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Central Government, E-Government, Policy, Technology

Eat an elephant bite by bite, and digest accordingly

By Jianggan Li | 9 February 2010

Despite many years of planning and implementation, questions often arise in both private and public sectors about the value of IT, more specifically about projects that IT departments have initiated.

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Dr Kiran Garimella, Vice President for BPM Solutions at Software AG, believes often failing to deliver value is not directly the fault of IT department, especially when it comes to process engineering or re-engineering. He recommends that IT department should be more proactive in monitoring compliance with the business process framework such that the benefits of IT can be fully realised.

“Functional managers only have incentives to improve the process within the particular office or department they are in charge off, with no incentive to look at end-to-end process improvement; and this is the same for both public and private sectors,” he says.

He draws his previously experience as the CIO of a global healthcare organisation a number of years back. “We reviewed ongoing process real time,” he recalls. “Whenever the business benefits dropped out, we would go to the particular department and ask why it is so.”

By doing so, Dr Garimella managed to force the issue of end-to-end process management into the business. As a result, he was bestowed with a number of management awards.

Dr Garimella goes on to propose that public sector CIOs should become Chief Process Officers (CPOs) in the future. “This is already happening in some commercial organisations, without the actual title being used,” he explains. “The reason is simple: IT is the only department which has a bird’s eye view on all departments’ processes and thus their efficiency.”

“Business process management (BPM) is usually defined as end-to-end process and involving cross-functional collaborations – something that technology alone cannot achieve,” Dr Garimella says. “It is, in fact, a management discipline.”

However BPM itself is a large concept; organisations which want to embark on this journey often have difficulties defining a clear roadmap with a suitable start point.

“Many people struggle on where and how they should get started with BPM,” he says. “They might have a BPM process implemented, but without a framework or a roadmap they don’t know how to scale the project enterprise-wide.”

“One of the ways we should never follow is total government planning from day one,” Dr Garimella says. “If we do that, we will get stuck for ten years trying to analyse everything which matters.” He says that government IT has grown into such complexity that a single system depends on many others to work together. “The fact is that you always engineer your process one step at a time, each step impacting upstream and downstream processes. Hooks and connections have to be provided everywhere.”

Dr Garimella recommends that organisations should always have loosely coupled systems with tight integration. “The fact is that most organisations run systems with lose integration but tight coupling,” he adds. “Loose integrated means you don’t have much communication going on between different systems: piecemeal of integration here and there often overlooks how the entire processes flow, with different systems implemented at different sides.”

BPM as we know it, claims Dr Garimella, is the highest level of integration.

“Process management is a way to eat an elephant bite by bite, and digest that accordingly,” he concludes.