THE COMMUNICATIONS-ENABLED BUSINESS PROCESS - GARTNER’S VIEW ON ACHIEVING AGILITY
As you’d expect from the world’s premier technology analysis firm, Gartner has developed a distinctive view on creating an enterprise that is capable of competitive and revenue differentiation through its agility. Central to this is a concept coined by Gartner, which it calls the communication-enabled business process (CEBP).
The concept is introduced in a recent report written by Gartner’s Bern Elliot, Steve Blood and Bob Hafner that cuts immediately through much of the hype that surrounds agility by defining it as "the ability of an organisation to sense environmental change and respond efficiently and effectively to that change."
On that basis Gartner believes that human communications is at the heart of an organisation’s ability to respond to all three challenges laid down in this definition. It is communication-enabled business processes (CEBPs) that allow communication functions – telephony and messaging, for instance - to be tightly integrated directly with the systems and applications that individuals are using to perform their organisational functions.
Homing in on the issue of human communications, Elliot, Blood and Hafner point to the phenomenon of human latency - the time it takes people to respond to events – as key in reducing an enterprise's ability to respond and to be agile. One of the effects of the integration of business processes with CEBP can be to reduce this latency and consequently increase organisational agility.
Gartner has identified that best practices for identifying, designing and deploying CEBP are already starting to develop. Despite the clear benefits of this approach Gartner believes that currently, the most difficult task is identifying opportunities, because established practices are deeply entrenched, and changing them requires changing behavior. In some cases, it also requires changing the business process itself. Nevertheless Gartner believes the increasingly mobile workforce is a key area in which CEBP can offer improvements.
But as any modern manager knows, there is little point in investing and encouraging change if the benefits or otherwise of change cannot be measured. Gartner believes that establishing the metrics for measuring the benefits of CEBP are a particular challenge. Communication systems typically can be measured only by low-level operational metrics, but the benefits of CEBP are often best reflected in higher-level business metrics.
So far deployments of what Gartner defines as CEBP have been limited and kept simple because of the complexity and cost of integration. As companies shift to an all-Internet Protocol (IP) communications environment Gartner argues the barriers will be reduced, and more-advanced applications will emerge.
Despite the potential challenge, Gartner’s prediction leads Logicalis to believe that a focus on CEBP could deliver significant benefits. Specifically Gartner predicts that through 2010, 80 percent of businesses that have deployed CEBP will obtain significant competitive and revenue differentiation because of it (0.8 probability).
Looking forward through 2010, 10 percent of the business processes that have been communication enabled will experience a 50 percent efficiency improvement (0.6 probability) and by 2008, leading unified communications solution vendors will incorporate tools designed to enable CEBP (0.8 probability).
So these appear to Logicalis to be results worth aiming for, but how should companies prepare to benefit from the CEBP approach? Gartner has three recommendations: Review current workflow and business processes to identify those that might benefit by being communication-enabled; evaluate all communications infrastructure in terms of its ability to support CEBP, and develop a software application group that has communications experience.
Please click on the link below for the full report and enter G00137838 into the Search tool:
http://www.gartner.com/
Achieving Agility Through Communication-Enabled Business Processes
4 April 2006 Bern Elliot Steve Blood Bob Hafner
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