Forrester Blogs › Category: business process management (BPM)

Digital Business Design Is The New Integration

Posted by Randy Heffner on the Application Development & Delivery Professionals Blog on October 5, 2012

Randy Heffner

If your organization is like nearly every other one I've talked to in the past 20+ years, you have a spaghetti chart of integration connections between all the siloed applications that run your business. Your customer is fractured across five applications. Your fulfillment process is broken across eight applications. Just try to pull together the data necessary to tell how profitable one of your products is. Or, as you implement mobile, external APIs, custom B2B connections, and more, how will you provide consistent, coherent access to your transactions and data?

Making sense of all the mess has been an important priority for years. The question is "how?" Forrester's latest research finds that it's time for a new kind of integration strategy. We call it "Digital Business Design":
A business-centered approach to solution architecture, implementation, and integration that brings business and technology design together by placing design priority on user roles, business transactions, processes, canonical information, events, and other business aspects that embody a complete definition of a business. 
 
Here's what we mean:
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How To Define And Track The Right Sales Metrics

Posted by William Band on the Application Development & Delivery Professionals Blog on August 27, 2012

William Band

As result of “big data” mania, there is an explosion of interest in business intelligence solutions and advanced analytics techniques. In particular, organizations of all sizes want to sharpen their ability to track the health of customer relationship management (CRM) business processes. A common question that I get from my clients is: "What are the best sales metrics that we should track, and how do we do it?"

Recently, my colleague Boris Evelson and I responded to an inquiry on this topic. Our answer is summarized below.

Question:

"How do we set up BI dashboards for a sales-focused company? We currently have Cognos, IBI, and various cubes around a 6 (+) year old Teradata warehouse. We are upgrading our Teradata to its latest technology and have purchased IBI's BI suite to use in conjunction. Our focus is on sales -- How did other organizations start out? We would like to know what works best for different roles from the CEO down to an inside sales rep?"

Answer:

We believe the answer to your question relies in adopting best practices around analytical sales performance management. You should take a top-down approach that has five steps:

1.     First, define the overall sales strategy.

2.     Then, identify goals and objectives that you need to achieve in order to make your sales strategy successful.

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Nimbus Acquisition Positions Tibco To Finally Empower Business Stakeholders

Posted by Clay Richardson on the Enterprise Architecture Professionals Blog on August 30, 2011

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Clay Richardson

Today, Tibco Software — best known for its SOA integration, complex event processing, and business process management suite — announced its acquisition of Nimbus Partners, a privately held business process analysis vendor based in the United Kingdom. Nimbus Partners is smaller and less well known than the other more mature and full-featured BPA solutions, such as those from ARIS, Provision, and Mega.  Nimbus, which employs more than 100 people, sold process discovery and authoring tools along with its homegrown methodology for quickly capturing and managing detailed information on business processes. Nimbus’ features and ease of use appealed mostly to process architects, process analysts, and business stakeholders that wanted an environment more robust than Microsoft Visio but not as technical — or requiring as much training — as other BPA environments. 

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The Inside Scoop On How The CRM Vendors Stack Up

Posted by William Band on the Application Development & Delivery Professionals Blog on June 16, 2010

William Band

The most frequent question I get every day is, “What is the best CRM technology solution for my company?” To respond, I worked with a team of five other Forrester analysts (Boris Evelson, Rob Karel, Jim Kobielus, Craig Le Clair, and Roy Wildeman) to evaluate 19 leading CRM solutions against more than 500 product feature, platform, and market presence criteria. Here’s a sneak peek at the key findings from two new reports: “The Forrester WaveTM: CRM Suites For Large Organizations”, and “The Forrester WaveTM: CRM Suites for Midsized Organizations”.

Oracle Siebel CRM and SAP CRM still offer the most complete solutions, with improved usability. SAP has been steadily working to fill out its CRM offering, resulting in end-to-end process integration support that no longer comes at the expense of missing CRM functionality. Meanwhile, Oracle Siebel CRM is still the most full-featured CRM solution, with a breadth and depth of functionality for many industry verticals. Both vendors have moved to address key complaints: poor usability, high cost, and long implementation times. Siebel 8.1 features the Siebel User Interface, which can be highly personalized and is task-driven. The SAP CRM 7.0 UI is flexible to support varying roles and offers drag-and-drop personalization that allows any section of any page to be rearranged by the end user. Both vendors are working to lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for their customers by introducing more preintegrations with other solutions from within their respective corporate families and offering “rapid implementation” methodologies and tools to reduce upgrade costs.

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