Business Process-centric

Information Technology:
Aligning Business and Technology
for High Performance

Point of View

Information technology (IT) is now established as a

primary—if not the primary—enabler of the business
processes that make up a company’s activity. As a
result, mastery of IT has become a key foundation
for achieving high performance. Accenture’s High
Performance Business research confirms that IT-savvy
companies are early adopters of technology and are
market leaders.
As information technology takes a more central role in business,
IT systems must become even more flexible and adaptable.
Today’s competitive global business environment requires
organizations to create new business processes rapidly to meet
changing customer demands, with fluid business models to
match. To achieve the necessary flexibility, business processes
must become uncoupled from technology.

The old paradigm, in which an
application enabled an entire business
process, has to be reformulated: the
focus will be on the business services
or processes being delivered by IT,
rather than the underlying technology
delivering them.
This fundamental shift means chief
information officers (CIOs) will be
required to create and manage
process-oriented composite
applications that are tailored to
deliver unique and highly
differentiated business capabilities
and processes. Composite applications
typically use customized, off-the-shelf
applications for processes that provide
some differentiation, and completely
outsourced applications for processes
that have been commoditized. This
strategy frees CIOs to focus on the
aspects of the business that
differentiate it from its competitors,
concentrating the IT organization’s
efforts on activities that add value to
the business and contribute to high
performance.
Making process-centric
IT possible
Two concepts underlie the emergence
of process-centric IT: service-oriented
architecture (SOA), and business
process management (BPM).
A service-oriented architecture
approach enables the division of
business functions and applications
into services based on standards.
These services may be combined in
different ways to create applications
that allow organizations to deliver
capabilities that are highly
differentiated from those of their
competitors.
Business process management is a
broad term covering a number of
emerging technologies that allow for
the design, modeling and orchestration
of business processes. From a business
process management perspective,
business processes are viewed as assets
which can be formally managed to
improve an organization’s operations
and allow it to achieve market
differentiation.
Business process management can
include business activity monitoring.
Such monitoring results in a feedback
loop that provides companies with the
means to develop their strategy,
implement their processes, measure
the value of those processes, and
then improve the processes on a
continuous basis.
By enabling business processes
through services delivered by the
IT organization, companies
can run their business process
management on top of a service-
oriented architecture. The combination
creates a business with the flexibility
to create new business processes
rapidly to meet changing customer
demands, and to streamline existing
processes to gain operational
efficiencies and reduce costs.
Challenges to the adoption
of process-centric IT
Although building a process-centric
IT makes considerable business sense,
there are a number of challenges that
could slow its adoption:
• The failure of IT and business
standards to keep pace with the
market—or, worse, the emergence
of competing standards—reduces
the benefits of interoperability and
the value of certain tools.
• The adoption of process-centric IT
as a largely IT-led initiative, with
a consequent failure to work in an
equal partnership with the business
side of the organization, may
adversely affect the design and
development of applications.
• The need for a change in mindset
and skills. The approach until
recently has been to solve particular
business problems by implementing
specific applications, so many people
view business processes as virtually
synonymous with applications.
Process-centric IT requires
organizations to take a far broader
view of processes, and for the
whole organization to become
process-centric.
• Much of the technology required to
implement process-centric IT is still
evolving. While there is a base set
of standards to work from, the tools,
language capabilities, execution
 platforms and general operability of
process-centric IT remain something
of a moving target.
• Organizations need to adopt a
holistic view of process-centric IT,
in particular to tackle the complex
issues surrounding the effective
use of processes, especially
differentiating processes. A number
of stakeholders should be involved,
since various organizational
boundaries need to be crossed,
both internal and external, and
political, governance and funding
issues need to be dealt with.
Despite these challenges, this
approach is fast gaining ground
thanks to the widespread adoption
of standards, together with general
advances in the technologies and
capabilities that make process-centric
IT viable.
Two areas where process-centric IT
is being applied are found in the
banking industry, where the
technology helps clients set up new
accounts, and in a utilities company
