Why traditional BPM is not enough and how situation-awareness is a game changer

Editor’s Note: the following includes thoughts and insight on the Gartner BPM Summit in London from Jeff Reser, Senior Solutions Market Manager, Business Process Platforms at Progress Software.

In the Gartner BPM Summit keynote, Janelle Hill and Daryl Plummer outlined 7 key changes in business that are necessary to take a giant leap forward in realizing the benefits of BPM.  Many of their reasons centered around people, collaboration, and social media.

The hierarchical structure of businesses and reporting build layers of management, where people have to adhere to established protocols that are difficult to cross. “Each of us works in an operational island. We have no visibility. We lose the big picture,” said Hill.  She said this creates a barrier that prevents the business process from being optimized.  She said: “There is no individual focused on end-to-end delivery. For instance, the customer gets what they want, not what they necessarily ordered, such as when someone accidentally orders 11 bottles of bleach, rather than one.”

These same notions are synergistic with our approach to situation-awareness - a concept that we’ve built into our iBPMS solution, and in the scenarios that we demonstrated at the show.

1. Mobility. Everything is mobile.  Situation-aware solutions need to accommodate the way people work today.  Whether it’s content or data or opinions, our solutions need to factor people mobility and mobile devices in when progressing projects forward.  Mobile support is crucial for today’s business.
2. The expanding world of social media.  E-mail systems are often times more burdensome than fruitful.  Situation-awareness in our solutions can and should leverage social media as well.  Whether it’s presence awareness, or tweeting sound bites or headlines, or communicating through Facebook or Google+ … our solutions should be positioned to take into account “social BPM” as well.  In our retail banking scenario at the event, we showed exactly that, using social trending and media to shape the kinds of offers and onboard the right merchants for particular customer sets – personalized BPM.
3. People-centricity. Often the decision-making processes get so bound up in politics and agendas that it all gets bogged down.  Situation awareness takes into account the people aspect of BPM-based solutions.  Fact is, business rules change much more frequently than processes – it’s a necessity.  How do we keep up with the changes while keeping everyone happy?  The business rule management system must cater to all types of users and people in order to be effective.  Externalizing rules simplifies the business processes of an organization.
4. Free flow of information.  This is one of the biggest challenges in progressing the value of BPM-based solutions.  Situation awareness is understanding the effects that small changes in a single application or rule might have in mission-critical cross-network processes.  The combination of real-time embedded analytics and business intelligence is required in order to fully understand how to quickly and effectively adapt to changes both inside and outside ANY organization.
5. Productive notification.  Keeping everyone in the loop over what’s going on – extreme collaboration.  Situation-aware solutions need continuous collaboration among all of the stakeholders in order to work.  We showed this again at our booth during the event – with the bank collaborating and working closely with the merchants to develop the right offers, at the right time, for the right customers.
6. Ad hoc relationships.  Every organization deals with personnel changes, morale, political maneuvers, and changing regulations.  It is how the business deals with these changes that becomes key.  Just as in situation-aware solutions, we need to be able to determine how to manage ad hoc tasks in real time – during process time execution – in order to be truly effective.
7. Dynamic communications.  Real time awareness of the decisions that are being made, continuous collaboration, and allowing everyone to contribute dynamically are all salient points to progressing positive business outcomes.  Situation-aware solutions also must support dynamic processes – this is absolutely critical in order to effectively adjust to changing conditions.  Dynamic services can be inserted into mission-critical processes to account for fraud detection, risk identification, customized offerings, and much more.

So there is definitely synergy among Gartner’s people-centric, collaborative “big steps” and Progress’ notions around “situation-aware solutions”.  It all comes down to the simple assertion that traditional BPM is not enough.  Organizations today need the fusion of people through collaboration and the fusion of technology through interoperating BPM-related elements.  In short, organizations need an iBPMS solution to progress revenue growth significantly in the near future.