U.S. National Intelligence Community

Challenge

There was a need for a more collaborative and inclusive process-design approach to application development. They needed to reduce costly redundancies, speed up the development cycle and be more future-focused. As well, with the help of IPI consultants, they wanted to leverage legacy systems in a way that challenged the developers and the users to think more innovatively with respect to what would take their business processes to new heights of performance.

Solution

A highly participatory, strengths-based group facilitation approach called Appreciative Inquiry (AI) was linked to Business Process Management (BPM) process modeling. The integrated AI/BPM method created a hub for human and application interaction—a crossroads of strategy, process, people and technology.

Bridging the business–IT gap, IPI facilitated a series of weekly gatherings of participants representing all facets of the enterprise in a manner that captured inspired ideas and hopes for innovation using BPM process-design software. The outcomes of these activities were captured by the BPM tool and transformed into compelling business processes and application prototypes that boosted participants’ visions for success.

Results

The combined AI/BPM approach has helped project managers across the community shave time and money off their traditional project plans is several ways. It allowed users to gain timely and proper insight and access to task information (e.g. resources requirements, policy bottlenecks, system interdependencies), allowed smart pre-investment business decisions to be made and facilitated the discovery of creative ways to maintain the best of legacy technology systems while making room for continuous innovations over time and enhanced buy-in and commitment.

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