The Need For Decision-Centric Intelligent Processes

For all the undoubted benefits of a process approach, many of the processes being modeled and implemented by organizations are not very “intelligent.” Many processes are mechanical and repetitive, often relying too much on human decision-makers. They are internally focused, driven by the organization’s own view of its transactions and structure. Relying on these processes means that too few transactions run straight through, completing without manual intervention, while many cases end up in work queues awaiting action. Customers and citizens are frustrated by these processes because they make interaction more difficult while organizations struggle to adapt these processes to cope with business change and new regulations. Organizations need a more intelligent set of business processes—more dynamic, more transparent, more adaptive, and fundamentally more focused on the consumer. Building more intelligent processes requires a focus on decisions as well as processes. Intelligent processes are more decision-centric, using a focus on decisions to drive intelligence into the process.

In this short series I am gong to outline the need for intelligent processes (this post), define them, and then wrap with a discussion of the role of decisions in them.

So what drives the need for more decision-centric, intelligent processes? Several things:

• Rapid pace of change
  As trite as it may seem, the pace of change is not slacking. Companies and government organizations must be able to respond quickly and effectively to changes in the new environment, new data, new competitors.
• Consumer expectations
  Consumers, as both customers and citizens, are increasingly demanding that they be able to do whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want using mobile devices, social channels and more.
• Increasing regulation
  Global, national and local regulations continue to increase in complexity, diverge in intent and change.
• People
  Especially the people with business know-how who are retiring in every increasing numbers. Lots of experience in how to make the old processes work is walking out the door.

And through all this CIOs continue to need to simplify IT. The answer is to develop increasingly intelligent processes.

You can get more on this topic at our webinar on Decision-Centric, Intelligent Processes with Mark Mastop of Blueriq on September 18th at 10am Eastern/16:00 CET. I also wrote a white paper that is available on the Blueriq resources page.

Next, defining intelligent processes