In this post I will try to lift the curtains for what I believe will happen in the future in regards of business process management.
The outlooks are very interesting business process management will probably get a key role in the future businesses.
Everything will be social
In the future everything will be social is predicted by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and a lot of things indicated that this will will be correct. Social Business Process management has become a buzz word in the BPM industry.
Social Business Process Management is about to integrating the processes your customers and employees perform in the social networks like Facebook and Twitter etc. into your company process landscape.
For example imagine your helpdesk using Facebook as part of the helpdesk process. But it goes even further. In the future your company will probably monitor the social medias and react proactively on events even before the customer has approached you. In the future I might make a tweet on Twitter telling that my ##%&* internet connection is yet again not working. My internet supplier catches the tweet and contacts me with a proposed solution. Sounds unlikely to happen? the majority of business process management companies don't think so.
Why is this prediction important to you? It is bacause your customers use of social medias will increase and they will expect to see you around.
What does this mean to you? First, it means that you need to think Social business processes into your business processes and you need to start thinking about how to start doing so. Second, it means that you need to consider your business processes as both seen from the inside-out and from the outside-in.
In the future business process consultants will need to ask them selves: What will our customers think of the processes they meet when interacting with us?
The main driver for business processes will be agility
Toady's businesses are facing more and more complex business environments and more and more unstable business environments. In other words the needs for changing your business processes will increase significantly in the future, Therefore, in the future, you will need processes that are easy to adapt to changes and you will need technology enabling you to adapt to rapidly changing changes.
Furthermore, the changes to business processes will be made by the business instead of IT. The business will be able to model new business changes and implement those without help from IT. To do this you will need BPMS like technology and business analysis skills among the business employees.
When I started in IT the business employees needed help when having to format a floppy disk or change printer cartridges - today, business employees are making simple databases, websites etc. in the future they will be analysing, designing and implementing business process changes themselves.
To do this you will need to implement IT systems that are enabling easy changes to business processes and business rules. Prepare for these kinds of demands!!
More Complex Business Processes
In the future the increase of complex processes will continue. According to a Mckinsey survey in average 41% of the business processes are complex interactions, 44% are routine actions and
only 15% are sequential interactions. Furthermore, in a business with increased business complexity more and more work will be performed by knowledge workers solving unstructured complex activities.
BAM - Business Activity Monitoring
Business Process Monitoring is about monitoring business events and let these events trigger other business processes in other IT systems and other parts of your organisation. It is like automating
the monitoring of the business. For example when we are busy in department A we know department B will be busy in a moment - you should monitor this event and act upon it. Or, if you monitor that your customers demand changes you can shift business processes to react on that knowledge.
I think BAM as a concept will be a hot buzz word.
To summarise; in the future social medias will interact with your business processes. You competitive edge will depend on how easy you can adapt to changes. In the future you will need fewer business process consultants to analyse your current business processes and more business process consultants to help your organisation getting more Business Process Mature and being able to monitor and change business processes themselves.
Comments