Jerry Perkins, EVP Emerging Technologies, Cross

A lot has been said about Avaya's Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP) in the last year since its initial launch, still, many businesses are asking, "What does CEBP actually do and how does it fit into the Business Process Management (BPM) Solution out there today?"

In today’s economy two of the biggest enterprise application trends in IT are defining total cost of ownership and aligning application trends to overall business strategy and goals. The good old days of spending money on Enterprise Applications simply because it is “cool” have given way to a more strategic and focused approach.

Late December of 2007, CIO magazine ran a survey from the top CIOs on their Management Priorities, Technology Priorities, and Most Important Technologies for 2008. An aspect of what Business Process Management (BPM) does in the enterprise was mentioned in the Top 5 of each survey.

• Top Management Priorities: Number #1; Improving alignment with Business Objectives

• Top Technology Priorities: Number #1; Creating or improving Strategic Applications

• Most Important Business Technologies: Number #4; Business Process Management and Modeling

Great information, but what does all this mean to the IT Enterprise when they are looking at BPM applications and CEBP?

The Gartner Group defines BPM as the following: “BPM is a management discipline that treats business processes as assets to be valued, designed and exploited in their own right. It aims to improve agility and operational performance. BPM requires tools that business managers can use to control and modify their processes. Specifically, it requires technologies that make process explicit – that is, clearly expressed and readily changed."  

Traditionally BPM has focused on document processing and integrating enterprise applications that were funneled into one convergent process for the end user.

Avaya has taken a deeper look at business process management and determined that the communication aspect of the process is severely limited or may not even exist because of “human latency.”  This communication touch point can add delays and incomplete steps within the process, causing a breakdown of a company’s critical decision making process. 

The Avaya solution –  a suite of applications called Communications Enabled Business Process (CEBP) software. These applications add the communication methods to the business process via Avaya’s Communication Manager Solutions. This Communication “touch point” can be added into custom designed solutions, existing BPM implementations and any future BPM applications. This solution suite gives decision makers the ability to quickly react to decision points within the process real time via voice (office, cell phone or any other telephone number), e-mail, SMS and conference call which will remove the “human latency” from the process.

At Cross we view this as “Giving a Voice to the Business Process.”  With CEBP software, not only can your communication solution operate with standard voice requirements, it will spread throughout the entire enterprise enabling and aligning Avaya’s technology with the business strategy. This will generate an ROI within the enterprise by not only converging networks and solutions, but by embedding them in all areas of core business functions.

Cross has partnered with Savvion Software and Lombardi Software, two of the top industry leaders in BPM solutions, to develop solutions for healthcare, contact center, financial services, manufacturing and the public sector, that can be used to help facilitate your Business Process Management strategy.

To learn more about “Giving a Voice to the Business Process” via
Avaya’s CEBP and to inquire about a demonstration of the
technology contact Cross today at 866.983.3500.