For their recent InformationWeek Analytics 2008 Tomorrow’s CIO Survey, the well-known trade publication quizzed 720 corporate managers, including CEOs, CFOs, and COOs, as well as CIOs and VPs of IT-level executives, about the attributes most desirable for future business technology leaders.

IW’s John Soat then posted an excellent write-up of the survey’s findings, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. John writes:

“Whether they know it or not–and most do–companies need an executive leader well versed in both technology and business processes. The CIO position is tailor made to take that role. . .the question is, which CIOs will step up to it?”

This chart (also below) based on the survey’s findings isn’t surprising if you’ve been looking at things from a process point of view as long as we have, but it’s not trivial that respondents noted “Need to manage or optimize business process” as the #1 priority as the CIO continues to strive to become more of a business leader.

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If you’ve been reading the Process People blog, you might have noticed that we talk a lot about an iterative approach to deploying BPM. What we haven’t touched on as much is that the iterative approach is an element of the overarching methodology. Looking in on the methodology from the highest level you will get a view of a three-phased approach – which ultimately results in iteration. But we want to provide a big picture of how all of the different parts of our methodology tie together, and how each point of emphasis leads into or loops back to key areas of the other two phases.

I realize that in some organizations, “phase” is a four-letter word. With BPM it is a must… it is the foundational element that leads to continuous process improvement and ultimately maximum business benefit. But don’t just take our word for it, just look at the countless customers who have used this methodology and achieve enormous success because of it.

Definition Phase

The definition phase is probably the most critical portion of the entire BPM adoption lifecycle. This is where you set the expectations for the BPM project, define metrics to measure the project and create a framework so that the focus remains on delivering business value throughout all three phases.

In this phase organizations should:

• Take the broader initiative and narrow it to a specific departmental level
• Define the business milestones and associated metrics
• Develop the business case
• Ensure that there is a common thread throughout the whole project (Business value)
• Get the business to drive this phase

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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.

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Ed.: This is the first in a series of Q+A sessions focusing specifically on playback session best practices, with our in-house expert, Kris Komassa.

People like to talk a lot about collaboration between business and IT, but it seems like a playback session, as a collaborative, iterative process baked into the development environment, is where the wheel finally hits the road.

When you start any engagement, any project work, the existing tendency is for business and IT to split off fairly early, but I try to keep them in lock step as much as possible, which is important in order to be successful ultimately.

That first playback session is the first formalized opportunity to get everyone back in the same room and on the same page. We try to immediately do a level-set, making sure that everyone has the right expectations coming in, and a clear understanding what is going to be covered. We ensure that there is an agenda of what is going to be accomplished, both from a business and an IT perspective, and that both sides also know their roles and the various responsibilities for the playback.

Then once the playback starts, I’m really big on having an ongoing ad dynamic back-and-forth between business and IT, and typically at first it is driven by IT because they’ve been more hands-on to date in the first parts of the project. There are also instances, though, where the business side is driving because you’re doing more process flow at the first part of the first playback, which is important to note.

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Recently we sat down with Rachel Aukes, a member of the Wells Fargo Financial Information Systems Continuous Improvement Team. Rachel, who plays an active role in the use of BPM at Wells Fargo, shared how Wells Fargo got started with BPM. In February, Wells Fargo received the Global Award for Excellence in BPM and workflow.

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.

Rachel Aukes: Our BPM program came about as a solution to organizational level needs - in fact we selected our BPM solution (Teamworks) and began to implement it before deciding on a specific project. We were challenged with increasingly complex, paper-intensive processes that had a large number of manual steps and handoffs. That was obviously inefficient and meant there was room for errors (such as bad typing, misplaced files, etc.). The idea of what BPM offers became prevalent in 2006 when most of our development staff was focused on maintaining our legacy systems while building our future systems of record. This effort was strategically important to our company; however, the business had immediate tactical needs that must continue to be met. We asked ourselves what we should do to best support our business partners, and we determined that BPM was a good solution for this. We haven’t looked back.

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Process People will be conducting a series of periodic interview sessions with Lombardi customers to provide useful insight into the BPM issues that they faced at their company, guidance for how to overcome obstacles, and to share the lessons learned during their process improvement journey. These real-world interviews will be posted regularly, so be sure and check back frequently. . .

In this Process People interview, we welcome Jeremy Kraybill, CIO for Boundless Network.

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.

Jeremy Kraybill: At Boundless Network, we were undergoing a business process re-engineering project at our business. We initially set out to document and analyze manual process changes that would reduce our company’s cash cycle and help us scale our back office. After the first couple weeks of the project, we realized that there were a whole set of business processes held in individuals’ heads that we could benefit from automating. Nobody at the company had previous BPM experience, but after looking at the first BPM vendor’s demo we knew that a BPM solution had great potential for our business pains. After a 3-month evaluation process we selected a BPM solution and have been very happy with the decision and how the implementations went.

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