In my previous blog I had promised to continue this series and to take you through the entire methodology for CEBT.
In line with this promise I present to you today the case for CEBT – Why is CEBT important to a key decision maker within an organization?
Today in many companies the business processes that run the organization are documented, modeled and automated. These processes run a series of automated tasks and invariably pause at tasks that require human intervention. These tasks require either a single or a team of human participants to collaborate, analyze the data presented, apply analytical thinking and then arrive at a business decision. This decision is then input into the automated process and the process is triggered to continue. It is these tasks that influence lag and also introduce inefficiencies into the overall business process.
Now let us look at why this is so. The human intervention tasks have the following requirements in the process context
- Need to identify other experts within the organization whose counseling is required to complete the task or sub-process. Here the lag is caused by the human user manually trying to locate the expert within the organization
- Connecting with and talking to the experts or team participants and collaborating on the decision making process. Here the lag is caused by manually trying to locate and connect with the participants and assembling a quorum decision.
- Persistence in getting the process or task participants to arrive at a decision. In many cases the tasks may have to be delegated or escalated to other participants or simply needs to be persistently executed by the participant to completion. In these cases inefficiencies and lag are influenced by manual escalations and delegations and by what we call the organizational loop.
- Consistency in the communications relayed to multiple layers of process participants. In many cases the message or business event needs to be relayed in a consistent manner to multiple process participants. Any deviation could turn out expensive for the organization. In these cases manually relaying the information can be inefficient and cause for errors and hence cost
- Accountability: In most organizations accountability of the transactions within the process context is an extremely important consideration. Hence the human intervention tasks in a business process need to be tuned to provide higher accountability and auditing capabilities.
The above requirements when not addressed adequately give rise to process variance that in turn leads to high costs, low customer satisfaction, low revenue attainment, erosion of competitive value and hence affected organizational performance.
With CEBT, the human intervention tasks can be
- Automated – both in terms of locating the experts within an organization and also automating the contact with the single or group participants.
- Made Persistent through Timed notifications, automatic escalations and delegations
- Made Consistent through automated messages broadcast to the population of participants while also enabling responses and acknowledgements, automatic collaboration sessions that bring the key process participants together, etc
- Made Accountable through enhanced and automated logging and reporting of the business events, notifications, responses and collaboration sessions.
Hence CEBT drives strategic value for an enterprise by
- Increasing operational and business efficiency
- Improving customer satisfaction
- Enhancing competitive advantage
- Driving down costs due to process variance
- Increasing revenue attainment by increased transactional efficiency
- Improving organizational accountability and reducing regulatory pressures
The above diagram shows the enterprise key decision maker’s realm of concern. It follows that by being able to positively impact competitive advantage, revenue and cost savings as also process efficiency, CEBT lies high in this realm of concern or priority.
In the next blog I will present to you a business process and then describe to you how to change it into a CEBT flow and the value it drives.
