Map the business processes and identify opportunities for IP Australia’s performance improvement

In the final quarter of 2008, I enjoyed the great pleasure of performing a piece of work at IP Australia with the goal of improving their Business Performance. Here is the approach I employed which generally I would employ with most clients:

These are the high level phases of the suggested approach:

¨ Complete scoping exercise and design program of work;

¨ Review/Determine “Points of Pain”, PEST, & SWOT analyses with IP Australia subject matter experts (SMEs);

¨ Create a Current State Process model of the whole IP Australia enterprise operating under the auspices of the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research;

¨ Perform a gap analysis against their business plan, strategy, federal charter, etc.;

¨ Distil various acts and regulations, i.e. Patents Act 1990, Patents Regulations 1991; Trade Marks Act 1995 except Part 13 which the Australian Customs Service administers; Trade Marks Regulations 1995; Plant Breeder's Rights Act 1994; Plant Breeder's Rights Regulations 1994; Designs Act 2003; Designs Regulations 2004 to create plain English business rules enabling consistent and sustainable process execution for improving the quality of unrepresented applications is to develop a set of business rules around the trademark application process that transfers the onus and workload from IP Australia to the applicants;

¨ Perform an analysis of key international treaties as advised making linkages with domestic federal legislation;

¨ Create a Future State Process model recognising customer/stakeholder values that may well result in a new organisation design.

¨ The Future State Process model would be embedded in a workflow where compliance with business rules would be the driver of the automatic process;

¨ In the event of non-compliance, emails would be generated to the applicants offering guidance to achieve compliance and if not accepted within a time frame to be determined, an alert would be generated to a digital dash board and the application referred to an examiner.

This will address the concerns of the linear relationship between staff numbers & output. There are significant savings in operating costs and improvements in quality deliverables moving from the current model to a model that focuses on exceptions. The precedent for this is Queensland local government building & development applications.


Ensure optimisation of operations in alignment with the strategic plan using business process reengineering:


¨ This is critical for the outcome sought;


¨ The business artefacts of IP Australia must align must align with the Future State BP model;


¨ In turn, information technology infrastructure must align with, and support the Future State BP model as per the following model: