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Agility JUNE 2012, VOLUME 1, NO 3

BUSINESS

INSIGHTS

w 02 Editor’s Letter

w 03 Going Mobile: A Portable Approach to Process Improvement

Mobile computing is poised to enable radical transformation in just about every aspect of business, and BPM programs are no exception. But reaping mobile’s many benefits requires a solid strategy.

w 07 Integration: A Key Ingredient in the Mobile BPM Formula

Mobility offers plenty of advantages for BPM—but it takes some finesse and expertise to build that capability into both new and existing processes. Here’s expert advice for doing the job right.

w 10 Boost Performance, Transform Your Enterprise

Today’s on-the-move workers expect constant, reliable mobile capability. Meanwhile, executives still want business value. The good news: It’s possible to create an architecture that meets both demands.

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BUSINESS AGILITY INSIGHTS JUNE 2012 2

HOME

EDITOR’S LETTER

GOING MOBILE: A PORTABLE

APPROACH TO PROCESS

IMPROVEMENT

INTEGRATION: A KEY INGREDIENT

IN THE MOBILE BPM FORMULA

BOOST PERFORMANCE,

TRANSFORM YOUR ENTERPRISE

EDITOR’S LETTER

STRATEGIES FOR MOBILE, HIGH-PERFORMANCE ENTERPRISES

TODAY’S ENTERPRISES not only need to do more than ever before—they need to do it all faster, at lower cost, and, increasingly, on the run as well. And they need to be agile enough to adapt to change quickly.

Business process management is certainly no exception. Both process-improvement work and business processes themselves must adapt to growing employee and customer demand for reliable, always-available mobile access. In many organizations, employees, partners and even customers also want processes that help them collaborate regardless of location and that support business-oriented social networking.

No question: Addressing those hefty, constantly shifting requirements creates chal-lenges for IT and business leaders alike. But as the experiences of some pioneering organizations indicate, meeting such demands is far from impossible. And experts say that—if approached correctly—the results are well worth the effort.

This issue of ebizQ and SearchSOA’s Business Agility Insights examines strategic ways to use mobility and integration to build a high-performance organization that can yield significant benefits, and, ultimately, boost competitive advantage. You’ll find a range of recommendations designed to help you move toward a more agile, more mobile, more collaborative business environment.

Used incorrectly, the tools and techniques discussed in this package are likely to add up to just more talk and more technology. But used wisely, they can help drive real—even radical—business transformation.

What steps are you taking to increase agility and mobility? I would love to hear your story—and your suggestions for future coverage. Write me at [email protected].

—Anne Stuart Site Editor, ebizQ

http://www.ebizq.net/

http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/

mailto:[email protected]


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BY LYNN HABER

FEATURE STORY

GOING MOBILE: A PORTABLE APPROACH TO PROCESS IMPROVEMENTMobile computing is poised to enable radical transformation in just about every aspect of business, and BPM programs are no exception. But reaping mobile’s many benefits requires a solid strategy.

THERE’S NO DENYING THE STAGGERING SPEED at which mobile computing is gaining a foothold among consumers and businesses alike. Business spending on mobile projects will grow 100% by 2015, according to Forrester Research Inc. By 2016, 350 million employees worldwide will use smartphones, according to projections in Forrester’s Forrsights Business Decision-Makers Survey from late 2011.


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For BPM specifically, the market is pro-jected to reach $5.3 billion by 2017, fueled largely by cloud services and widespread demand for connected-

anywhere-anytime enterprises, according Global Industry Analysts, a research and analysis firm.

That’s not surprising, given mobile’s potential to add value—and even provid-

ing competitive advantage—by not only streamlining and improving processes, but making them more portable as well. But business and IT professionals look-ing to benefit from the approach need to start with the right strategy—and the right mind-set.

THINKING STRATEGICALLY ABOUT MOBILE BPMTaking a mobile approach to process management requires designing with different principles in mind. “You don’t want to mobilize an app; you want to mobilize a process,” said Maribel Lopez, principal analyst at Lopez Research, a research and consulting firm specializing in mobile issues. Process teams should

Mobile BPM: Words to the Wise FOLLOWING ARE BEST PRACTICES to consider and pitfalls to avoid when adding mobil-ity to process-improvement efforts.

rr Keep in mind that a mobile strategy involves much more than selecting the right devices, operating systems and applications. An effective strategy reflects the fact that you’re changing the way people work.

rr Avoid mobility for mobility’s sake. Make sure your mobile strategy moves toward clear business goals and objectives.

rr Focus on mobilizing business processes, rather than mobilizing business applications.

rr Work toward a long-term, enterprisewide strategy rather than ad hoc pockets of mobile development.

rrCapture and incorporate user needs into mobile processes and the overall strategy.

Taking a mobile approach to process management requires designing with differentprinciples in mind.


