Appian was the sole BPM vendor sponsor at the recent Gartner Symposium/ITxpo. We were there because, as I noted in a previous post, we believe that BPM technology is a powerful remedy for the competing challenges facing IT: developing and deploying new business-driving services, while also fighting the fires to maintain existing systems.
Gartner issued a press release from the show outlining the "Nine Most Contentious IT Issues for the Next Two Years." Almost all of them are directly related to process control and improvement within IT. Whether talking about business expectations that have outstripped IT capacity, infrastructure and application modernization, or accountability and risk management, it comes down to process:
- Automation and the ability to make better resource allocation decisions based on process performance mean more productivity for short-staffed IT teams
- BPM-based composite Web applications mean new life and increased value from legacy systems
- Documented policy enforcement and audit trails mean more accountability and reduced risk
Gartner names BPM specifically as one of three core disciplines IT must master (along with Enterprise Architecture and Service Management) to minimize turf wars, align viewpoints and "provide the architectural guidance required to build solutions." To foster and support a process-oriented culture, Gartner talks about creating Business Process Competency Centers, also called Centers of Excellence (COE). This is absolutely in keeping with what we have seen with our customers, and it is why we have created services packages including our own BPM Center of Excellence that puts customers on the fast-track to success, facilitates knowledge transfer to make customers BPM self-sufficient, and helps them develop their own on-going BPM COE.
We want to help IT leaders get a jump-start on using BPM to overcome their "contentious issues." To that end, we're offering a webinar on BPM for IT called "Improve Your Processes. Control Your Destiny," where some of our IT customers will discuss their BPM successes. Follow this link to register, and while you're there, take a look at some of the BPM for IT case studies we have collected.
Don't delay, because as the Gartner press release concludes, "IT leaders should use this time, before obtaining new post financial crisis direction from CEOs, to resolve these issues. . . Resolving these issues will place IT leaders in a far better position to take on the challenges of the new future that lies ahead."
Ben Farrell
Director of Corporate Communications
