The Citigroup team that won a Vision Award took on the challenge of increasing the performance and reliability of the organization's global network while cutting its cost. To do both simultaneously, IT managers had to benchmark network performance and collaborate with their internal customers on decisions about usage of the network's capacity. Their solution integrated information from disparate systems to automate planning and management of the network and to provide the kind of information that enabled customer conversations.

Both Merrill Lynch and Citigroup collected in-depth operational and financial data, then reported performance -- as indicated by that data -- against key business drivers for an individual function, rather than against overall corporate strategy. For the involved business units, the link to strategy was indirect. Still, other departments within each company, from finance to procurement to HR, ended up following the example of the IT group.

A second pair of Vision Award winners, both of which operate in the health-care industry, developed BPM systems to drive critical business turnarounds. Covenant Healthcare and St. John's Hospital each identified a narrow set of factors as indicative of a reversal of their fortunes. They then translated those factors into specific short-term goals and developed performance reporting processes that focused on them. For Covenant, where the discipline of day-to-day management had become lax, reliance on a new BPM process reinforced accountability for execution by linking rewards to the achievement of individual goals. At St. John's, improving productivity and reducing labor costs were keys to regaining financial health. That organization's BPM process focused heavily on improving these measures. For both health-care providers, the result of the BPM effort was an outstanding performance improvement.

St. John's Hospital also exemplifies the trend to extend BPM further into the organization; it used the initiative to explicitly drive and reinforce a change in corporate culture. In pursuing its financial turnaround, St. John's recognized that decision-makers would have to change their assumptions about and behavior around staffing. New performance benchmarks, backed up with robust reporting at all organizational levels, made the culture change stick. Likewise, the United States Postal Service used BPM to help establish a performance culture. Exposed to increasing competitive pressures from both overnight delivery services and the growth of e-mail, the organization's leadership refocused managers on three overarching goals -- operational efficiency, customer value, and enhancing the performance culture -- then provided specific objectives that extended down to the branch postmaster level.

How Did They Do It?

Sometimes it is not what a group achieves that is instructive but, rather, how it achieves it. Early in the life of the Vision Awards, it became obvious to me that initiatives which involve internal BPM customers in designing the organization's reporting solution are more likely to develop successful processes. Disney's Contemporary Resort brought key representatives from its user community together in a steering committee that reviewed and approved every aspect of the system design. These steering committee members also participated in pilot testing and trained others in the resulting processes. Northrop Grumman broke reporting into 10 subprocesses and empowered 10 teams of stakeholders from all of the affected disciplines to make key decisions about changes to those processes.

Many award winners passed up the big projects and technology-driven solutions for a more tailored and iterative approach. Lucent Technologies designed and implemented a reporting dashboard in a step-by-step process, preferring pilot projects and work-arounds to grand solutions. Disney's Contemporary Resort designed its reporting tool in "rapid prototyping" mode, instead of taking the time to develop a full-featured system from the outset. Having customers test prototypes generated feedback that significantly altered the final look of the product, maximizing its usefulness while keeping development time and costs low.