Business processes are what makes an organization tick. And while the vertical processes that live within individual lines of business in insurance are supported by individual applications, today's business climate is bringing increasing focus on end-to-end business processes as the primary means of defining the business and creating differentiating value. These end-to-end business processes span lines of business and tap into functional tasks within each of them and beyond the boundaries of the enterprise to trading partners and external service providers.
But to keep these end-to-end business processes in line with the ever-changing demands of the market, you need a deliberate, thorough approach to managing them. BPM enabled by SOA is a discipline that combines software capabilities and business expertise to accelerate innovation and optimization of the critical end-to-end business process.
An outline of the simple process:
·BPM starts with taking the business process that might exist on paper or even in the minds of some insurance subject matter experts and documenting it with business modeling. But the real value of process modeling comes with running simulations and what-if scenarios to forecast what would happen if the process was altered. An iterative approach to these simulations is suggested, quantifying the results and arriving at an optimal process design, before putting a single change into production.
·After the process has been optimized conceptually, it's time to make it a reality in deployment. But it never makes sense to reinvent the wheel or start from scratch. There is a wealth of prebuilt, customizable business process assets and best practices available to facilitate deployment.
·Once the optimized end-to-end business processes are in production, the ability to monitor and measure the results is available along with the ability to evaluate how the business is doing today but also how well the business is poised to react to additional changes tomorrow.
·The business world does not stand still and neither should the end-to-end business processes. The ability to continuously look for ways to innovate and reoptimize the process as conditions change is a must in today’s environment. There is a continuous improvement loop of using the information that is gained from monitoring the business to make better business decisions about where to take the business in the future. BPM supports these capabilities.
This is an excerpt from a recent whitepaper “Insurance: Realizing the Full Potential of Change Shifting the mindset to create dynamic business models by leveraging BPM and SOA as true enablers” authored by Deb Smallwood & Cindy Maike, Co-founders of Smallwood Maike & Associates and published and sponsored by IBM. Contact Deb Smallwood at dsmallwood@smallwoodmaike.com for a copy.
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