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consider the best ways to tap mobile’s unique functions, such as its location and presence capabilities.

But adopting mobility for mobility’s sake is a mistake, experts say. In fact, BPM specialists who are struggling to deter-mine mobile’s potential for their orga-nizations just might not be thinking big enough.

“Enterprises need to review business process with an eye towards effecting busi-ness objectives, not mobility,” said Bern Elliot, a Gartner Research Inc. vice presi-dent and distinguished analyst. “That’s how you’ll get where you want to go.”

Thinking strategically about mobile requires developing plans to successfully engage employees, partners and custom-ers, said Ted Schadler, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester.

EDP Renewables North America, a global company that’s also known as Horizon Wind Energy in the United States, is doing just that. The company, which designs, develops, constructs and operates renewable generation facili-ties, is readying a mobile application for field technicians who are responsible for maintaining service for more than 20 wind farms throughout the country. But the company won’t launch that app a moment before its time.

“We know the benefits of a mobile app for our field technicians—reducing redundancy, simplifying decision making approvals and rejections, saving time and resources—as well the benefits for our customers,” said Jaimeet Gulati, perfor-mance analyst for EDP Renewables, add-

ing, “We also know the challenges.” Now the company is addressing

mobile-strategy issues such as build-ing the proper infrastructure, creating end-user policies and developing device strategies; Gulati expects all to be ironed out by the end this year. Overseeing the effort is a team of more than half a dozen people from different departments and senior management. EDP Renewables, which has nearly 300 employees, pur-chased Appian’s BPM Suite for mobile, cloud and social BPM about a year ago.

Following is advice from industry analysts about moving forward with a mobile strategy for BPM.

BUILD YOUR MOBILE BPM TEAMFirst, gather key players from throughout the business to help think about BPM in a broad context. These might include the following:

rrPeople familiar with business pro-cess and sub-process review and evaluation.

rrEmployees with expertise in commu-nication, collaboration and mobility.

rrIndividuals with knowledge about a variety of business process content.

The goal: capturing user—employee, partner or customer—experiences with each process.

Another key to a successful outcome: aligning the customer’s mobile experi-ence with the customer process. “The


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customer-experience guys and BPM team share a common goal but it’s rare to take those insights and make changes to core processes. That’s got to change if compa-nies want to get the desired outcome,” said Clay Richardson, a senior analyst at Forrester.

The team should also include BPM leaders who, unlike individual business process players, offer a big-picture, end-to-end enterprise view of business pro-cesses. BPM managers can also provide understanding of the business case and what metrics are needed for evaluation.

Forrester’s Richardson also suggests the need for a new role: that of process data analyst. This individual provides under-standing about the users’ data needs in the mobile experience. “What we see today is different user experiences and the need to access different data stores [in terms of] mobile or Web,” Richard-son said. “Companies must address the differences in order for the customer to have a truly great user experience.”

There’s also a seat at the table for an IT-services representative who can share expertise in how mobile BPM can enhance communication and collabo-ration among employees, partners or customers.

Schadler recommends establishing the office of the chief mobility officer to coordinate business and technology. He also recommends that the chief infor-mation officer develop an “engagement guide” to facilitate mobile BPM proj-ects, create a mobile architecture blue-

print and manage mobile technology investments.

CONSTRUCT THE RIGHT ARCHITECTUREAny mobile strategy must, of course, address IT architecture—and that’s a con-versation that’s incomplete without dis-cussing the cloud.

Mobile involves two critical experi-ence considerations. First, the app should involve as few clicks or as few fields as possible. Second, but equally important, the app should be as responsive as pos-sible—that is, screens and information should load quickly.

Overall, mobility is about access, ubiq-uity, performance and user expectation. Cloud solutions are typically designed from the ground up to deliver a task-ori-ented mobile experience on every pop-ular device, over any network. As For-rester’s Schadler puts it: “Mobile was made for cloud. LAN was made for on-premise.”

Where should you start your mobile BPM efforts? Look for people who are doing their work close to where that work is located—for instance, in the field, on the factory floor, in a retail store, on a construction or in a health care set-ting. Said Elliot, “The user should be able to accomplish the task at the point the task is discovered.”

Finally, start small and scale up. Look for early, easy wins—and let your mobile BPM program grow from there. n


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BPM STRATEGY

BY LYNN HABER

MOBILE BPM OFFERS BUSINESSES the opportunity to not only improve and streamline processes but make them more portable as well.

While that’s a desirable outcome, it presents BPM specialists with new challeng-es. Processes designed for yesterday’s computing paradigm aren’t likely to fit well into a mobile enterprise.

INTEGRATION: A KEY INGREDIENT IN THE MOBILE BPM FORMULA Mobility offers plenty of advantages for BPM— but it takes some finesse and expertise to build that capability into both new and existing processes. Here’s expert advice for doing the job right.


