BPI Initiative

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A BPI initiative is a plan to achieve business process interoperability. An initiative can consist of a single BPI project or can serve as a guideline for multiple projects. While a BPI initiative may also entail other business-process disciplines, including business process improvement, business process management and business process outsourcing, its main focus is end-to-end automation, in which a process is designed to achieve a specific objective utilizing essential human labor only.

The purpose of a BPI initiative is to address a problem caused by information silos. Accordingly, BPI initiatives differ from traditional silo initiatives because they may require close collaboration among the parties that will use the processes they seek to automate. By collaborating, initiative participants can create the shared data and procedures required for BPI and store them in a centralized repository.

In most cases, BPI initiatives are used to rally the people and resources needed to address well-known problems. They can be launched within private organizations, or may be started by one or more industry groups. The Financial Services industry, for example, may form an initiative to achieve Straight Through Processing, or it may join with the Insurance industry to develop a common BPI solution.

While some initiatives address long-standing, well-known problems caused by information silos, they can also be used to enable new applications made possible by BPI, especially in areas where BPI can increase productivity, enhance customer convenience, reduce costs, spur innovation, improve security or reduce errors.

A BPI initiative often serves as a reference point for individual BPI projects conducted within private organizations or by industry groups. By inheriting an initiative's objectives, an organization or group can assure that its BPI projects are on track to achieve across-the-board interoperability.

[edit] BPI vs. silo initiatives

A BPI initiative differs from a traditional silo initiative because silos are, by definition, insular in nature whereas BPI is all-inclusive. A BPI initiative requires that standard data and procedures be available in a shared repository and, while some of these components will already be on tap, others may need to be created by collaboration among initiative participants, often across organization boundaries. For example, an airline company wants to create BPI between its reservation system and the travel departments of its top corporate customers. The airline, and each customer, participate in a BPI initiative and collaborate to assure that common data (flight and rate schedules) and procedures (manage reservations, billings and payments) are available to each of them. In this scenario, the initiative may provide further advantages to the customers, enabling them to utilize the common components in their internal initiatives to automate employee expense reports and travel schedules.

[edit] BPI Initiative guidelines

A distinguishing characteristic of BPI is the need for guidelines to facilitate collaboration. Guidelines are valuable because—at least in the early stages of BPI—initiative participants are likely to work together across boundaries to create the shared data and procedures required for interoperability. This need for collaboration can be streamlined by giving BPI initiatives a similar anatomy. Widely-accepted guidelines also make it easier for management to evaluate BPI initiatives, and for consultants to propose them to their clients.

Generally speaking, a BPI initiative contains the following elements and related questions that need to be addressed. Please note: These guidelines assume that an initiative is aimed at a single process.

Identify the process to be automated

What is the specific objective?
At which points will the process start and finish?
What essential human labor is required?

Create a workflow

What tasks are to be performed?
Which tasks will be performed by humans, and which by computers?
Has the flow been reduced to the least number tasks?
Has each task been reduced to the simplest steps?
Is the flow fully documented?

Determine the need for collaboration

Which data and procedures are already available in a centralized repository?
Which data and procedures need to be standardized and stored in a centralized repository?
What degree of collaboration is needed?
If necessary, how will collaboration among competitors be handled?

Calculate a return on investment

How much will it cost to carry out the process with BPI?
How much does it cost to carry out the process now?
Do costs include the following items?
- Human labor, such as
  - Knowledge transfers, including faxes, telephone calls, emails, letters and instant messages
  - Meetings and face-to-face discussions
  - Computer work, including data processing, word processing, spreadsheets, web searching, and electronic presentations
  - Physical work, including business travel, commuting, reading, filing and other physical activities subject to automation
- Computer hardware replacements, upgrades and maintenance costs
- Software replacements, upgrades, maintenance costs and middleware

Address security issues

Is the process secure? Unlike processes contained in information silos, BPI processes extend across boundaries and, because they are based on standards, can be quickly and economically linked to other processes. This ease of interconnectivity must be taken into account when a project is designed. If an organization grants access to its information to its customers, vendors or business partners, for example, it must also address the security issues that are raised.

Create Automated Tasks