Business Innovation and Optimization

You’re a successful financial institution considering the acquisition of a smaller company.

You’re a leading retail distributor anticipating rising fuel costs.

You’re a fast-growing insurance company trying to react to a competitor’s new prices.

Yet, if you’re like a lot of businesses today, chances are you’re not confident that your company can effectively respond to changing conditions.

Complexities in the business and the supporting infrastructure, siloed organizations and processes, and a lack of visibility are just some of the obstacles preventing many companies from achieving growth.

What’s needed is a total approach—one that draws upon both industry expertise and technology resources to provide a “State of the Business” picture, and the actions that go with it.

Introducing Business Innovation and Optimization from IBM, an advanced approach to making your business more responsive to the marketplace.

With this approach, companies:

Identify key business goals…

Align business measures with these goals...

And manage performance.

The results directly respond to today’s most persistent business challenges.

More efficient design strategies reduce process, task and activity complexity.

Business and IT objectives and priorities are aligned, from strategy through operations, facilitating coordinated actions to achieve your business goals.

Visibility is improved with an approach that provides data not only in real time, but at the relevant time.

And responsiveness is possible when software alerts relevant decision-makers to the problem as well as available options to address it.

Finally, experts in your industry help create a strategic roadmap that can reduce risk and anticipate change.

How does this approach generate results?

Business Innovation and Optimization applies Industry specific expertise to help identify the critical parts of your business that are most essential to meeting targeted goals.

This insight, combined with market-leading software, allows you to focus on the essential parts of your business, apply metrics based on best practices and monitor, analyze and measure performance in relation to your goals.

Once in place, the software solution alerts you to problems or negative trends.

It provides you with options—including suggested relevant actions.

In fact, even before you take action, it gives you projections on the outcome.

There are a number of potential on-ramps to Business Innovation and Optimization—specific starting points or areas of need associated with various departments of your business.

For example, you may be seeking a way to gain more insight from business data, or wanting to optimize processes by creating models and simulations.

Or you may be looking for enhanced ways to track real-time performance indicators, and more insight into what these indicators mean now.

And every business would benefit from a tighter alignment of IT operations and business priorities.

Any one of these areas—or a combination of two or more—can serve as an on-ramp to Business Innovation and Optimization. Because it is an orchestrated approach touching all of them, the process begins at the departmental or project level then opens up to potentially include every aspect of your business.

For example, in the banking industry, the process may start with the need to have more visibility into individual branches, which are so central to the industry, but often operationally remote.

This may stem from a very urgent need to know if branches are complying with the latest regulations, but it is associated with a number of other transformation solutions the bank is seeking, like:

Low cost provisioning and administration of branch software

Role-based workplaces for tellers, customer service representatives, and branch managers

And a consistent consumer experience integrated across channels

For each objective, Business Innovation and Optimization provides a total approach to managing performance. In regards to role-based workplaces, for instance, the approach offers selective access to relevant information, integrated across multiple applications and processes—tailored to specific roles, like CSRs, tellers, and managers.

On role-based dashboards, they receive alerts and solution suggestions. At the same time, other decision-makers will receive their own alerts, reflecting their roles and, ultimately, their ability to help provide solutions from their vantage point.

These solutions are derived from tools that analyze all relevant information, providing insight that generates possible actions.

The result is a rapid, orchestrated and comprehensive response from a variety of perspectives that not only addresses the immediate issues but positions the company for the future.

Business Innovation and Optimization from IBM is an approach that presents the right information in front of the right people at the right time. It also simultaneously provides informed and strategic actions that result in managed innovation—delivering business performance excellence.

Find out how IBM Business Innovation and Optimization can help your business. Visit ibm.com/software/innovate.