(upbeat music)
- The best way, I feel, for institutions
to demonstrate business process management
is through the development of an analytics
and data sharing program.
What this allows the institution to do
is to instead of looking down at their lines of business
and concentrating on those individual lines of business,
it allows them to look up.
And now they start to look across the institution.
When you look across the institution
about how data moves through its lifecycle,
that enables you to attack
and deal with business process issues
without saying it
and thus bringing that value to the institution
through enablement of data sharing.
- So the value in business process improvements
really gets demonstrated
when you can show a changed process,
you can eliminate tasks that are not adding value
and you can provide better service.
It goes back to better, faster, cheaper
and the more you can find
a specific project
or specific area that has those benefits,
the better sort of a pilot effort that is to demonstrate.
And I think it's really important
to be able to identify it
and then to be able to execute on it
and communicate that to the campus community.
And as you find success,
that gains success elsewhere.
It's important to be thinking about your business processes
in alignment with what you're trying to do
as an institution.
Strategy suggests broad strokes
that you're trying to undertake
and directions you're going in.
And business process is very focused on specific areas
that need to be improved.
So blending specific business process improvements
with strategic direction is really important.
And that's something that is determined
by the vision that you set.
And that's probably the place to start
is in setting vision for where the organization is going.
- The bottom line in that question
is value proposition.
How do you show that?
And it is all about the metrics.
So one of the things that we have noticed
over many, many years of doing this
is that reporting tends to be
the last thing anybody thinks about in any project.
Any process improvement, software implementation,
whatever it is, it's the last thing anybody thinks about
and yet it is key to the success of the project,
the successful use of the tool,
the successful implementation of the process.
Getting folks to adopt process change
and new technology.
So you really have to start with the end in mind.
It's trite but it's true.
You need to start out with what are the metrics
that you need to design to show whoever it is
you need to show that there's value
at the end of the yellow brick road.
The other thing is the tangential value proposition.
So you will always get out of a process improvement
this thing takes less time, it has less errors.
But that means that you're feeding resource time
back into your day,
which means there are other things
that you're able to tackle
because they're not having to spend time
doing this other stuff over here.
So you also need to look for those opportunities
and measurements and be able to show
that hey, before we did this process improvement
we didn't have this thing that we've now accomplished
as a result.
- Truly a comparison of the level of effort
and that goes into a process
as you think about it, from end-to-end
or from origination to disposition
of whatever the transaction might be,
both before and after.
And by contrasting those,
I think you get a really good sense
of what the value might be of that.
To do that, it's not easy
but it is often worth while
particularly in those situations
where you have very distributed processes
that may be originating in
an academic department, in an institute.
But understanding who all is involved
and what the level of effort is they're applying to that
is a significant factor.
So you really have to gather this information
almost originally through surveys
or whatever other means you might have.
And then through that process,
identify how much effort
and when you combine that with cost,
how much costs are involved in that business process.
When those are distributed
and when they vary across the academic units
or the distributed units,
that those costs can be astoundingly high.
And to go about improving the process
and making changes where it is more cost effective
can result in significant,
either savings or reallocation of that effort
to those things that are more critical
to the mission of the institution,
structure, research, service,
patient care in some cases.
So I think that's a way to demonstrate value
is do the before and after,
and really do your homework
in terms of what those costs might be.
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