Jim Sinur, Gartner Emeritus, is next at Building Business Capability talking about the possibilities of transformation resulting from BPM and process models.
Businesses, he says, are in a battle to lead in revenue per hour worked. This means a constant focus on increasing productivity and the linkage of every action to desired business outcomes. It means every decision will be made in the light of conflicting business goals and that every process will have to become more intelligent – adding people intelligence and machine intelligence.
BPM and a BPMS is going to be a part of this. It can make technology more able to drive business change, help IT become a better business partner more focused on business outcomes while increasing agility and speed.
Intelligent Business Operations using events, process, rules, analytics is all about responding appropriately and in real-time. Jim likes the OODA Loop:
- Observe with connected infrastructure generating Big Data
- Orient using dashboards and event processing
- Decide with Decision Management
- Act with process and case management
Multiple process styles are going to be required – form-driven and straight through processes, collaborative and case management types and dynamic, intelligence processes. More and more companies are going to be focusing on processes that are goal-driven (with business constraints) rather than on a specific defined outcome.
Processes of any type can help companies break their organizational silos. By including a variety of interactions and covering both structured and unstructured processes, what he calls an integrated intelligent BPMS. Such an iBPMS supports analytics, business rules, orchestration, human and machine interactions, content management, dashboards, process mining and more. Business rules, of course, guide the decisions in a process as well as helping with the event detection and ongoing adaption of the process.
Jim proposes that processes can be assessed along 5 dimensions
- Raw intelligence
From expected behavior to event and pattern handling, analytics and machine learning - Social Intelligence
From collaboration, crowdsourcing to social analysis and better practices - Agility
From parameters to policies, milestones to goal-driven - Autonomy
From programmed to constraint-based and interactive. - Visualization
From push data to simulation and gamification
Jim had an interesting collection of stories illustrating how different elements come together in intelligent processes. Each showed a different balance between the various dimensions, scoring highly on some but not generally all.
Perhaps the critical challenge for intelligent business processes is going to be finding the (changing) balance point between human and machine intelligence.
Jim suggests that companies should:
- Immediately investigate intelligent business process operations
- Next 90 days assign an architect to investigate it
- Next 12 months, do a pilot of the kind of intelligent processes that will increasingly be critical for success.
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