Businesses constantly struggle with the best business management structure to use. Each business function is usually well packaged and within its own silo but with blurred delineations made in service delivery ownership. Service improvement is normally directed toward optimizing discrete business processes and making them more efficient. Service delivery is then declared a success. Yet, from industry to industry the client experience falls short. The reason lay primarily with the narrow focus on efficiency at the expense of effectiveness. To provide quality service delivery processes must be developed from a client-centric point of view.
The segregation of the business functions of human resources, finance, and procurement result in service degradation instead of service improvement. These enabling functions must be viewed as an integrated service delivery and planning function to be both efficient and effective.
Integrated business mapping
To optimize service the integrated business processes and approval touch points need to be mapped as a single delivery process emanating from a client request. When a manager hires an employee, for example, each of the enabling functions directly support the hiring process, but because of the discrete business processes in the organization the processes are often efficient in their own right, but hardly effective. Mapping the business processes in an integrated way, however, helps to eliminate redundancies across the enablers and provides for a seamless action that requires only a single request to initiate.
The business process maps will clearly identify each process step required to execute the request, regardless of the function responsible to support it. This will facilitate the costing of resources and support the creation of metrics inline with established service standards.
Once the business processes are identified within the context of integrated business enablers workflows are exposed and made available for automation, further improving the efficiency and effectiveness of service delivery. Assessing enabling business functions this way also provides a more robust foundation in which to implement enterprise-wide resource planning solutions, such as PeopleSoft, Oracle and SAP.
In support of organizational change
Viewing the enabling functions of the organization as an integrated business function with the 'raison d'être' to provide seamless service delivery to clients will certainly generate angst among siloed business functions.
To be effective the enablers must be central figures in the business mapping process with the 'client' as the centre of focus. Client-centred organizations will come to realize the redundancies and duplications inherent in the segregated service delivery mechanisms and will see the merits of an integrated enabling function.
Organizational leadership will be essential to support this organizational change toward integrated enabling functions. Clients want service; quickly, error free and with quality. The integration of the enabling functions deliver on these expectations, but to be successful the new service delivery direction requires sustained reinforcement both on the part of the employees who must adjust how they deliver services and the client who must understand the service delivery expectations.
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