Financial Services in Germany Lead in BPM and SOA

This latest post on eBizQ discusses how financial services are ahead of many different industries in terms of SOA and BPM adoption. Since banks and other insurers are using SOA and BPM to achieve flexibility, agility, and transparency to drive overall business growth, the financial services industry will bounce back quicker than most.

The results come from an AG-sponsored survey of German operations which 64% of the financial companies surveyed viewed IT as a strategic resource. These results are monumental in the case of BPM, but what are similar results here in the US?

BPM to Help Increase Efficiency if 2009

The Metastorm News Blog recently highlighted that the results of the Gartner EXP CIO report shows that IT budgets will most likely remain flat in North America and Europe and slightly increase in Latin America and Asia/Pacific.

The results of the survey also show that senior executives will try to reduce enterprise costs by changing business processes and not by cutting costs directly. Business process management is on the top list of priorities for CIOs since these solutions can help improve efficiencies.

Human Interactivity is a Huge Problem for BPM

I came across this post on the Action Blog that discusses how the human factor and human interaction is a big problem for business process management. Ayal Steiner explains how human work is:

• Dynamic
• Tacit
• Ad hoc
• Crossins boundaries and silos
• Saturated with peer to peer interaction

Workflow that involves a human element does not fit into this rigid process. Does anyone have an examples of how they have gotten around this?

What BPM can do in the current economic situation

Elise Golding recently shared with WhatPC? what business process management can do for a company in this current time of economic crisis. She points out that business processes are at the core of a business, and now is a great time to start controlling the processes. She also outlines some of the major activities that go on in BPM program management: Sponsorship, Objectives and Outcome, Education and Training, Opportunity Analysis, and BPM Programme Road Map.

For a more in-depth look, read the article here.

The Enterprise: Serious Games?

You might ask what does video games and employee training have to do with each other, and then most likely you would find absolutely no answer for it. I came across this post on ZDNet from Larry Dignan which discusses how Forrester Research seems to believe that ‘serious gaming’ will likely come to an enterprise near us very soon. Here’s the full report from Forrester Research. So what’s the business value derived from video games in businesses?

Forrester notes that serious gaming is being used by emergency responders training through scenarios of terrorist attacks, university staff for its business process management game, and Cisco, Hilton Inn, and Johnson & Johnson to teach things like math, customer service skills, and drug development. Interesting enough, this is what Forrester mentions regarding proving ROI:

How do you prove their business worth and ROI? This is the hardest of the five questions facing serious games. For some games, such as advergames, it’s easy to see the link to ROI: For example, Burger King’s three Xbox 360 titles developed by Blitz Games Studios ranked among the top-selling Xbox games over the winter holidays in 2006 and were credited with the company’s 41% profit increase in its second quarter. However, such a 1 to 1 relationship between a game and a desired outcome is often hard to tease out in something as nebulous as diversity training. And for those deploying games, divining whether their target audience internalized the lesson instead of just becoming good at playing the game is paramount.

What’s your take on enterprise gaming? Is there really any business value to this practice?