View. The human race seems to be locked in an endless battle with. Process. with a. How Automated Workflows are Transforming Business

Transcription

1 Proce with a View How Automated Workflow are Tranforming Buine The human race eem to be locked in an endle battle with productivity. In the great indutrial revolution of the 17 th and 18 th centurie, the mechanization of production method went a long way toward ettling the core. But for the labor force performing thee new granular tak, the tranition wa tumultuou. Emerging from a medieval-era agrarian model, worker in the new indutrial ociety needed fuel for a more productive workday. Enter the coffee bean. A complex olution to the problem of the day including a lack of clean drinking water, and a work chedule timed to the clock intead of the un coffee quickly replaced ale a the tandard morning beverage. Chalk one up for human. Workflow and buine proce automation might jut be the modern day equivalent of the morning caffeine buzz weeping away the cobweb and bringing a doe of clarity to the heterogeneou computing environment and complex manual procee that run the 21 t century buine machine. 32 CIO Diget April 2010 by Allen Clapp

2 richard borge I think automation doe a great job when you re moving from a manual proce that i prone to error and in t well documented, explain Fred Brouard, an analyt with IDC. Undertanding the entire proce and how it hould ideally work, a well a how it actually doe work i a challenge. Tranforming the organization to get people to make the proce work the way it hould i probably the bigget challenge. Technology i only one piece of the puzzle. The key to tranforming buine with better workflow lie in undertanding the people and procee on which each organization i built. Today IT organization are faced with immene complexity in infratructure and in buine procee, Brouard ay. IT department need a way to iolate pecific buine procee that are critical to the company. Ideally, you d like to automate thoe procee and treamline them. That the challenge. Mark the culprit complexity At Mercy Health Service in Baltimore, Maryland, workflow improvement are helping treamline acquiition, intallation, and approval procee for the organization 11,000 clinical aet from IV pump to ultraound ytem. But aembling a procedure to improve the ytem and eliminate bottleneck required eriou detective work on the part of the IT department. The IT team dicovered firthand that complex procee need to be undertood and broken down into their core element before they can be improved and automated. Before even opening up the oftware, we had to dive in and try to undertand the proce, which can be difficult, becaue ometime the department doen t even know it own procee, recall Nigel Lavin, director of IT for Mercy Health. Some of thee legacy procee have been carried out by employee who have worked here for 15 to 20 year. After playing the role of private invetigator in numerou interview (ee idebar on page 34) and determining the people, time, and tep that contributed to the management of Mercy Health clinical aet inventory, the IT team turned to Symantec for a workflow automation olution baed on Symantec Workflow. Reclaim productivity When exceive and complex paperwork reult in taff hour lot or delay in delivering eential ervice, it i a ure ign that there i cope to reclaim productivity uing workflow automation. At Mercy Health, new clinical equipment mut be logged in before it can be ued on a patient. Earlier paper-baed procee involved o much phyical back and forth and manual checking, that it bogged down the proce for day. Thi, in turn, impacted the ability to get new clinical equipment into ervice. Uing the graphical interface in Symantec Workflow to drag and drop flowchart-like element, the IT team created a implified workflow for logging aet into the aet management functionality of Altiri Service & Aet Management Suite from Symantec. The Service Dek functionality of Altiri Aet Management Suite provide an audit trail. For Mercy Health, thi ha yielded a time-aving olution that directly benefit doctor and patient. Now we re able to get new reource into the ytem and out to the hopital floor in a day intead of a week, ay Kathleen Youngbar, vice preident and chief information officer for Mercy Health. Dig deeper In it drive for buine efficiency, Mercy Health targeted other heavily paper-baed procee uch a it facilitie maintenance ticket ytem for workflow improvement. There were multiple opportunitie for wateful tep to be eliminated, ay Matt Giblin, IT manager at Mercy Health. We dicovered a lot of printing at the beginning of the proce and a lot of manual data entry on the backend. Giblin and team were able to quickly deign a workflow olution that allow maintenance taff to log into the new ytem from anywhere in the campu and update tatu while on the job. Thi ha given the department better viibility into it maintenance chedule while ymantec.com/ciodiget 33

