The Number 1 enemy of most Business Process Improvement efforts within organizations is current organizational reality! Ironically, those companies in the developed countries that have been the most avid technology adopters are the most cursed!. We have run into many such organizations that have a long history of adoption of latest technologies for their work, have been very successful at what they do and have slowly grown into large bureaucracies now with clearly defined fiefdoms within their world with competing agendas. Many in the BFSI (Banking, Financial Service and Insurance) sector are classic examples of these kinds of companies. Unfortunately, they are the ones that need to change the most because of new models of business execution, especially online, web based versions of what they have done for the past 25+ years.
Many of them have come to be invested in large IT backbones that support their business and these are applications that have been in use for a while, work O.K. and do what they are supposed to do properly. However what they may lack is the nimbleness and the technical characteristics needed for morphing themselves into nimble, online, web based versions of themselves so that they can compete effectively. For example, old line companies like State Farm Insurance and Farmers Insurance have all had to rethink how and where their local agents could add value in the face of increasingly online, web-based, self-service based companies like GEICO, Progressive Insurance, etc.
There are some very useful BPM solutions that can Orchestrate the Business Processes with workflows that can be built with Glue like integration that can link into multiple backend software systems that form part of the end to end workflow. These can make things flow with Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Business Rule Systems.
In reality, many of these BFSI companies are also huge users of Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) services, many of them offshore. This puts in an extra wrinkle over any Process Improvement efforts you may have. Parts of an end-to-end business process is now in the hands of some offshore provider. For example, let us assume that it is an Order to Cash process and part of the Cash process is a Collections Process. This may have been outsourced and the offshore service provider may use their own local hardware, software and applications infrastructure to execute this part of the overall process.
Now visibility into detailed data may be limited because the process is now broken up in to pieces and handled by different people around the globe!
Just getting a good AS-IS picture of the whole process becomes much more difficult, much less do any process improvement. However organizations will continue doing this if they are saving money!
Organizational Reality always intrudes just when you see organizations place higher priority on end to end business processes, either in the form of an IT History or current outsourcing efforts!
Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. ~Albert Einstein