that uses a composite application to
procure street lights. In both cases,
what may appear to be a simple
function in practice requires the
building of process-centric composite
applications incorporating
functionality from several sources.
Taking the five-year view
In three to five years’ time, business
process management and process-
centric IT will become the standard
way of approaching software design
and software engineering. This
approach will allow an organization
to measure its processes and
understand where its performance is
being constrained—whether as a result
of bottlenecks, performance issues,
excessive demand, or any other
cause—and adjust the underlying
services which make up that process
accordingly.
By adopting the process-centric
approach, the organization will be
able to provide infrastructure
dynamically to accommodate spikes
in demand, or release infrastructure
and redeploy it elsewhere. In this way,
the enterprise becomes much more
automated and agile from both
process and IT perspectives.
The move to a process-centric
organization may not necessarily be
wholly achieved within a five-year
timeframe but will, at the very least,
be evident within particular business
units or particular areas of activity.
The promise of high
performance
Process-centric IT is, first and
foremost, a way for the IT
organization to build applications
that will deliver greater flexibility and
agility to the business—enabling high
performance. For IT professionals,
process-centric IT will mean a
fundamental change in the
application architectures they use
to construct solutions.
Specifically, process-centric IT will
mean the following:
• IT professionals and business people
alike will need to take a process
view of the business rather than an
application view.
• They will need to expand the scope
of the projects they undertake and
take a broader view of the business
landscape.
• They will also need to take a hard
look at their processes, and if they
are non-differentiating, commodity
processes, will have to seriously
consider outsourcing them or
acquiring them as packaged
applications.
• Processes that truly differentiate the
company and are unique must
receive special attention. Rather
than enabling them via customized
applications that cannot easily be
changed, they should be enabled by
using standard services that can be
reassembled as needs dictate.
There is no question that IT will
become more and more process-
centric to support the needs of
business in competitive global
markets. Process-centric IT will enable
businesses to create new capabilities
quickly and automate business
processes more effectively, thus
reducing costs and building customer
loyalty.
Accenture is helping organizations
take their IT organizations and
strategies to the next level, closely
aligning business and technology and
enhancing IT’s contribution to
the quest for high performance.
Accenture is an acknowledged leader
in service-oriented architecture, and
has decades of experience in helping
leading companies manage and
transform their business processes
to achieve competitive advantage.
A large utility in the
Western United States
implements a business
process management
center of excellence
The CEO of a large utility in the
western United States engaged
Accenture to help implement a
number of business imperatives.
Accenture helped the company to
align those imperatives with a new
logical operating model by using
methodologies, tools and software
previously developed as part of
the process engineering initiative.
This effort has drawn on deep
experience across 18 industry groups
to populate the Accenture Business
Process Repository with proven
business processes. Accenture uses
the repository to create industry-
specific solutions that drive high
performance for its clients.
Accenture then aligned the
new operating model with the
organization’s key business processes,
and based on those processes,
implemented a service-oriented
architecture together with a business
process management center of
excellence. This allowed Accenture
to document the processes within
the utility and consequently to
generate a BPM-based composite
application to deliver those processes
most effectively. This solution
combines services from SAP and other
applications, and has already delivered
a payback, measurable in dollars, from
the second month that the system
has been up and running.

Copyright © 2008 Accenture
All rights reserved.
Accenture, its logo, and
High Performance Delivered
are trademarks of Accenture.
For more information
Accenture can help IT organizations
plan and implement business process
automation that contributes to high
performance by transforming business
processes and optimizing service
delivery. For more information about
Accenture’s Business Process
Management capabilities, visit
www.accenture.com/bpm.
About Accenture
Accenture is a global management
consulting, technology services and
outsourcing company. Combining
unparalleled experience, comprehensive
capabilities across all industries and
business functions, and extensive
research on the world’s most successful
companies, Accenture collaborates
with clients to help them become
high-performance businesses and
governments. With more than 175,000
people in 49 countries, the company
generated net revenues of US$19.70
billion for the fiscal year ended
Aug. 31, 2007. Its home page is
www.accenture.com.