Business Process Management

IT enables business process management

IT systems have always implicitly supported business processes, but the current demands require innovative thinking as business needs are driving IT changes. IT managers are asked to make quick changes to IT systems to meet rapidly changing demands in the business environment. IT must be closely linked to business processes - but with flexibility to enable innovation - to improve effectiveness of the systems and services that connect customers, partners and suppliers. If you can improve supply chain integration, improve organization-wide understanding of customers, better monitor decision making, and improve basic processes like call centers and print/copy usage, you can improve the company’s bottom line.

At the same time, availability cannot be sacrificed- the business processes have to work reliably. To support BPM, IT managers look for business expertise, software, services, industry templates and workplace forms designed to help you understand, define, execute and optimize the core business processes that generate value for your company. There are a number of steps toward realizing your BPM infrastructure. The first step is to visualize and document business processes. Once you’ve documented, you need to automate processes and make the new services components available to your applications. And ultimately, if you want to offer maximum agility, you’ll want to fully orchestrate your business services and continuously monitor your end-to-end business processes.

Technologies like service oriented architecture (SOA) and virtualization enable flexible, efficient, reliable BPM solutions built on a solid middleware foundation.