Achieving Agility Through Communication-Enable
Business P
d
rocesses
The Agility Angle: Agility is defined as "the ability of an organization to sense environmental change and respond efficiently and effectively to that change." Human communications is at the heart of all three of these functions. Communication-enabled business processes (CEBPs) allow the communication functions to be tightly integrated directly with the systems and applications that the individuals are using.
Key Findings
• Human latency (the time it takes people to respond to events) reduces an enterprise's ability to respond and to be agile. The integration of business processes with CEBP can reduce this latency.
• Best practices for identifying, designing and deploying CEBP are starting to develop. 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.
• The increasingly mobile workforce is a key area in which CEBP can offer improvements.
• Metrics for measuring the benefits of CEBP are a particular challenge, because 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.
• Deployments of 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 (such as voice over Internet Protocol [VoIP] and Session Initiation Protocol [SIP]), the barriers will be reduced, and more-advanced applications will emerge.
Predictions
• Through 2010, 80 percent of businesses that have deployed CEBP will obtain significant competitive and revenue differentiation because of it (0.8 probability).
• Through 2010, 10 percent of the business processes that have been communication-enabled will experience a 50 percent efficiency improvement (0.6 probability).
• By 2008, leading unified communications solution vendors will incorporate tools designed to enable CEBP (0.8 probability).
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.
• Develop a software application group that has communications experience. ANALYSIS
1.0 What You Need to Know
To successfully create an agile enterprise, executives must radically alter how they harness their
communications to create more-effective business processes. These changes will result in faster response times, more accurate interactions and better social context for the communications. Below we define CEBP, we review the major drivers and enablers of CEBP; we outline a step-by-step approach to transforming creating CEBP and, finally, we provide some examples.
2.0 What Is CEBP?
Traditionally, communications have been managed directly by individuals entirely separately from any business applications they are using. However, in many cases, workflow would be improved by direct integration between the business application and the related communication functions. Gartner defines CEBPs as business systems that are able to directly integrate with communication systems and networks. These are used to support interpersonal and person-to-system interactions. We define two types of CEBPs:
1. CEBPs that are initiated by a person – These are communications activities that are initiated manually from a business application by an individual. For instance, an application that shows a problem condition on the screen may also show a list of who is available to solve it and may also allow direct contact of that individual by double-clicking on his or her name. So, in this case, the application has been communication-enabled to speed, simplify and make the communication task more effective.
2. CEBPs that are initiated by an application – These are communication activities that are initiated automatically by a business application in response to an external event or change. For instance, when an alarm is triggered, the application can send notifications, and if no response is received within a given time period, escalate the problem. Another example would be an application that automatically schedules a meeting at a convenient time for participants in response to an event. The following are examples of CEBPs. Without CEBP, an assistant at the dentist's office might scan the appointment calendar daily to remind people of their upcoming appointments. The assistant would then manually dial or send e-mail reminders to patients. In this case, the communication systems are entirely detached from the business systems, and, thus, are not CEBP. Alternatively, the assistant might have been able to click on the patient's name in the calendar application to dial the phone or send an e-mail. In this case it is CEBP, because the calendar system, the phone system and the e-mail system are integrated; but note that in this case the automated action is initiated by a person. If the application automatically scanned the
calendar each day at 5 p.m. and sent out reminders, then it would be a CEBP that is initiated by an application. In a more-complex scenario, the application might also consider elements such as contact preferences, history of "no shows," or even an individual presence, in determining the best approach to remind people of upcoming appointments.
The use of CEBP has historically been limited because of the complexity of integrating applications with communication systems. Those applications that were deployed usually focused on only a single
communications channel and basic functionality, such as sending e-mail alerts. In addition, until recently, some significant barriers existed: integrating live voice with applications required computer-telephony integration (CTI), and the awareness of presence information (the availability and state) of individuals was
extremely limited. For this reason, most CEBP applications focused on e-mail and Short Message Service (SMS) integrations and did not use any presence information.
3.0 Major Drivers and Enablers of CEBP
The primary drivers of communication change are a) to improve the speed and accuracy of interactions, b) to improve the human quality of the interaction, c) to improve the flexibility of use and integration, and d) to reduce the cost. The improvements in speed and accuracy are directly tied to tangible results. Flexibility benefits relate to integration, mobility and infrastructure reuse and are tied to both tangible and intangible benefits. Human quality improvements are more difficult to quantify but play a critical role in success when personal contact or social context is important – for instance, a video call allows more nonverbal social cues than other channels. Cost is often a trade-off for speed, accuracy, flexibility and quality.
