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Government and Business Process Transformation Projects - What’s Wrong with Current Efforts?
By Doug Allen, CRM, CDIA+ | March 24, 2008
I have seen substantial investments of tax dollars made as State and Local Agencies focus on improving existing business processes, and as they seek to ensure that key governmental services applications are improved to render better services to constituent groups. However, many of these efforts fail to achieve the high impact, long-lasting results that agencies set as their ambitious goals.What are the reasons for the frequent failures to achieve success? There are several, but one that I believe is often overlooked is that agencies view process improvement or process transformation as a “one time effort”. They often fail to appreciate the need for the continuous improvement of their processes. Thus, agencies are prone to taking actions that allow them to:
- Document current business processes
- Identify weaknesses, gaps and areas requiring improvement, and subsequently
- Launch new processes based on newly developed system applications
Where’s the weakness? The weakness rests in the thought that a single iteration of a new or “to be” process is sufficient. Thus, rather than acquiring advanced Business Process Management (BPM) suites…and then building applications around those tools, agencies tend to rely on contractors who build one-time, one-off solutions that embed some process management capabilities, but that do not allow agencies to:
- Model and simulate alternative processes
- Actively Manage existing processes to shorten process cycle times and to appropriately monitor process goals and business activities
- Apply advanced process analytics to see where bottlenecks are developing, and then to apply additional modeling and simulation to eliminate such bottlenecks.
There are outstanding suites available for use, some of which would allow government organizations to operate with as much or with greater efficiency than any private sector firm. However, until these agencies demand that contractors incorporate such suites into their proposed solutions, it is unlikely that we will see government agencies achieve the results that the desire. Contractors, for their part are apt to build solutions that “encourage” or require agencies to continue to return to them for future services, as business requirements or statutory requirements create the need for additional changes in process.
One agency that has broken the constraints of that particular mold is the Los Angeles County Information Systems Advisory Body. As that group sought to build a solution to automate a key law enforcement application for the collection of DNA evidence, they sought to acquire a solution that they could implement, and that they could operate over time. As a result of their work, the Los Angeles County Information Systems Advisory Body and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department now work with a solution that will serve them well beyond an initial deployment.
Topics: R.I.M. Technology |
