Build a More Agile Business with IBM

fact sheet Vendor: IBM Corporation (www.ibm.com) About IBM Smart Work About IBM Corporation vendor resources Lotus Notes Demo Does your company need a smarter way to work? With the capabilities of IBM Lotus Notes and Domino 8, your people will be able to communicate, collaborate, and share information from virtually anywhere. Business Agility Now: Establishing a Dynamic Business Network Through Highly Agile, Interconnected Processes It's a dynamic business world—can your organization keep up? Unfortunately, while business networks need to become more dynamic and fluid, most organizations, processes, and systems are not evolving at the same rate. Organizations need more agile, interconnected business processes that enable your company to establish dynamic business networks to fully take advantage of a smarter planet. Smart Work for a Smarter Planet: Empower People and Embrace Change Discover how businesses are evolving the way employees work together to meet new business demands by fostering deeper collaborative relationships to create a sustainable advantage. Smarter Ways to Make Smarter Products Smarter Products is about creating products that integrate into our lives, to work in a more personal way, and to adapt to our individual needs.

Your customers demand lightning-fast responsiveness and increasing levels of personalization in service. If you can't meet their needs, they will go elsewhere. Your partners rapidly change, shift business models, or disappear entirely. New global competitors continually appear on the scene. Regulations and compliance demands shape and reshape the way you do business every day.

To achieve a more dynamic business network, businesses need agility. But is your organization up to the task? Most organizations, processes, and systems are not evolving quickly enough. Traditional siloed applications hinder process performance and limit the flow of information across business. Rigid IT systems and communications networks keep people from accessing the expertise and information they need. We need more agile, interconnected business processes that enable organizations to become dynamic business networks.

Together, We Can Work Smarter By giving your people the tools and resources to work more effectively, you are giving your business the opportunity to operate more efficiently.

Organizations are recognizing the need to reinvent their processes and IT infrastructures for increased agility. What makes a business process more agile? First of all, agile business processes are explicit—they're documented, understood, and agreed upon. They are also visible, making process performance available in real time, measurable, and actionable. Agile business processes are easily changed, with tasks, activities, and end points that are flexible and quickly adjusted. Above all, the business can achieve agility with process information contextualized by role and extended to all stakeholders, as well as with processes that are governed to ensure compliance with business and regulatory requirements and executed as designed.

But for processes to be truly agile and to benefit today's business, they must be integrated into a reusable IT infrastructure and interconnected across an organization's business network. It is only when information can flow freely within and across processes—giving people access to the right information at the right time—that an organization can deliver a dynamic business network.

By remodeling business processes to be more agile:

• Organizations can discover new insights that can lead to better business outcomes
• Companies can increase the value of business interactions with better access to information
• Organizations can optimize workflows and IT infrastructures to save money and increase productivity

When aligned, business strategy, BPM, and service-oriented architecture (SOA)—specifically those portions related to connecting and integrating the pieces of a business network—are the engines that can drive agility in your business and allow you to achieve a dynamic business network. Creating agile, dynamic, and optimized processes today builds a foundation for innovation in the future.

Let's take a look at how agile business processes can help your business, and how IBM can help you get there.

A variety of solutions from IBM can help you discover new insights into your business by allowing you to deconstruct processes that span different organizational levels. You can use those new insights to rebuild processes to be more agile and effective within a dynamic business network—positioning your company for innovation within an ever-changing environment.

Finally, you can extend those processes across your entire business network—across your organization, and to your customers, partners, and suppliers—integrating them with business applications and processes, regardless of the industry-specific data, messaging, and communications requirements.

BPM BlueWorks
A key first step in understanding your business processes is process discovery and design. IBM BPM BlueWorks, a cloud-based BPM offering for business users, is an easy on-ramp to BPM—offering process and strategy tools that help organizations on the path to business agility. Business leaders can leverage prebuilt BPM and industry-specific content and contributions from peers, BPM experts, and users around the world to move quickly from strategy mapping to process execution. The site includes a content library with information on strategies, trends, capabilities, and best practices; tools to create and capture BPM business designs; and a community where participants can share designs, advice and ideas.

IBM WebSphere Business Modeler Software
IBM WebSphere Business Modeler software is the tool for documenting and understanding existing processes. It can help you visualize, document, and model business processes for understanding and process execution, enabling you to rework older business processes into more agile ones or create new processes from scratch. The software enables users to make informed decisions about deployment with advanced analysis and simulation capabilities based on modeled and actual data. Business analysts can visualize and identify bottlenecks to better optimize processes. This robust modeling tool can then turn these process models into executable business processes for automation.

IBM WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition Software
To realize the full potential of business processes, organizations with diverse, constantly evolving IT environments need comprehensive BPM capabilities, including modeling and simulation, rapid deployment, and real-time business process monitoring and analysis. IBM WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition includes all of these capabilities and organizes SOA and BPM infrastructure into shareable, reusable intelligent business services, for a fully realized SOA vision of architectural agility and reuse.

IBM WebSphere Industry Content Pack Assets
IBM WebSphere Industry Content Packs provide prebuilt assets to speed and enhance BPM solution delivery from modeling to deployment to monitoring—including maps and models, service schemas and interfaces, key performance indicators (KPIs), business glossaries, and end-to-end solution examples. Based on industry standards, they can help to reduce risk and increase consistency and reuse across the different lines of business within an enterprise and are available for banking, healthcare, insurance, industrial product life-cycle management and telecommunications. The industry content packs are a core part of the IBM Industry Frameworks, which combine the power of award-winning IBM software with industry-specific assets and best practices specifically configured to meet an industry's specific challenges and needs.

IBM WebSphere Transformation Extender Software
IBM WebSphere Transformation Extender software increases the speed and reliability with which SOA applications and services can be extended beyond organizational walls to partners, suppliers, and customers. For industry-specific data solutions, enterprises can leverage predefined WebSphere Transformation Extender Industry Packs, including healthcare, financial services, insurance, and electronic data interchange (EDI). Complex industry transformations can be deployed quickly, with relative ease, helping to increase transaction volume while providing additional flexibility and fostering adaptability to industry changes. WebSphere Transformation Extender software helps remove risk from projects where regulatory bodies or industry service providers require strict conformance to mandatory and advisory guidelines.

IBM WebSphere Business Monitor Software
When business leaders can link operational metrics to business strategy, their decision-making ability improves. WebSphere Business Monitor software provides real-time insight into business processes, presented in easy-to-read role-based business dashboards. Users can integrate existing business activity monitoring capabilities into WebSphere Business Monitor dashboards, along with other BPM, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and legacy applications, for more holistic process management. And the software offers an embedded metrics library of more than 800 open standard KPIs.

Working smarter and achieving a dynamic business network begins with aligning business processes and IT infrastructure with business strategy to ensure business objectives are met. Organizations must collaborate across business and IT to ensure all elements of the business network are driving in the right direction. Once they achieve agility, they'll be part of a smarter planet; working smarter to adapt and respond dynamically to marketplace change.

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