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Modernising business processes
Formalising what may previously have been ad-hoc business processes is a key issue when differentiating medium-sized organisations from small ones. Yet figuring out which processes need to be formalised or modernised, and in what priority, is a difficult task for leaders of medium organisations.
Modernising business processes is a new white paper from M Institute that seeks to provide some fresh thinking on the business process challenges that medium organisations face so that they are better equipped to make the judgements on how to develop and grow in a way that takes advantage of their growing maturity in the exploitation of technology, innovation and new opportunities in the business landscape.
The paper explores four drivers that give momentum to changing business processes in an enterprise:
- Small businesses are characterised by ad hoc processes, while medium-sized organisations tend to have formalised processes. Negotiating this transition from ad hoc to formalised processes is important in the life of the organisation if it wishes to scale and grow. So as businesses mature, they tend to think about ways in which previously manual or ad hoc processes can evolve into formal processes.
- While all of the business drivers that cause processes to change are present at most times to some extent or another, one particular issue never goes away: natural changes occur to the organisation that compel change. There may have been a time when a business would have substantially the same processes from one decade to the next, but that day seems to be past. Now, the expectation among leaders of medium businesses is that their organisation would continually change to respond to movements in the marketplace, their own capabilities, and the capabilities of their business partners.
- A European innovation study found that 40% of the European companies they studied indicated that their ability to innovate is greatly enhanced by IT, plus a quarter found that the organisation strategically depends on IT for effective innovation. The wider impact of the digital revolution is in the way in which organisations can break down their activities into core processes which, through the use of enabling digital technologies, can be shared easily, speeded up and scaled up. Processes that are manual or based on the movement of paper are truly single-user, whereas digital processes enable any number of participants in a process to do their part without compromising others or holding them up.
- The arrival of digital technologies has enabled the evolution of business processes in most companies, but the ones that have taken these technologies furthest are those that have revolutionised their business models. Some business gurus argue that it isn’t companies that compete with each other anymore – the real competition is between business models. A business model is really a collection of processes skilfully assembled in such a way that the output of the model is delivered as effectively and efficiently as possible. It is this sort of process thinking that is at the heart of business model change.
The Modernising business processes paper is from M Institute and has received support from Microsoft, which has provided access to a number of their customers as case studies in the development of this report. Microsoft holds the view that technology is just one of the many elements that support business process change, but one that has growing importance in determining the success of the modern medium business.
The report features case studies from three leading medium enterprises: Audio Partnership, Jenks, and JJ Food Service.
Download M Institute's Modernising business processes report here.
