Future Forward! - BPM Futuristic Trends

Future Forward - BPM Futuristic Trends :

How can Business Process Management optimize business outcomes and performance? Last year’s leading BPM events and the views aired therein by the industry’s thought leaders all bring out a dominant and somewhat worrying scenario – after a decade, Process Agility is still a pipe dream for organizations struggling to connect BPM technologies with their real world business processes.

Companies continue to focus on process automation as the quick fix to achieving Business Process Management goals without clearly defining end performance parameters and process improvement metrics. There is a need then to step back from the blinding array of available BPMS and concentrate on building operational resilience achieved through continuously introducing new process incidents for goal fulfilment and performance measurement. The need is also to identify a set of techniques that allow people, processes and information systems to adapt to changing patterns repeatedly.

The success words for the future of BPM include Activity Monitoring and Business Intelligence – a greater shift towards “predictive” instead of the “reactive” models being followed; Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Business Event Support as an important aspect of any full service BPM platform whilst evaluating best fit BPMS by organizations. BPM platforms with a strong focus on BAM, will come out on top by providing the critical visibility today’s embattled organizations need to establish relevant business goals and accountability.

The road this year will organically lead to social BPM - an ideal scenario where knowledge workers and partners model collaborative processes and BPMS designs address needs of unstructured process such as those that rest with knowledge workers. . As organizations begin to see the light about creating structures that are operationally resilient, BPMS as a technology takes a back seat. Key features of BPMS that support real world company goals for operational intelligence such as BAM and Process Designers for continuous process improvement take to the forefront of BPM as a solution to achieve operational success.

Business transformation has emerged as the key to sustaining organizational success and there is negligible concern on technology issues. Processes as a platform must necessarily come to pass as more and more users are vested in the belief that processes will eventually run in the cloud (both public and private).

The economic downturn has everyone looking inward and setting the house in order. Going forward, structured process automation will slowly give way to process management for unstructured processes – harnessing knowledge repositories within enterprises.

The emerging face of BPM extends accountability to process management as the means to optimize business outcome. This means that BPMS needs to keep pace as organizations start adapting process at the pace of business changes and not at the pace of their BPM package!

---

The Relevance of Simulation in Today’s BPM World

The way most BPM solutions approach improving any process is by first understanding the process, then analyzing it; and this is generally followed by process simulation which allows the business to visualize possible effects of the change/s. This is followed by the process improvement stage and finally, the automation of the process in question. The question being, can BPM solutions do without the simulation stage?

Well, we do know that the BPM sphere has seen rapid growth since its inception, and changing trends are now becoming increasingly commonplace. Processes are definitely more automated now as compared to a couple of years ago, and the focus of such solutions is becoming more and more client based. However, with the focus shifting on the needs of individual clients, providing relevant solutions does raise the expense factor to a certain extent.

The Traditional View of Simulation in BPM:

A number of people still see simulation as an integral part of BPM solutions. The rationale is that since you have a BPM model in place, you have access to data that indicates exactly what happens within the given process, and this gives you the data for your simulation model. But for a complete understanding of this aspect, taking a step backward offers more insight.

The Process Analysis Stage:

Since this is the stage that precedes the simulation stage, let’s see how it fits into the scheme of things starting from here. Analyzing and optimizing a process is usually overlooked by the process leader and it is this role that looks to identify any problems as well as make any suggestions. This is done after having gone through the entire process, its performance, as well as all associated data; and the aim is to better the overall process performance.

Also, since a majority of the businesses looking at BPM solutions aren’t in a position to get more manpower, BPM solutions tend to offer tools that allow businesses to test various alternatives.

Process Simulation:

Since there is a need to test various alternatives, many BPM solutions do incorporate simulation tools which allow businesses to compare an assortment of scenarios. These tools essentially run using statistical analysis of factors like resource utilization, queue lengths, average task completion, durations, etc. and can be an effective method to test probable situations. However, a simulation tool is generally very complex in nature, with every statistical link requiring checking. This can lead to a lot of complexity within the process instead, which is against the most widely accepted philosophy of BPM – making processes simple and transparent.

The Process Improvement Stage:

Some BPM solutions come with optimization tools which allow a business to establish the best path towards the improvement of the process. This works in addressing the simulation stage’s natural glitches; wherein, as opposed to an analyst determining the areas that can be improved upon, the tool would actually give you feasible options.

Besides, comparing simulated scenarios isn’t always beneficial to business growth. This is simply because different business managers would look to measure different metrics/components in reaching to effective conclusions.

So while I’m not writing off the role of simulation completely, I am certainly of the opinion that more cost effectual and efficient BPM solutions can be offered without the use of simulation tools.