Today’s ongoing economic uncertainty is casting a long shadow across global business. Yet even as companies cut spending and adjust their forecasts downward, the most successful organizations see the downturn not as a crisis, but as a chance to reinvent themselves as more agile enterprises. These organizations are mapping out ways to work more effectively and efficiently while looking beyond short-term survival to capitalize on opportunities over the long-term. This intelligent approach to business requires that organizations adjust to constantly shifting market dynamics and optimize their operational costs.

The best way to get a business to work smarter is to structure its processes to support operational flexibility, which enables it to compete in a dynamic and intensely competitive marketplace. To accomplish this, an organization needs clear visibility into all of its processes, as well as business events that can affect these processes. Dynamic process changes, based on business rules and the ability to apply actionable insights that capitalize on institutional knowledge of changing business scenarios are crucial. Having solutions in place that incorporate industry-specific expertise to help optimize business processes provide a real competitive advantage.

The resulting environment will foster exceptional collaboration among colleagues, partners, and customers; and in turn deliver greater overall efficiency and organization agility.

Many organizations are building out their business processes using IBM’s Smart SOA as a foundation to effectively connect people, processes and technology that will propel forward these changes. IBM continues to advance its thought leadership in this arena through new additions to its BPM suite and enhancements to existing solutions.

At IMPACT 2009 in May, IBM introduced the hosted, cloud-based BlueWorks, a combination of strategy and business process tools that provide application testing and development for validating a process implementation. With BlueWorks, users can work together with on business strategies and processes using pre-built process maps, or create their own process map and then test it in the SOA Sandbox.

Based on early customer experiences, IBM estimates a business can cut out as much as 50 to 75 percent of capital expenditures and licensing fees using this cloud-based environment versus a traditional testing environment. And the savings don’t stop there. IBM projects a cloud-based test environment can help a company cut out 30 to 50 percent of operating and labor costs. But the biggest benefit may come from the potential quality improvements that come from the 15 to 30 percent decrease in configuration problems and ill-conceived process models.

IBM also announced improvements to its WebSphere Business Events (WBE) processing system at IMPACT 2009, including WBE dashboards for role-based business spaces that expand on and simplify event exchange. IBM also rolled out new widgets for role-based business process management. These widgets help users perform their duties based on their specific responsibilities, whether they are business leaders (better comprehension of existing processes for optimization), business users (more effective task management), or IT administrators (solution management and monitoring).

Separately, IBM improved on existing vertical solutions and added new ones to help businesses more quickly and accurately automate industry-standard processes. These include new retail performance analytics and a new Intelligent Transportation Management solution. IBM also enhanced both its existing framework for telecom providers, with added dynamic service creation, and the framework for healthcare concerns, which now incorporates collaborative decision-making functions. Additionally, ILOG, an IBM company, revealed plans to update its business rules management system (BRMS), optimization, supply chain management, and visualization solutions.

Each of these solutions provides support for the savvy business practices organizations need to successfully compete on the world stage. Through this intelligent approach to work, organizations can deliver value and business results, even in a rocky and unstable economic terrain.

Archive of Articles by Amy Larsen DeCarlo