After speaking with a few customers, I realized the timeliness and importance of Tuesday's GCC presentation by AIG CIO Mark Popolano. He gave tremendous insight into how valuable BPM really is and why it is critical to growing business.
AIG is one of the largest insurance providers in the world (#9 in Fortune 500 ; 2005 sales = $109 billion). They have over 95,000 employees with 11,000 employees in IT alone. They have a 100% virtualized help-desk, supporting over 2,700 applications, along with 30,000 agents who helped generate $10+ billion in Net Income for 2005. Amazingly, they now have more than 40% of their workforce working from home – talk about distributed work environment!
In the short time they have been using Global 360’s BPM system, they have been able to:
- Optimize business processes across the organization. According to Mark, “the business process is the end-game…[you must] keep the flow of work through your organization to keep the cash engine going.”
- Eliminate compensating controls, which is critical for compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley legislation
- Enable a mobile, dynamic, workforce whose productivity has increased along with job satisfaction, and retention
- Reduce risk associated with an exclusively bricks-and-mortar operation in the event of a disaster
- Reduce costs by enabling effective outsourcing
Interestingly, Mark spoke quite a bit about their concern over the avian/pandemic flu. In the event of the avian flu reaching the US and becoming highly contagious between humans, chaos could set in. He knows, however, that AIG must continue to operate in the face of tremendous adversity and serve their customers. According to Mark, their BPM system enabled AIG to be “up-and running just 9 hours after hurricane Katrina,” ready to be there for their customers. If they fell victim to chaos, amongst other detrimental effects, they would put their brand and reputation at risk.
A key component to addressing risk is through a distributed workforce (PDF).
No comments:
Post a Comment