In part one of this two-part Process People interview, we welcomed 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. In Part 2 we hear more about Raju’s key learnings from his BPM implementation.

Process People: How did Kleinwort Benson determine the metrics by which the company deems the project to be a success, both initially and on an on-going basi?

Raju Oak: It is important to note that our initial project was a pilot designed to first prove out the potential of the BPM approach. We faced several challenges during the pilot project that we had to negotiate along the way. Perhaps the biggest issue was that the pilot was being introduced through IT, and at that time IT did not have strong credibility with the business. At the same time the business did not recognize the connection between the challenges that it faced and the absence of a managed process infrastructure. We also had a strong skepticism about BPM within some parts of IT as well, based upon an earlier failed attempt to implement a workflow tool from another vendor as a point solution. There really was no experience of process engineering within the business. These challenges made it a complex and vulnerable project, with a long gestation, and its success depended upon strong leadership from the CTO.

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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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We just wanted to check in and report on the first day of our annual Driven User Conference here in sunny Austin, TX.

The day began with CEO Rod Favaron’s keynote, which was all about how we are now at “the end of the beginning.” The secret is out about BPM, attention and visibility are soaring to new heights, and we are now entering a new phase of adoption and maturity.

A big part of this progression is the move from Project to Program to Culture, as Rod put it — in the early days of course it was all about getting your first BPM project up and running successfully, and then it became all about growing that project into a full-fledged program. But the next phase that Lombardi customers and partners are moving into right now is one in which BPM begins to truly impact the culture of any and every part of the organization that it touches, indeed the organization as a whole. This is the true value proposition of BPM ultimately — the idea that BPM becomes part of your DNA, that process becomes an integral part of what your company does every day.

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Recently we had the pleasure of announcing that the Finnish Sales Division of the Nordic and Baltic telecommunications service provider, TeliaSonera, is deploying Teamworks and Blueprint. The news was picked up by KMWorld.

This should be a very interesting deployment that we’ll review later after their initial playback and first round of results.

The company will use Lombardi to support sales of business services in Finland, as well as its activation and provisioning and other core business processes. We expect to be able to help them increase their service levels and improve customer satisfaction by designing and automating their business processes so they can be easily controlled and managed.

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Last week, the BPM industry - and two Lombardi customers - gained some very nice attention in the Financial Times. Steven S. Smith, CTO of Wells Fargo Financial, talked about how he achieved adoption from the business side of the company. Another, James Thomas, IT Director at University College London Hospitals (UCLH), discussed how they are using Lombardi Teamworks to reduce the time it takes for a patient to receive medical treatment after a referral. Impressive stuff.

But I think the really interesting thing here is that people can use this article to help evangelize the value that BPM can offer their companies in terms that business people can actually understand: efficiency, effectiveness and agility.

While BPM has been covered for some time in IT-oriented publications that dive deeper into the technology, this story is fairly unique in that it talks at a business-level about some of the biggest issues companies face with getting success with BPM. It provides examples of successful approaches that other companies took to solve meaningful problems while connecting with the business - and it comes from mainstream business press source - not an IT journal.

What it doesn’t do (too much at least) is get bogged down by technical points that make business people’s heads spin. And that is the problem with a lot of the press attention that BPM has received in the past. Many articles either get totally side-tracked with technical ‘in the weeds’ points or only discuss the broad market trends.

So the point I am making is that if you need help making the case for BPM with your executives, or if you need concrete examples of the benefits companies are acheiving, have them read the FT article - it should really help. And they probably won’t even make that funny face when they read it (you all know what I mean). Let me know how it goes!

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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The selection process for choosing a BPM vendor can be pretty daunting. BPM is a rapidly evolving space, and there seems to be a different philosophy on process at the core of each vendor’s solution set. Usually the first step an organization takes is to read some of the research that’s out there. While Gartner and Forrester do provide world-class research on our corner of the software world, I think it’s also worth mentioning another place to look for an in-depth look at the major players in business process management.

Bruce Silver’s recently published BPMS report provides one of the most thoughtfully composed product rankings in BPM. I would also like to quote and commend him on his methodology for the research, which I think is an admirable approach:

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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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