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Chapter 13 Building Information Systems 525

also provide analytics for verifying that process performance has been improved
and for measuring the impact of process changes on key business performance
indicators.
Some BPM tools document and monitor business processes to help firms
identify inefficiencies, using software to connect with each of the systems a
company uses for a particular process to identify trouble spots. Canadian
mutual fund company AIC used Sajus BPM monitoring software to check
inconsistencies in its process for updating accounts after each client transac-
tion. Sajus specializes in goal-based process management, which focuses on
finding the causes of organizational problems through process monitoring
before applying tools to address those problems.
Another category of tools automate some parts of a business process and
enforce business rules so that employees perform that process more consistently
and efficiently.
For example, American National Insurance Company (ANCO), which offers
life insurance, medical insurance, property casualty insurance, and invest-
ment services, used Pega BPM workflow software to streamline customer
service processes across four business groups. The software built rules to guide
customer service representatives through a single view of a customer’s informa-
tion that was maintained in multiple systems. By eliminating the need to juggle
multiple applications simultaneously to handle customer and agent requests,
the improved process increased customer service representative workload
capacity by 192 percent.
A third category of tools helps businesses integrate their existing systems to
support process improvements. They automatically manage processes across
the business, extract data from various sources and databases, and generate
transactions in multiple related systems. For example, the Star Alliance of 15 air-
lines, including United and Lufthansa, used BPM to create common processes
shared by all of its members by integrating their existing systems. One project
created a new service for frequent fliers on member airlines by consolidating
90 separate business processes across nine airlines and 27 legacy systems. The
BPM software documented how each airline processed frequent flier informa-
tion to help airline managers model a new business process that showed how to
share data among the various systems.
The Interactive Session on Organizations provides an example of a company
that benefited competitively from business process management. As with any
company that rapidly expands from a small business to a global brand, Burton
Snowboards found that some of its business processes had become outdated.
Burton has made serious efforts to improve these processes and turn their
weaknesses into strengths.

13.2 OVERVIEW OF SYSTEMS DEVELOPMENT

New information systems are an outgrowth of a process of organizational
problem solving. A new information system is built as a solution to some
type of problem or set of problems the organization perceives it is facing.
The problem may be one in which managers and employees realize that the
organization is not performing as well as expected, or that the organization
should take advantage of new opportunities to perform more successfully.
The activities that go into producing an information system solution to
an organizational problem or opportunity are called systems development.

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