Financial services

Interview:

Differentiating in the BPM market

23 April 2010

OnWindows talks to Antony Bream, global financial services sector manager at Nimbus about how the company’s business process management (BPM) application stands out from the market. Karen McCandless reports.

Could you give me some background on Nimbus, in terms of business process management your work in the financial services market?
Nimbus is a global software company that develops and implements Nimbus Control, a BPM application, which helps companies improve performance, efficiency and compliance. We are headquartered in the UK and have offices in 10 countries. We have over 700 clients across all industry sectors, mainly Fortune 2000 companies. I look after clients in the financial services sector, for example Royal Bank of Scotland, Royal Bank of Canada, JP Morgan, HSBC, ING and Barclays.

In the financial services sector, we’ve seen a significant up-take of Nimbus Control by investment banks over the past five years. Initially this was driven by process improvement projects, but more recently the big driver has been regulatory compliance and the need to improve operational risk control. To put it in a nutshell, if you don’t have clear, transparent and up-to-date business process knowledge, you’ll have a hard time implementing effective business controls and risk management measures, as there’s a question mark over the whole aspect of who does what, when and why and who’s responsible for each part of the operation. This is our forte, making business processes comprehensible and useful for day-to-day operations, then providing the governance to ensure you keep the information up-to-date, and can easily cross reference process with risk and compliance frameworks.

First and foremost this is a system that serves the needs of ordinary staff who simply want to know what’s required of them.

Antony Bream, Nimbus We are now seeing asset management and insurance firms adopting Nimbus Control for the same reasons. Preparation for the Solvency II regime is causing such firms to look carefully at their operational processes and particularly at how risk management can become part of day-to-day operations for the entire organisation.

A lot of software companies offer something in the area of business process management – what makes Nimbus different?
You’re right; there is a wide variety of software tools which fit under the umbrella term of BPM, and it can be confusing for buyers as different vendors all have their own slant. However the widely accepted view is that BPM is a management discipline, not a type of software. It’s quite simply about treating your organisation’s business process knowledge as one of the most important intellectual assets, which you own. It makes sense to capture that knowledge, standardise where possible to eliminate unnecessary variations which add to cost and risk, use that knowledge right across the business and continuously improve it. That’s what Nimbus Control is all about. Compared to other BPM software vendors that are typically either focused on technical process analysis or workflow automation, Nimbus Control is better described as a content management application specifically suited to the task of managing your business process knowledge. Key to that goal is meeting business users’ needs for ease of use, and ease of comprehension, because if people cannot find or cannot understand the process content you create, you might as well not bother writing it down.

What importance does the management of business process content play in the day-to-day running of these companies?
It plays an absolutely huge role and is increasingly seen as a must have capability. COOs and business unit heads increasingly need to demonstrate good governance of their business processes for a number of reasons. One is the increasingly intrusive and direct style of supervision being imposed by regulators. Regulators want to easily see and understand in much greater depth a firm’s business model, its associated risks, the controls in place to manage those risks and the competence of the people who have to follow the correct operations right across the business.

Compliance has to become part of the DNA or culture of firms, not the concern of just a few specialists or a periodic concern at time of audit, but something that is absolutely mainstream and day-to-day for all staff. I’d venture that this is something which is impossible to achieve if people don’t know the processes and procedures they are required to follow, or are using inconsistent or outdated procedures. If you cannot demonstrate that your processes and procedures are approved and up-to-date, the regulator is not going to be impressed. If you cannot demonstrate that staff understand the processes which you’ve provided them, you’re stuck.

Our clients use Nimbus Control to address these issues. By comparison technical process analysis tools tend to create content which is understood by technical analysts but completely baffling to ordinary staff; and process automation tools, whilst important alongside other banking systems, do not address the knowledge management and compliance requirements I mentioned before.

What’s the pay-off?
When businesses get this right the pay-offs are multiple; it’s not just about being able to more easily demonstrate compliance or improve risk control. Employees can be more productive, more easily finding the process and procedure information they require. Process standardisation and improvement run more smoothly helping to eliminate waste. Mistakes and risks can be reduced. Customer service levels can be improved. Agility can be increased helping the organisation roll-out changes to operations, systems and products, because there’s a single source of the truth for all process content, and communication mechanisms built in which ensure those who need to adopt new processes are informed. You can even enforce acknowledgement so that staff confirm they’ve understood the changes.

Who are the different users for a system like this and how does it help them?
First and foremost this is a system that serves the needs of ordinary staff who simply want to know what’s required of them. They want processes and procedures served to them in a format they understand. Think of it as an online operations manual for the business and you’ve pretty much understood what this is about. But it’s dynamic thanks to the content management capabilities. It supports personalisation, search and collaboration. So push the right content to users according to their role, notify them of changes and actions they need to be aware of, help them engage in process improvement, with feedback, questions and change requests between the consumers and owners of this process content.

Compliance and operational risk management specialists are looking for a robust record of how the business operates against which they can map risks, business controls and compliance requirements. Obtaining a clear understanding of how the business operates allows them to see where controls need to be placed, which controls may need tightening and the accountable roles involved. They then use the resulting framework as a means for driving operational control certification, monitoring, remediation and audit. It also allows you to have a point-in-time reference so you can go back and show a regulator how you operate in your business, what policies you are complying to and remediation actions which have been carried out. You can actually show the regulators that you have an element of governance in place to manage the day-to-day challenges and changes.

Process owners and those concerned with process improvement have a system which enables them not just to capture and analyse processes, but to do so in a manner which governs the content from a change management perspective, and provides the information to the wider business audience in a format they will understand.

IT and systems analysts find that when processes are accurately described in a simple language which the business users understand, the ability to elicit system requirements is significantly enhanced, improving the accuracy with which system changes are scoped, delivered and successfully adopted by the business. It helps close the often-mentioned gap between IT and business.

How do you leverage the Microsoft platform to provide this application?
Nimbus Control runs on a Microsoft server platform and can be deployed seamlessly through Microsoft Office SharePoint. We integrate with a wide variety of data sources for metrics, which can display how processes are performing, or other key performace indicators (KPIs) that may be relevant to a process such as risk or control metrics. According to the results of a recent survey we carried out, the majority of people are using Microsoft Office to capture process and procedure information. We can leverage what a client has already documented, whether in PowerPoint, Excel or Visio, and we are able to put that content into a process governance environment. Another thing we found from the survey is that people who are using Microsoft Office to capture processes and policies can’t easily link relevant management information like KPIs into such process content. They are dissatisfied with their business controls and have a lack of confidence in their ability to demonstrate control. Once we’ve migrated such content into Nimbus Control the governance capability solves these issues as well as enabling KPI integration so they get a more complete view of process and performance together.

This is part one of a two part interview. Part two comes next week.

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