Taming Big Process With @passion4process

I have to depart Appian World at the morning break today to catch a flight home, but first I caught up with Clay Richardson of Forrester and his keynote on the future of process as we move from isolated process improvement projects to what he calls “big process”: a more holistic approach to process improvement and transformation. He described four dimensions:

• Customer – bringing the customer into the process and transform the customer experience. Greater customer satisfaction isn’t just about having happier customers, it drives revenue growth, but it requires more than just putting a pretty (read: iPad) interface on the front of the process; it requires transformation of the underlying processes that support the customer experience. Starting with the simpler environment of the mobile experience, rethink processes based on the customer journey and needs.
• Chaos – taking advantage of change. He claims that the round-trip is dead: what gets executed is so complex that you shouldn’t even be attempting to model it, but use dynamic case management instead where you can combine some structured fragments with the ability for the knowledge worker to decide what to do next. Social BPM provides guidance throughout process discovery and execution, and analytics monitor what’s happening during execution and push into process optimization.
• Context – putting processes in context, leveraging big data to drive process transformation by connecting data directly to the value stream. As I discussed yesterday in my keynote, it’s about monitoring the flood of events, pinpointing and responding to emerging issues before they become problems. Context also means handling localization and regionalization of processes and data, but exploiting the benefits of globalization to service customers anywhere and find the resources required to manage processes.
• Cloud – accelerating development and reducing cost by moving some functions to the cloud; this doesn’t mean moving everything to the cloud, but leveraging it as a platform in a hybrid strategy.

He walked through a couple of case studies, then discussed how to build a plan for dealing with big process.

First, embrace “big process” methods and techniques, adding value stream analysis, value chain analysis and business capability maps to other more granular views of process such as BPMN and Lean/Six Sigma.

Next, build process architect skills that connect data and process.

Last, adopt new tools and architectures that support target operating models, linking data and process to support customer experiences.

MDM and BPM and finally coming together, and not a moment too soon.