Only 25% of respondents to a recent study by Silver Spring, Md.-based non-profit organization, Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) felt business process management (BPM) was well understood and addressed within their organization.
BPM is nothing new to insurers, but AIIM and its members believe it to be entrenched as an integral part of the enterprise content management (ECM) lexicon. A convergence of workflow and enterprise application integration, BPM can do many different things for insurance companies from process automation to service orientation.
But despite insurers' knowledge of BPM and its uses, only 25% of respondents to a recent AIIM "Market IQ" report focusing on BPM felt that it was well-understood and addressed overall within their organization.
In addition to this, nearly half of the respondents (45%) reported that there was little to no BPM strategy in place at their company, whereas 23% indicated having mostly or exclusively strategic BPM deployments.
AIIM feels that since BPM cuts across technological and intra-organizational boundaries, it is critical that carriers identify a clear leader to head a BPM strategy. Despite this, respondents said their companies did not have a specific group in charge of BPM.
Survey respondents cited derailment by internal political squabbles and scope creep as BPM's major pitfalls, and likely were accountable for why 62% of respondents said business was disrupted while new processes were deployed.
But despite these challenges, AIIM says, the data collected suggests that BPM makes a significant and speedy impact on a company's bottom line, as more than 50% of respondents who conducted an ROI study achieved a positive ROI in three years or less, with 70% of those same respondents citing direct cost savings as a benefit.
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