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Over the past decade: open innovation has begun transforming the way global companies develop new products, as executives increasingly recognize the benefits of exposing internal R&D to outside ideas. Now, some organizations are going even further by applying open-source thinking to improve a range of core business processes. Aided by rapidly changing technology, these leaders are looking outside the gates to develop faster and better solutions to a variety of strategic, operational, and organizational problems.

Open up: Knowledge brokering offers companies an analogous capability. Pioneered by product designers in companies such as the design consultancy IDEO, it is grounded in the adage that the best source of new ideas is old ideas.2 Creative product designers can take a subassembly (say, a hinge or a motor) from an existing product and apply it in a completely new context. We’ve observed companies using processes in much the same way. They do so by forming project teams that initiate conversations with knowledge brokers—people willing to discuss their experiences to serve the teams’ needs—and then combine the external ideas with internal ones to improve these companies’ business processes.

Business process management (BPM) is a management approach focused on aligning all aspects of an organization with the wants and needs of clients. It is a holistic management approach[1] that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. Business process management attempts to improve processes continuously. It could therefore be described as a "process optimization process." It is argued that BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach.Reducing operation costs was another driver. Specifically, Wells Fargo needed to reduce the administrative time burden on revenue-generating employees and also reduce the FTE required to case-manage the new-hire process while integrating as much as possible. Falk pointed out that not a single FTE was lost from this project. Employees simply became much more efficient and valuable by almost doubling the amount of work done.