According to Wikipedia, “Business Process Management (BPM) and systems engineering is the activity of representing processes of an enterprise, so that the current process may be analysed, improved, and automated.” It also explains that BPM has been with us for more than 40 years
Why are we now talking about BPM so much?
The COVID pandemic has shifted the focus onto employees and their need to work together as a team. Remote working involves transforming the organisational model toward participative/collaborative paradigms that are less hierarchical. The virus has also led to the general use of technologies such as Office 365, ZOOM, etc, and most significantly of all, it has boosted the speed of manoeuvre in the face of an environment that is so uncertain and volatile, in which monthly, quarterly and yearly reports, with trends in KPIs, averages, etc, come too late in this setting in which major business decisions need to be made in just a few days. This new scenario requires data to be made available in real time, with a case-by-case understanding of the business, and monitoring processes in order to correct/realign/modify them almost immediately. It is clear that BPM plays a major role in these circumstances.
BPM’s role of joining the dots in processes
An ever-growing tendency in digitisation involving end-to-end processes, emerging CLOUD environments, and the dynamism expected of us in our manoeuvring is that the IT system currently embedded in everything companies consider they need has lost the battle of exclusiveness. ERP solutions that until only recently catered for over 80% of companies’ IT needs have now missed the boat. What now prevails is, on the one hand, the spread of collaborative media such as ZOOM, O 365, etc, niche solutions for such relevant functions as CRM, combined with cloud-based development environments for “disposable” needs, and supplemented by traditional ERPs, which have been pushed aside in fields such as CRM, BI, IOT, etc.
The glue that binds all these components and the ones already on the horizon involves the definition of processes in BPMN, the orchestration of processes with BPM tools, which also allow automating the steps in these processes, with case-by-case, real-time monitoring of all the milestones in our procedures. Solutions such as AgilePoint, Camunda, Celonis, Signavio, ARIS, etc, allow assembling the components in our processes, which are increasingly set to become the key players in our IT environments.
What role do we want to want to play in this new scenario?
Organisations cannot turn their backs on their processes if they want to fully understand them, monitor them, supervise them and assign responsibilities and management dynamics focusing on processes and the value they bring to the organisation.
The technologies that support process-based management are sufficiently mature to adapt to each need and budget.
Process-based organisation calls for the management of organisational change, moving from a vertical organisation to a process ownership structure.
At FeedBackGround, we have spent 20 years helping organisations to combine People, Technology and Processes to become more efficient. We have always been here, but now we are needed more than ever.
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