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Everything a business does is based on processes-whether it's something as basic as requisitioning office furnishings for a new employee, or something as complex as validating and rolling out a new software application to every box in the company. But all too often, managers don't appreciate the value of formalizing core business processes-or even recognize the many supporting processes that could also benefit from formalization. By failing to recognize, refine and formalize processes, too many enterprises squander productivity, waste IT resources, undermine audit requirements, violate regulations and ultimately hurt the bottom line.
LANDesk Process Manager works with your existing LANDesk management solutions, third-party tools, business applications and manual processes to automate all your IT processes, end to end-leaving IT staff free to concentrate on the strategic work that moves the company ahead. This paper shows how LANDesk Process Manager can allow you to design processes once, automate them everywhere and refine them as needed-saving money, ensuring compliance and keeping even the most complex processes running reliably.
Introduction: Why Traditional Process Analysis Doesn't Work
Business and IT managers alike understand that they need to standardize, and ideally minimize, the labor required to get any given task done in order to fully exploit the potential value of that labor. However, their employees, and even the managers themselves, often don't understand the chain of dependencies involved in completing a particular process. They're essentially relearning or reinventing individual steps each time they're called upon to facilitate a process.
For decades, process consultants have made a pretty good living helping companies map out and refine their processes on a conference room whiteboard. The drill usually proceeds like this: A specific problem is chosen for analysis; the current process for solving it is analyzed in the form of a flow chart; inefficiencies in the process are identified; and a more efficient process is proposed and charted. Then it's on to the next problem, and so on, until the consultant's time expires. The customer is then left with the task of implementing the new process improvements and finding an effective way to enforce them on a daily basis. But look at all the drawbacks of this traditional approach. You only cover the most conspicuous processes, and miss identifying perhaps hundreds of other commonplace processes that are draining resources on a day to day. There's only one process evaluation, with no provision for continuous refinement based on actual experience and results. Once the whiteboard is erased, people quickly forget what they've learned. There's no ongoing audit to ensure that reengineered processes are doing the job as intended. And even if management has formally implemented a process, rank-and-file employees may ignore it, flying under the radar and continuing to do things the way they always have.
Toward a Deeper Understanding: How Processes Interrelate
What's needed is a far more structured approach, one that's comprehensive enough to identify, refine and enforce virtually every business and IT process in your organization-and orchestrate multiple processes together to achieve an overarching goal.
Think of an analogy: the task of parallel parking a car. Parking is a hard task for new drivers to learn because it involves several different processes that must be performed in the right manner and order to achieve the goal successfully. Shifting gears between forward and reverse is one process; accelerating and braking at the right time is another; sensing the location of other cars and the curb in relation to your own car is another; turning the wheel to achieve the optimum turning radius is another; setting the parking brake is another; and so on.
If these were business or IT processes, a company would likely analyze them all separately and deploy point solutions to manage each one. But what's obvious from the car example-and totally missing from most enterprise process management-is that all the processes are interrelated. Each maneuver must happen in the right sequence, and they all contribute to one overriding goal: to get the vehicle safely into an available parking spot, and do it correctly on the first try.
A Paradigm Shift: Full Integration and Automation
Cars are already available on the market that know how to integrate and sequence all these processes, parking themselves automatically at the push of a button. In the coming years, you'll see cars that automate and link even more processes that today are manual-planning optimum routes, avoiding road hazards, performing self-maintenance, and all but driving themselves while you simply set the destination and enjoy the ride.
What if business and IT processes could achieve the same degree of integration and automation, freeing you as much as possible from manual intervention so you can focus on more strategic work?
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