The recent advances that enable the current generation of change to enterprise communications are the following:
• Convergence of communications around Internet standards – This enables a single network approach (TCP/IP) to be leveraged across all media (for example, VoIP), and these can be integrated with applications using common standards such as SIP. A major result of this is that users and applications can now select, on a case-by-case basis, which channel is optimal for any specific task – instant messaging (IM), voice, Web-collaboration, video, e-mail and so forth.
• The move of communication applications to open software platforms – This allows easier integration of communications and business applications. Previously, communication applications were on specialized equipment, for instance automatic call distributor (ACD). A major result is that business applications can directly control communications applications. For instance, a conference call with shared data can be triggered in response to an exception incident.
• The proliferation of wireless communications – The adoption of wireless voice and data
technology has resulted in demand for "anywhere, any time" communications and an expectation of mobility by users. A major result is that individuals can now immediately respond to events, even if they are in the field or away from their desk.
3.1 A Method for CEBP
Identifying and changing how business processes can be communication-enabled is difficult: No two enterprises use the same approach, the technology options are evolving rapidly, the concepts behind CEBP are new, and best practices are not well-defined. However, while working with Gartner clients in early deployments, several common threads are emerging. Below we outline the approaches that appear to be most effective. These processes fit into a classic deployment cycle: identify requirements and needs (CEBP discovery), identify metrics for evaluating success (CEBP metrics), tests and evaluations (CEBP evaluations) and, finally, full deployment. As with most applications, this cycle is then repeated with incremental
refinements and expanded deployments. 3.2 CEBP Discovery
The initial, and often most difficult, task is identifying which business processes would benefit from being integrated more tightly with communications. This step is called discovery, because it requires a careful
review of business tasks, searching for those offering the most potential. Success involves bringing together individuals knowledgeably in different forms of communications with those intimate with the details of day-to-day business operations. Together these individuals can, over the course of a few days, identify the major opportunities. The following three approaches have been used for discovery:
• Role-based CEBP discovery – In this approach the roles of individuals in the enterprise are reviewed and the communication tasks or requirements of these roles are identified. These become candidates for change. The goal is to define a "typical" role and how communications could more effectively be used in that role or job function. Although not all employees may be described by each role, it is important that the role define large groups of individuals. Roles common to many different enterprises include: mobile sales professional, telecommuter, field worker, and managers who perform frequent authorizations away from their office. In each case, these roles may benefit by reviewing the communication dependencies in the tasks that the workers perform and in the applications they use.
• Process flow CEBP discovery – In this approach, the major business processes in the enterprise are reviewed and the communication tasks and dependencies are identified. These become candidates for change. Often, these occur across business areas. For instance, in a hospital, there are often
communication requirements between workflows performed by nurses and those performed by housekeeping or laboratory personnel.
• Task-based CEBP discovery – Each process and role has specific tasks to accomplish. Sometimes enterprises can identify common tasks. This, then, makes it easier to offer support to individuals who perform those tasks. Gartner clients have found this approach particularly useful for identifying common patterns of mobility. Each category has a distinct set of information, device and networking needs, as well as support issues and work patterns. Enterprises recognizing categories can better decide when to adopt mobile solutions for each category and how to serve each more
cost-effectively. Annual cost estimates are based on three-year operational costs. These include hardware, network charges, support, software, security and mobile middleware, and they can then also be applied as needed. Common tasks include urgent alerts, notifications (or messages), forms-completion tasks, data access while away from desk, specialized call routing, approvals while traveling, unexpected conference calls and handling exceptions.
3.3 CEBP Metrics
Whenever possible define the needed metrics before initiating a project, these metrics can then be used for before and after deployment evaluation. Measuring CEBPs often requires the definition of new methods because communication activities are measured differently from the way that business processes are measured. In addition, the two domains are usually entirely disconnected. As a result, it is difficult to correlate the two sets of data.
