Saturday, May 19, 2012

BPM ‘s Mighty Waters

5:18 PM Pearl Zhu 2 comments

Companies are using Business Process Management to support new ways of interacting with customers

BPM walk through the rocky road, and start climbing the value trails, through recent surveys, that BPM is increasingly becoming a part of mainstream management thinking, though only 16% of respondents believe that their organization’s processes are currently at the “optimized” level knowledge and practical experience of the topic, 82% believe as more executives know about BPM –to manage the knowing from flowing, the more C-level executives may enjoy the BPM’s mighty waters, especially a few live streams merged in recently.

1. Social BPM

Social business is the transformation many organizations blueprint now, beyond social platform, in essence, social enterprise means the new mindset, the culture of learning & sharing, the more creative way to do business in order to adapt to the new generation of customers, always-on, hyper-connected, hybrid operational environment and extended enterprise boundary.

BPM is moving into an unstructured, more collaborative age. Rules management will be the way to stay properly governed, visible, and compliant, while dynamically keeping business processes on track with changing and complex, to reach desired goals and KPIs.

Social business processes can be categorized into:

· Social co-creation via collaborative projects

· Social profile management via user participation

· Social publishing for content sharing and aggregation

· Social feedback via engaging customers to improve customer service.

Social BPM also means to converge BPM with CRM, BI, MDM and other cutting-edge technologies in order to optimize processes and cultivate competitive business capabilities, to go beyond inside-out business process, to delight customer via outside-in viewpoint. Companies are using Business Process Management to support new ways of interacting with customers

Though social BPM is not fully mature yet, the business need ride the wave, to re-tool the key business process via social angles and embrace change management via social collaboration.

2. Gamification Embedded into BPM

Gamification is a way of using game mechanics (challenges, recognition and rewards) to improve a business process, with the goal of fulfilling business objectives. Organizations can use gamification to motivate behaviors that elevate business performance.

Gamification can also help business understand key processes, then how to improve and optimize them to encourage positive behaviors and improve staff satisfaction. As BPM is no long just process automation in which everything is mapped in a step-by-step process flow; through gamification, BPM will help diagnose flaws in process design, also identify the key steps to success, then become integral part of process design for business, to achieve high-performance result. Such as: the learning management approach speeds domain mastery, or the service excellence via incentives and leader boards

3. BPM Meets BI

The other trend is about aligning Business Process Management and Business Intelligence to achieve business process excellence. The traditional BPM may have the limit to see the context of processes. By integrating BI and BPM, the closed loop performance management can be achieved, where the metrics compared with goals, and KPIs fed back to improve processes and decisions.

Optimize decision making process via integrating BPM & BI, takes business insight to drive decision process;
Closed Loop Performance Management by combining BI with rule management associated with BPM to monitor process from outside-in perspective.
Business agility is enabled via process and data linked dynamically, fueled by master data and ruled by data governance and principles.

The more agile and intelligent process via social BPM, mobile BPM or BPM in the Cloud, will improve cost efficiency, business agility, governance, compliance with regulations, customer centricity, innovation-driven and improve staff satisfaction

In last two decade, BPM has its roots in industrial management practices such as TQM, BPR, BPI, at the age of digitization, BPM may become the mighty waters for more business to dive in, to nourish the new fruit via innovation.