System Transformation Portal

By William Ulrich

Back in the early 1990’s the business process-reengineering craze swept through corporations like wildfire. Unfortunately, the term became synonymous with downsizing and was subsequently shunned by corporations as an ineffective strategy. But the need to integrate business processes, driven by the explosive demand for e-business solutions, is back on the corporate agenda. This time around business and IT executives should avoid the missteps of the past and take a holistic approach to business processes integration.

Business process integration is a major component of your e-business integration strategy. Consider a company that has 16 billing systems, the majority of which replicate 90% of the billing data and functions that should reside in a single system. Trying to web-enable back-end data and systems under this scenario would be a major nightmare. The root cause of these redundancies is the redundant business units that use them. Collectively, these business units replicate business processes, waste corporate money and create an integration roadblock. In other words, redundant business units, performing redundant processes, have spawned redundant data structures and systems.

Viewing this situation as a technical issue does not recognize the root cause of the problem. Holistic business process integration requires looking at internal business units and external stakeholders, such as e-marketplaces, supply chains, partners and customers. A business process integration initiative should identify and consolidate automated and manual business processes across business units to better serve customers, shareholders and the community in which the enterprise functions. And this may mean integrating business units as well.

In the aforementioned billing scenario, management may need to consolidate multiple business units and the processes they perform. The end result may require reorganizing business units, IT functions and relationships with external entities. Here are seven points that companies can follow when launching a business process integration initiative.

1. Clearly define the challenge. As IT people we tend to want to rig a solution rather than digging into the root cause of the issue. Don’t just create a layer of seemingly integrated processes, front-ends or web sites that provide the illusion of integration. Management will catch on.
2. Gain senior executive support. If you are changing organizational structures, you need to have the participation and support of top management. Explain that this is not a problem IT can solve alone.
3. Establish collaborative teams of business, IT and third party stakeholders for the project. Process integration requires business analysts, executives, IT personnel and, in many cases, third parties.
4. Create a holistic strategy that addresses business process integration from an organizational, process, data, systems and marketplace perspective. Consider how enterprise application integration tools can be deployed and then phased out as back-end integration takes hold.
5. Look at the organizational structures behind the processes. You may be forced into an organizational redesign effort – including a shift to non-hierarchical management models that facilitate collaboration and adaptability with internal and external business entities.
6. Model the processes. A large company will have an overwhelming number of processes that require integration and modeling them will help expose patterns among business units and third parties. Process models can also be used in the systems integration process.
7. Create a knowledge base to support your project. A knowledge base of business processes can be used by analysts, IT personnel and e-business teams during the project and on an ongoing basis. Future redundancies will be avoided because analysts will be able to readily determine that a process already exists and should not be replicated.

Taking on a business process integration initiative is not a one-dimensional project. It is also not a trend or a fad, but a critical next step in making e-business integration a reality in your enterprise.