Optimizing business processes with dynamic capabilities provides the means to innovate new business models and to offer differentiated products and services while using existing assets. With the proper tools, businesses can give new life to existing IT assets and support business-led process change. These dynamic capabilities enable enterprises to keep business service policies separate from business processes and create reusable business services. This creates a highly flexible environment where the business process is dynamically assembled at run time, reusing these business services in a personalized manner based on user context and the direction provided by the business service policy.
What makes working with business service policies so effective? Business service policies represent declarative knowledge written in a business context, such as “Repeat customers receive preferred status.” They are not limited by hard code—so change is quick and easy.
These business services are created with existing IT assets and organized into reusable building blocks. By keeping these vital building blocks and policies separate from the process, you have reusable pieces that can be dynamically assembled. The overall business process becomes highly flexible and agile.
Altering business service policies, rather than redeploying the business processes, gives organizations the ability to innovate, respond rapidly to external demands, and speed new products or services to market. Customers also gain through enhanced, customized experiences. Most organizations, for example, are becoming increasingly customer focused. With tight competition for the market, it is crucial to provide high service levels and the differentiated products and services they demand.
Business processes optimized with SOA technologies benefit from reusable building blocks, giving rise to an entirely new approach to how business services are deployed. Using these technologies, the dynamic assembly of reusable assets powers a high level of customization—an agent can assemble the right product offering for his customer by making adjustments to business service policies. Real-time changes happen without bringing down the system. Or a carrier can temporarily raise authority levels for claims adjusters to pay claims in an area hit by a tornado. A carrier can also change underwriting criteria to stop writing auto policies on a vehicle with reported safety issues.
For a dynamic environment like this to reach its full potential, business leaders need to share a vision with IT leaders that drives adoption of BPM enabled by SOA based on their objectives. Without business leaders who are aligned with IT, BPM solutions enabled by SOA become difficult to implement and stand to never realize their full potential.
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.
Leave a comment