Mr. Virender Jeet, Senior Vice President, Technology, Newgen, is the dominant force behind Newgen’s robust and innovative products, as he spearheads the organization’s product design and development. This article is an insight on the Business Performance Management(BPM) and potentials it holds for smart cities.
We all understand that automation saves money and resources. These savings and efficient use of resources will create efficient cities. That is what BPM does and has been doing in the enterprise space for decades. It has only been improving, each iteration being more intuitive, streamlined, responsive and delivering continuous innovation, flexibility, and process improvement. BPM aligns an organization’s business processes with the needs of its clients. In the case of smart cities, the clients are its citizens. This is how BPM will help smart cities reach their potential:
- Drive collaboration: For a smart city to work efficiently, all its systems need to communicate and collaborate seamlessly. These systems needs to address a number of key challenges that include but are not limited to health, transport, infrastructure, waste management, and air pollution etc. BPM enables process and work flow among these systems. It supports day to day business operations and allows for optimal utilization of city resources. BPM enables effective decision making by ensuring that all key decision makers in the system are provided consistent and complete information and therefore can approve, disapprove, revise or delegate key decisions and actions.
- Real-time Information: Smart cities need to take decision and solve problems on an everyday basis. From energy consumption and transport to lighting and enhancing public safety. But to keep these cities working seamlessly they need to access, process and comprehend data in real time. BPM not only helps to foster operational intelligence through improved process visibility and business responsiveness, but helps in better decision making. The platform is able to assess trends in real time and help cities to respond to emerging opportunities and threats.
- Enhanced eGovernance: Smart cities will ensure that government and citizens will be connected like never before. Government departments will have access to a huge volume of data that can be stored and then sliced and diced with the help of smart content analytics to extract contextual information. This information can then be used to improve the quality of life for citizens by improving the responsiveness of services offered, driving transparency and assigning responsibility across the board.
- Continuous Improvement: A smart city will constantly need to keep evolving and adapting depending on the needs of its citizens, industry best practices, economic climate, socio-political scene and technological advancements. What that means is there will be a perpetual need to optimize and continuously improve implemented processes. With BPM as the underlying platform these processes can be easily and cost-effectively adapted without incurring too much analysis, simulation, effort and cost.