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“Companies have to evaluate whether existing processes and apps are applica-ble going forward,” said Maribel Lopez, principal analyst at Lopez Research, a research and consulting firm that special-izes in mobile issues.

And, of course, mobile BPM isn’t about mobilizing applications. It’s about mobi-lizing processes, including assessing what information is deliverable on mobile devices.

INTEGRATION CONSIDERATIONS FOR MOBILE BPM In terms of process integration, BPM spe-cialists should first think about what mo-bile offers that wasn’t available before. That might include incorporating common mobile features such as the following:

rrTouch interfaces

rrLocation and mapping capability

rrSocial media, activity and collabora-tion feeds

rrAlerts

rrText, camera and video functionality

Those capabilities, among others, are all deliverable at the point where the work is performed.

Another factor to consider: Until now, many processes have been asynchronous. Mobile affords real-time communica-tion, notifications, scheduling or activi-ty streams, for example, which also mean real-time communication with back-end servers.

Looking ahead, BPM teams might also

explore how mobile could significant-ly improve individual processes. Then they can use that information to integrate those improvements into the next gener-ations of those processes.

SETTING MOBILE BPM STRATEGY When approached in a scattershot way, mobile BPM can be costly and, ulti-mately, unproductive. Long-term success requires an enterprise-wide strategy.

Ted Schadler, vice president and princi-pal analyst at Forrester Research Inc., said the chief information officer is the right executive to pilot a company’s three-to-five-year evolution from the early experimental phase of mobile to a more advanced stage involving sophisticated architecture and widespread engagement.

Depending on the scope of expertise within a company, it’s likely that mobile will require organizations to seek out-side guidance or partners that can bring mobile expertise and a fresh perspective on the process to the table.

Reluctance to hire third-party help to gain access to skills may hold back com-panies from venturing into mobile BPM or result in costly missteps. Experts rec-ommend considering the answer to this question: What will it cost your company not to hire experts in mobile BPM?

Based on some pioneering companies’ early adventures in mobiles, Schadler rec-ommends avoiding the following:

rrThe multichannel coordination quagmire


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rrBusiness processes that are designed for transactions, rather than engagements

rrServers and infrastructures that are ill-prepared for skyrocketing volumes of activity

rrMiddleware, application and securi-ty models that are poorly constructed for engagement

rrDesign, development and governance processes that are misaligned with mobile requirements

Integrating mobile into BPM var-ies depending on whether the process-es involved were new or existing ones. Addressing a new process is the easier scenario, said Scott Francis, chief tech-nology officer at BP3 Global, a BPM solu-tions company. “We’ve learned that the workflow on mobile doesn’t always reflect a business process diagram,” he said. “Working with a new BPM diagram, it’s easier to align the chunking of work given that the implementation of the process is new.”

When starting with a new application, process designers can set new priorities and make compromises along the way. Francis recommends that designers keep Lean Sigma Six principles in mind to help ensure that the mobile app benefits or improves the customer experience.

Integrating mobile into existing pro-cesses poses a greater challenge. The most difficult part is determining which exist-ing process parts work for mobile users and tying the pieces in for a good mobile experience.

“The trick is to piecemeal parts of a process together to design good mobile app flow and minimize disruption,” said Francis.

In some cases, rethinking whether to stick with an existing app is the best route to mobility. For example, most existing processes don’t assume knowl-edge of the user’s location or account for the fact that someone can relocate while participating in a process. Mobile devic-es, of course, often have geolocation and presence capabilities. “Not only do BPM practitioners need to stay up to date with mobile technology, but BPM needs to bring the process context to mobile,” Francis said.

Whether integrating mobile into new or existing processes, designers must also consider which devices or platforms to use—or whether to take a cross-plat-form approach. No question about it: The wrong choice can be costly. Indus-try experts say there’s often value in tar-geting one platform, optimizing the software to that device’s hardware, then building an app that gives users a great experience. Later, you can leverage that experience with business decision mak-ers to justify expanding the app across other platforms.

Bottom line: Mobile BPM is a journey. The challenge is getting started. Indus-try experts recommend first asking your existing mobile BPM vendor about its mobile strategy—and then figuring out whether that vendor’s roadmap will take your company where it needs to go. n


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BY ALAN R. EARLS

BOOST PERFORMANCE, TRANSFORM YOUR ENTERPRISEToday’s on-the-move workers expect constant, reliable mobile capability. Meanwhile, executives still want business value. The good news: It’s possible to create an architecture that meets both demands.

All and now. Those words sum up two of the biggest demands from today’s employees.

Increasingly mobile users want the world and they want it now. In response, IT must provide high-performance architecture that meets those hefty demands—and, of course, provides value to the business as well.


