Business process management software offers businesses access to a solution that provides an integral function in today's technological climate. BPM enables organizations to take the large amounts of information and diverse technological solutions they use every day and turn them into operational improvements that generate fiscal results. While the technology is relevant in a diverse range of industries, it is increasingly important within enterprise IT departments, where traditional staffing roles are changing.
According to a recent CloudTweaks report, cloud computing is completely changing how IT staff manage the company's technological setup. Instead of focusing day-to-day efforts on keeping systems running, making updates and performing other similar processes, IT has to focus on managing the relationship with the cloud vendor.
This is creating an environment where a network manager, for example, will spend most of his or her time dealing with vendor management and developing strategic methods to improve the partnership and align third-party resources with on-premise solutions. In the past, a network manager would spend the majority of his or her time managing hardware and completing similar operations that are not only outsourced to the cloud, but usually automated by the third-party provider.
In this new IT landscape, the role of staff changes into a strategic enabler. For IT to live up to this designation, it needs access to more data. Information about the company data center, cloud vendors' systems, usage trends, employee mobile devices and network operations is essential on an everyday basis when IT plays a strategic role in supporting cloud operations.
While at first glance, this may seem like life suddenly becomes easier for IT, as all they have to do is analyze data and make decisions that improve operations and develop solutions for the future, this assumption is far from reality. The volume of data being delivered to IT can be overwhelming. Technicians have to notice when a worker tweets about poor application performance, analyze environmental information from hundreds of sensors spread throughout the data center, track network performance through multiple aspects of the configuration, track how mobile employees work and analyze cloud purchases made by business managers using a self-service portal and adjust the configuration accordingly.
These tasks can be extremely daunting, but BPM can play a major role in simplifying operations. Essentially, the solution analyzes the data, completes repeatable processes and ensures IT only has to deal with the data that requires action, leading to process-level improvements.
