Digital Business (DBiz)

The need for evolution from Human BPM to Social BPM

With the significant cultural revolution brought about by social media resulting in a new set of social capabilities, enterprises are discovering value in collaboration and engagement of process users in the BPM execution environments. By traditional definition, human-centric business process management is an approach to BPM that focuses on human activities and human interventions in business processes, and supports them with automated functions ¹. The emphasis was on operational efficiency, process visibility and control with business agility. Now, the adoption of social models and opportunities for collaboration are extending the traditional boundaries of human-centric BPM systems.  There are many dimensions that necessitate this change in outlook.

An increasing number of organizations are monitoring the “Net Promoter Score” or NPS metric.  While NPS can help an organization get a sense of where it stands with its customers, measuring NPS – by itself – is no guarantee of improved success in performing for customers.  However a process based approach to measuring, modeling, and improving customers’ experience can produce significant results.

“All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination.” – Earl Nightingale

If you are a government program or project manager, let’s say in the IT solutions (or services) delivery business, you’re probably devoting a lot of thought to the long term view of how you plan to deliver on the promise of your product(s), solution(s), or services(s) – even as you grapple with the day-to-day challenges, risks, and issues that inevitably arise to frustrate your best laid plans. I suspect that you’re also maintaining some form of a road map for each of your projects, to highlight the many intermediate goals that need to be accomplished along the way – perhaps feeling frustrated at times by the need to maintain all that information on a single, fairly intuitive page.

Big Data is all the rage, but how should we use it, and how does it relate to process improvement and BPM?

Big Data is really just a new category of data, but one that has gotten a lot of buzz because it

• is a catchy term
• casts a wider net – out to external customers, potential buyers, suppliers, other networks in the general market place
• requires more sophisticated methods of gathering, modeling, and analyzing the data

So add Big Data to your organizational tools, but make it an integral part of a data-driven organization.

Foundational Principles
The two critical underlying questions before any organization starts gathering Big Data or data of any kind is: 

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” - Albert Einstein

In the 21^st century, government transformation initiatives have become increasingly more common, rather than exceptional. Some ambitious public sector initiatives turn out to be at least partially successful, though many others do not. Even when transformation success is declared, the outcome is often plagued by significant limitations that must be dealt with for many years.

We live in a fast paced world where consumers demand high quality and rapid services. When we buy an item on-line we expect a confirmation email in seconds or we start to be concerned that something has gone wrong.

The desire for rapid and meaningful response is also growing in more complex transactions such as a mortgage or insurance application, even though these often require documents to be supplied that contain the data needed to decide on the claim or application. Consumers can now take and send pictures on mobile devices or scan documents from home, and are attracted by the simplicity and availability of 24/7 e-business.

When transforming these types of business process a capture strategy is needed to enable documents to be delivered and processed in a fast and low cost means, with a consistent high level of quality.

A lot has been written about Big Data in the last few months.  Most companies are trying to make sense of the large amount of data they have to serve as an input to both strategic and operational decisions. In this article, I’ll discuss a couple of reasons for the obvious link between BPM and Big Data and how they can co-exist with BPM implementations helping drive adoption of Big Data.

Most BPM platforms have built-in capabilities to collect process parameters and key process related data during process execution. Most also provide some form of rudimentary to sophisticated analysis of the data, perhaps not run time, (yet), but on a post facto basis.

Process owners use this data to gain insight into the process, for example:

In the previous article “Integrated Business Management in the Process Age”, I discussed the concepts that will shape businesses in the Process Age. In this article I will discuss how process-oriented concepts and systems engineering practices can be used in a process-oriented engineering methodology.

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In the previous article “Integrated Business Management in the Process Age”, I discussed the concepts that will shape businesses in the Process Age. In this article I will discuss how process-oriented concepts and systems engineering practices can be used in a process-oriented engineering methodology.

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