3 Mercy Health Service mizing time pent on data entry. We had a peron logging in 26,000 ticket per year, and now that ytem i being updated in real time by the technician performing the work, Giblin relate. By automating maintenance ticket with Symantec Workflow, we re reclaiming 40 hour of productivity each week. Founded: 1874 Location: Baltimore, MD Employee: 3,276 Webite: Kathleen Youngbar (front), Vice Preident and Chief Information Officer; Matt Giblin (left), IT Manager; and Nigel Lavin (right), Director of IT for Mercy Health Service It the kind of productivity boon IDC Brouard ee fueling the wider adoption of automated workflow in the future. I think ultimately the ue of automation to reduce wateful buine practice i going to be pretty pervaive. Break down operational ilo One of the ucce torie of workflow i the breaking down of tovepipe, Brouard explain. You ee IT being able to bring efficiencie acro different line of buine being able to pa information better and that definitely happening. It happening at Travelport, an international e-commerce travel buine that needed to peed it procee around the verification of thouand of uer account. For auditing purpoe, we have to verify that all our uer account are active, up-to-date, and belong to an actual peron, explain Rob Moore, enior architect of enduer ervice for Travelport. With about 5,000 employee in 160 countrie and more than 12,000 account to manage, Moore wa looking for a olution to limit the repetitive manual tak involved in the proce. There are a lot of people and item you have to review, and it wa a totally manual proce. We ued to have to have different people go in and verify every account and the uer they belonged to. Needing to expedite account verification, Moore built an automated proce uing Symantec Workflow. Beide fater proceing, thi ha alo enabled him to reclaim taff time and reduce the margin for error by minimizing the human component. Now, intead of having individual worker pend hour reviewing individual account, we have an automated check that goe into our active directory, Moore ay. It happen on a chedule, and can through every ingle object looking for potential problem. It then highlight any iue o we can focu on addreing jut thoe. The Travelport team alo turned to workflow olution to implify it companywide procedure for tranitioning worker in and out of the company. When omebody leave a company, you have to make ure you are auditing and tracking every element of that uer account, explain Moore. In my particular cae, there are 22 different group that have a hand in the departure of an employee from the company. Each of thee group had a different way of managing an employee acce removal from variou ytem (identity acce management). The Complexitie of Boiling an Egg At Mercy Health Service, IT Manager Matt Giblin ha a recipe for dicovering the hidden nag within complex buine procee. The firt quetion we ak i, how do you boil an egg? explain Giblin. And the firt anwer I alway get i, you put the egg into boiling water. But that anwer already implie about eight tep. Helping hi team to think differently about their workflow begin with thoe eight implied tep that lead to boiling an egg opening a cabinet, finding a pan, bringing it to the ink, turning on the faucet, filling the pan with water, bringing the pan to the tove, turning on the tove, and waiting for the water to boil. The exercie ha taken Giblin and the taff at Mercy Health on a journey of elf dicovery. Very often, we find thoe implicit tep aren t documented anywhere they re uually inide omeone head, Giblin ay. If we can get our employee to convey that kind of information, we can build an effective workflow automation ytem. michael brunetto 34 CIO Diget April 2010

