Research Perspective
In our Business Architecture and Business Process Innovation research activities, we take a holistic approach to improving the foundations and practice of transforming global enterprises. Value-generation for enterprises is an organization-centric activity in which differentiating resources are deployed through complex combinations of capabilities delivered by individuals and technology. While value assessment is exogenous to an enterprise, complex and entangled use of rare and difficult-to-substitute resources are the foundation for competitive advantage and sustainable superior business performance.
We regard business processes as critical resources in the enterprise. Thus, we believe that certain operations and the underlying business processes supporting them are built to last while others are built to change. This duality of operations is essential to competitiveness and strategic survival. A large fraction of industries today see their main processes converge toward common and well-established practices, calling for complex integration across regional and geographical operations. The opportunity to build better IT support for these operations is being motivated by an impressive and revamped economy of scale. On the other hand, differentiation for our clients lies in other critical activities. Value for our clients needs to also be built through operations and strategy that must accommodate intensive and frequent change. Information technology comes to play a critical role in this approach, where flexible structures are essential to enable, and not to impair, transformation.
Business Architecture and Business Process Innovation are service- research activities through which we aim to help our clients seed growth through viable change, by working with other global divisions in IBM and with colleagues from our global research labs. By making fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of Business Architecture and Business Process Innovation through models, methods, content and tools, we are able to understand and predict change as well as design transformation methods to cope with business performance challenges. We address the instrumentation of change holistically through solutions that position IT automation and organizational skills as complementarities. Our research projects on models, methods and tools find application to both cross-industry needs as well as industry-specific demands. Our mission is to advance the state-of-the-art of Business Architecture and Business Process Innovation by working collaboratively with our colleagues from Global Business Services (GBS), Global Technology Services (GTS) and Software Group (SWG) and by assisting our clients directly through selected partnerships.