Communication systems often offer only operational metrics, such as the number of e-mails sent, number of calls made and average delay before a message is delivered. Business metrics are often collected only in large, end-of-month aggregates, such as revenue totals. Human tasks often go entirely unmeasured, and when they are measured, only weekly or monthly totals are produced. However, to be most useful, communication functions must be tied to the business function and human task that was supported. For example, useful business functions that may be related to communications functions include time to repair, number of and value of contracts sold, or increased customer satisfaction.
Methods for measuring CEBP include surveys of users, independent reviews, (stopwatch, self-reporting and so forth), data from established workflow reports, and data from business metrics (such as sales, production or service).
CEBP can be particularly effective at reducing the "human latency" involved in accomplishing tasks; however, this metric is difficult to capture and use. When designing CEBP, consider how and where human latency can be measured, as well as how this latency affects underlying business functions. For instance, if CEBP enables an engineer to fix a fault on a production line 30 minutes sooner, the benefit is not just a 30-minute savings of the engineer's time (although that is certainly useful). The more significant value is in restarting the production line, which is likely to prevent a delay amounting to thousands of dollars per hour. 3.4 CEBP Evaluations
Although the overall process for developing and evaluating CEBP applications is similar to that used for new software communications applications, several characteristics of CEPB are unique. This is because many CEBP functions support collaborative work, because work habits involving some of the new communication technologies are not clearly defined, and because some individuals and demographics more readily adopt new communication options. Once useful areas for CEBP have been discovered and metrics for evaluating them have been defined, enterprises should plan an extended evaluation and tuning period. This will allow the human factors to be addressed. Additionally, as the options are better understood, individuals will innovate and find new and unexpected ways to adapt the processes, such as those involving mobile communications, such as IM and SMS. Enterprises should expect and encourage this innovation and experimentation, because it often leads to the discovery of additional and improved work processes. 4.0 Examples of CEBP Deployment
A simple example of a CEBP is the initiation of an SMS or e-mail alert by business activity monitoring (BAM) middleware. Historically, the ability of BAM middleware to communicate with individuals in response to events has been limited, as has its ability to manage communications in real time. As a result, the communication solutions have been very basic and have had a limited ability to respond when an exception must be handled. More-complex solutions are now being deployed that integrate multichannel notification systems with presence information that indicates how the individual can be reached. These solutions also support a personal profile that the individual's preferred contact methods are used, if possible. Rules for handling exceptions and no-response escalations are also defined. Additional information on BAM is described in document reference.
Credit card authorization provides a more-complex example. Credit card transactions are authenticated at the same time as the bank processes a merchant authorization request. On receipt of a potential fraudulent purchase, an outbound call is established to the customer, and the process of authentication is automated using speech processing and voice authentication technology.
In some cases, presence and communications can be combined with desktop applications to improve speed or to simplify the workflow. For instance, in one group of order processing applications, "smart tags" were used to indicate the presence and availability of individuals listed as having created the work order. When the cursor was placed over an individual's name, the availability of that individual was indicated. So the order-processing clerk could immediately contact someone (by IM, e-mail or phone) if he or she had a
question processing the order.
Work with Gartner clients indicates a multitude of opportunities in most business areas. Any area in which there is human latency because of a lack of communication or unavailable information about an event may present an opportunity. Good places to start are in the following work processes areas:
• Working with suppliers and partners – Look for opportunities in order tracking and processing and in work that must go across or outside of preintegrated data systems.
• Processes in marketing and sales – CEBP implements agility in order approval and processing, event planning and scheduling, locators and, generally, a broad range of sales force automation applications.
• Work in the development and production areas – Tasks such as coordination, production sequence and problem escalation/notification may benefit from CEBP.
The service-and-support areas have already been significantly changed by the use of mobile technologies. Mobile devices and applications can also be directly integrated into business process. Areas of opportunity include field-service automation, product delivery, repair, and dispatch scheduling and confirmations. The common thread among the examples is the ability to improve the enterprise's agility though the direct integration of communication functionality with businesses processes. The result is improved ability to sense and respond in a timely and effective way to business requirements.
Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00137838, Bern Elliot, Steve Blood, Bob Hafner, 4 April 2006
© 2006 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction and distribution of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. Although Gartner's research may discuss legal issues related to the information technology business, Gartner does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner shall have no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the information contained herein or for interpretations thereof. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice.