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“We are beyond the age of just infor-mation and now into a world of enter-prise transformation,” said Vijay Thirum-alai, managing partner at Streebo Inc., a provider of master data management and business intelligence consulting and implementation services. “Mobile is no longer an option; it has now become a business necessity.”

In his view, every function in an enter-prise stands to benefit from a mobile platform’s ubiquity. Salespeople can access information on the go, create new accounts in the field, fulfill orders faster and affect revenue, profitability and sales cycles. He describes advantages for mar-keting professionals as well: “Customer acquisition, promotions, personalization and customer experience are some of the immediate benefits for marketing in leveraging mobile.”

Likewise, finance and accounting departments are beginning to leverage mobile technologies in their payment platforms. “It’s time to rethink payments, collection departments and associat-ed costs in enterprises,” he said, add-ing that “every department now stands to gain from a well-thought-out mobile strategy.”

The key to achieving integration, mobility and high performance: Under-standing your user requirements and building a flexible, scalable architecture to meet them, said Adam Bari, managing director of IPM, an IT consulting firm. “If you don’t provide that architecture in your enterprise, users will take out their credit cards and buy it from someone

else, regardless of security mandates,” he warns.

In some senses, integration is best thought of as a form of convergence, where there’s an effort to provide a uni-fied IT platform as viewed from the per-spective of the mobile end users, Bari said. “You don’t want to think in terms of a network group or storage or vir-tual desktop infrastructure group,” he said. Providing that connectivity is a mat-ter of selecting the best fit from a range of options, such as Web-based services or so-called “native” connectivity, built around the specific device characteristics and capabilities.

While Web-based HTML5-based apps and environments can deliver some func-tionality, they won’t work over the long term because they aren’t robust enough for data collection offline, said Mary Brit-tain-White, CEO and founder of Retriev-er Communications, which focuses on mobile customer solutions for field work. By contrast, she argues, native apps can work across all operating systems, mean-ing companies spend less on operating expenditures while still getting the high-

Finance and accountingdepartments are begin-ning to leverage mobiletechnologies in their payment platforms.


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performance architectures needed to do more with less.

Meanwhile, she said, in the age of mobility, IT must stop thinking of mobile as the edge of the enterprise, recogniz-ing that some—or perhaps most—of the critical work of the business occurs through mobility and mobile workers.

The key to developing and delivering a successful high-performance implemen-tation is working closely with employ-ees, said Larry Van Deusen, national prac-tice manager for network integration at Dimension Data, an IT services and solu-tion provider. “To really understand how to utilize enterprise mobility you have to adopt a methodology that brings together key stakeholders and includes workshops to look at your operation-al objectives,” he said. Factors to consid-er are performance, device management issues and strategic business goals such as operational agility, Van Deusen said. “When we work with our clients, a pro-cess like that helps provide a clear snap-shot of what matters and how to get there.”

Darrin Witte, a partner and manag-er for the mobile development practice at Clarity Consulting, cites other issues involved in crafting an architecture that supports mobility. For one thing, he said, operating systems such as Android weren’t designed for the enterprise; for that reason, an initiative like Windows 8, which has more of an enterprise orienta-tion, may have value. In addition, he said,

everything you do needs to be “consum-able,” whether it is just an application programming interface (API) or some-thing more.

“In the past, that would have been done with SOA [service-oriented archi-tecture], but now, more simple REST-based services are being consumed by disconnected, or occasionally connected, devices,” he said, referring to representa-tional state transfer services. “Tradition-ally, enterprises don’t have this infrastruc-ture in place, so creating that is the first step, followed by the decision of wheth-er to go native or orient toward a mobile Web approach,” he said. In Witte’s view, HTML5 can provide some cross-platform capabilities—but native has advantages, too. “There are pros and cons to both; it depends on the needs of the organiza-tion,” he said.

Regardless of the choice, though, it’s time to get started. “You can always alter course. You don’t have to wait for a per-fect approach,” he said.

As the number of smart mobile devic-es overtakes the number of computers, the demand for enterprise information from those devices becomes more cru-cial, Thirumalai said. And demographic factors play into the picture as well: “In a few years, more than 50% of the world population will be under the age of 25, and this demography is biased towards mobile use,” he said. “We are at the cusp of a perfect storm for enterprise transformation.” n


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Lynn Haber, a Boston-area journalist who specializes in writing about business and technology, is a regular con-

tributor to ebizQ. Email her at [email protected].

Alan R. Earls, a Boston-area journalist who specializes in writing about business and technology, is a regular con-

tributor to ebizQ and SearchSOA.com. Email him at [email protected].

Business Agility Insights E-zine is a joint e-publication of ebizQ and SearchSoa.com.

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Jason SparapaniMANAGING EDITOR, E-PUBLICATIONS

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