Strategic Value of Business Processes
for SMB Tech Companies

By Hillel Glazer, © 2003 Entinex, Inc.

Have you ever thought of your business processes as one of your company’s most valuable strategic assets?  Consider this: what makes you so different from your competition?  Is it your level of personalized service?  Your prices?  Your experience?  Whatever it is, you’ve come up with a way to make it possible, and, your ability to be successful depends on how consistently you’re able to deliver it.

Isn’t it true that for you to convert a client engagement or purchase into profit, you need to know how much of your company’s time and energy it takes to actually get it done so that you know how to price it, and how long it will take to provide it?  Isn’t this "conversion into profit" another way of saying "process?"  Then why is it that business processes are often among the most overlooked assets a technology company could have? 

As the business process re-engineering (BPR) craze early in the last decade demonstrated, business processes were frequently seen as what keeps businesses from operating efficiently.  These inefficiencies typically contributed to why the business had trouble flourishing.  In fact, many companies jumped onto the BPR band wagon because they saw their business processes as liabilities against their success.  Conducted properly, companies that underwent successful BPR efforts converted their process liabilities into corporate assets.  So much so, that many companies correctly see their processes as intellectual property and confidential, privileged information.  Patents are awarded on corporate processes much in the way they are awarded on products.  A term to describe the things a company knows, and knows how to do is frequently referred to as "intellectual capital."

Notice how little of the above discussion mentions business processes as a role in technology companies.  The fate of many technology solutions companies rests in their ability to convert sales into profit, just like any other type of company.  Yet, unlike other companies, small and medium sized technology companies seldom have formal processes they follow on each engagement.

Often, you will only find the processes of small and medium sized companies locked in the owner’s head.  This, then, makes the owner an integral part of the process which (if following the process is important) means that the owner is dragged into everything the company does on a daily basis.  Being part of every detail of every engagement keeps him or her from going out and generating more business.  More typically, however, is that these companies don’t have any formal business processes in place, and have no predictable, reliable way to estimate or execute projects.

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