness;
• Second, the ever increasing regulation in financial services required us to have tremendous visibility across our business processes, coupled with integrated reporting on the outcomes. That in turn, required us to address the whitespaces between our various point solutions;
• Third, we needed a uniform way to integrate and manage several parts of the business that each had dissimilar infrastructures and processes (a strategy we call ‘regionalisation’).
• Finally, changing market conditions required the organisation to step up the scale and complexity of its offerings while reducing the time to market, which was difficult in the absence of a process governance framework.

Implementing BPM using Lombardi as a tool was proposed as an approach that had the ability to simultaneously help us address all four of these challenges.

Process People: How did you initially present the idea of BPM as a solution and to whom?

Raju Oak: At our company the idea to use BPM technology was originally presented to our Chief Technology Officer. As a visionary, our CTO recognised the benefits of the BPM approach to resolving the four challenges that I mentioned before, and that the technology offered us a way for IT be repositioned as a key enabler to the business. The CTO needed permission from our Chief Operations Officer to proceed with the project. It is really interesting to note that the success of our BPM initiative helped to contribute to the CTO being given a wider mandate, with responsibility for all transformation and process services in addition to systems and technology, as well as promotion to the title of ‘Chief Transformation Officer’.

Process People: Where did the BPM program originate - IT or the business? Who leads it today?

Raju Oak: The BPM program originated within our IT organisation. Once it had established some credibility and success, it was spun off to a newly formed process services group with an identity separate from IT. It now forms a large part of the Chief Transformation Officer’s mandate.

We’ll continue this interview with Part 2 next week. Questions or comments, chime in below!