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BNY Mellon on BPM at IBM’s Business Agility Executive Forum
Wednesday, November 2, 2011 by Neil Ward-Dutton
Yesterday I spent the morning at IBM’s London Southbank offices, attending a “Business Agility Executive Forum” – one event in a series being held around the world in the coming weeks to help promote IBM’s fall 2011 set of WebSphere related product launches.
A lot of the event content covered ground I’d already explored at events like IMPACT and other analyst briefings, but that wasn’t surprising – I wasn’t the kind of person the content was targeted at.
What was particularly interesting, though – and I know it was interesting for many of the others in the audience, too – was the customer presentation by Randall Overby, who heads up a BPM programme at BNY Mellon.
Yes, the BPM programme is using Blueworks Live and Business Process Manager to deliver process improvements, but for me that wasn’t the interesting bit. The interesting bit was how the programme started by addressing questions of cultural change and client involvement (the busines domain being addressed had a number of touchpoints with clients, in an environment of very high-touch, high-value customer relationships).
In the first process change project, a big part of the cultural change work revolved around getting input from 500 employees in the affected business line, and then sifting through that. Of the 800 suggestions for improvements received, 150 were eventually implemented – resulting in a 40%+ cost reduction in the business line. Rather than throttling employee morale, the project drastically improved employee engagement measures and reduced attrition rates significantly.
Unlike a lot of BPM programmes I come across, this programme also sought to benchmark client experiences of BNY Mellon’s services in depth before implementation started – and then sought in-depth feedback on the changes after they’d happened. As the programme’s projects were delivered, clients were consulted on key features – and also advised on ways they themselves might want to change the way they worked, in order to maximise effectiveness.
Going forward, BNY Mellon seems to be tearing it up – a number of other very impressive business improvement stats were shared; not all of which I got down, and some of which might not have been shareable. All in all – a very impressive story.
The presenter started out with his key lessons, but I’ll share them at the end here. They were illuminating, not least because IBM (as a “middleware vendor”) is sometimes denigrated by its competition for being all about the technology, and not really very good at helping clients understand the bigger issues at play in the BPM space. This was the presenter’s list:
- Start with BPM the concept and the method, not the technology
- BPM programs need or rely on cultural change
- Stretch the meaning of “end to end” process – include the customer, and ask “why do we do this? What does it mean for the client?”
- Ensure proper tool selection for success
- Be inclusive – BPM programs can’t succeed in isolation – you need to understand and influence many stakeholders along the way.
If I had one criticism of the event as a whole, it’s that I would have hoped for more examples of customer success like this, and less of the “here’s another new product” popups. But maybe that’s just me…
Posted in BPM