4 If you have 22 group, each with it own methodology, the auditor have a lot of work to do. Rob Moore, Sr. Architect of End-Uer Service, Travelport Some department ued preadheet, ome ued ticket, other ued an repoitory it wa really confuing. From an auditing tandpoint, it created headache for Travelport. Our auditor would have to go to every group and collect that information individually, Moore ay. If you have 22 group, each with it own methodology, the auditor have a lot of work to do. Uing Symantec Workflow, Moore and hi IT team deigned a tool that interface with all of the different group, automating and centralizing the identity acce management proce acro the company. Now, when the auditor come in to pot-check the employee record, he can quickly ee an electronic lit of all action taken by different department. Auditing the identity management proce ued to take ix week. Since we tarted uing Workflow, that ha all changed. Thi lat cycle, the auditor came in, and within 45 minute, had everything that he needed, Moore recall. The improvement in accuracy and peed ha been dramatic. I thought the auditor wa going to cry. I ve never een a man that happy about hi work. He wa jut thrilled that he wa able to go to one central place, with an audit trail, and be able to get all the information he needed, Moore ay. The auditor wan t the only peron impreed with the ucce of the project. That the piece that I m mot proud of, Moore ay. I built that workflow my firt week after taking the training cla. Automation: the great communicator An abundance of procedural complexity can lead to another caualty: communication, both among internal takeholder a well a with end cutomer. Workflow automation i changing thi, and IDC Brouard ee uch improvement a an emerging trend in IT department. We re tarting to ee IT think more in term of how information flow throughout a proce focuing on more event correlation capabilitie and inter-departmental communication, he ay. A company that can tetify to thi i Puerto Rico-baed health inurance provider Medical Card Sytem, Inc. (MCS). The company i the commonwealth fatet growing and econd larget health inurance company, inuring about 700,000 reident. It manage that volume with 1,300 employee 87 of which are on the IT team, providing application development, network ecurity, call center ytem, and data center upport. The team i currently wrapping up a detailed and ucceful pilot with the help of Symantec Partner Bay Dynamic to automate it IT ticketing proce. The need to drive pro-ductivity will actually end up making the Rob Moore, Senior Architect of End-uer Service, Travelport Travelport Founded: 1980 Location: New York, NY Employee: 5,300 Webite: ticketing proce more viible to the organization end uer. Uing Workflow ha really helped u improve cutomer ervice and give our cutomer more control over the proce, relate Ivar Blum, chief information officer for MCS. Before thi workflow pilot wa delivered, key IT ticketing procee receiving requet for ervice, documenting delivery and acceptance of ervice were paper-driven. Thi led to interoffice mail delay ending paper from one peron to another for approval. I wa looking for a way to expedite that proce by making it happen electronically have it howing up in people inboxe for approval and automatically ecalating to the next level a needed, Blum ay. By automating thi communication, Symantec Workflow enabled u to get the ervice delivered fater in many cae. It alo centralized the documentation for all of thoe ervice. ymantec.com/ciodiget 35

5 Uing Workflow ha really helped u improve cutomer ervice and give our cutomer more control over the proce. Ivar Blum, CIO, Medical Card Sytem, Inc. Ivar Blum, Chief Information Officer, Medical Card Sytem, Inc. Open a window into the black hole Delving deeper, Blum realized that from the moment an internal cutomer filed a ticket, he or he lot all touch with the proce until the problem wa fixed. For all practical purpoe, it became a black hole for that peron; they had no idea what the tatu of the ticket wa, if omebody wa working on it or not, or when we etimated it to be completed, he recall. Realizing the need for better cutomer relation, Blum and team deigned a proce uing Symantec Workflow to keep employee in the loop. Now, cutomer receive automated notification whenever the tatu of their ticket change. Medical Card Sytem Inc. Founded: 1982 Location: Hato Rey, Puerto Rico Employee: 1,300 Webite: It been very proactive, very poitive, Blum explain. It may ound a little bit illy, becaue it really a computer doing an automated tak, but to the uer it feel like we re doing omething rather than jut waiting for them to call u. It been a great PR tool for the IT department. Thi trategy of peronalizing ervice for internal IT cutomer baed on their unique technical requet trengthen the company emphai on ervice excellence to it entire cutomer bae. Interface with productivity IDC Brouard alo ee better graphic uer interface fueling the wider adoption of workflow oftware. The fact that the workflow tool are becoming more uer-friendly i going to benefit buinee that we don t normally think of a being heavily involved with IT, he explain. Even code-avvy uer are finding it eaier to create complex workflow to treamline buine. Uing Symantec Workflow, you can deign ome pretty powerful web form and workflow with jut a modicum of knowledge now, ay Mercy Health Giblin. I made our firt workflow before I even took the Symantec training. By uing the viual Workflow deigner and then the debugger, you can actually create and tet an automated proce without publihing it anywhere. It allow you to build incrementally. Once IT organization do their detective work, they can ue thee tool to et productivity gain into motion. If it happen on your computer, there a better than 90 percent chance that we can automate it in ome fahion, Travelport Rob Moore um it up. To thi day, I have not found one thing that I haven t been able to automate when it been brought to me. n Allen Clapp i a writer at NAVAJO Company. A journalit and multimedia producer, hi work ha appeared in the Palo Alto Weekly, on the televiion erie Felicity, and in advertiement for The Coca-Cola Company and Target Store. Gain Control with Symantec > Client Management Altiri Client Management Suite > Data Lo Prevention Symantec Data Lo Prevention > Endpoint Security Symantec Endpoint Encryption Symantec Endpoint Protection Symantec Network Acce Control > Dicovery & Retention Management Symantec Enterprie Vault > IT Compliance Symantec Control Compliance Suite > Meaging Security MeageLab Hoted Security > Security Management Symantec Security Information Manager michael brunetto 36 CIO Diget April 2010