Starting up season three of my Process Extraordinaire Weekly newsletter and I have to admit that Weekly might be a bit of an overstatement. We’re going to be off on a great start with the background I promised when I posted my “My year in BPM 2023 edition post”. Here’s the link in case you missed it: link
In this post I looked back at the BPM industry and all of the interesting things I witnessed during 2023 and came to the conclusion that most of the things I predicted for 2023 also actually happened in 2023. So, let’s take a quick look at them:
1) Increasing integration between process management, mining and GRC
Organizations as well as BPM solution providers have been heading in the direction of connecting the insights from process and task mining with the standards and governance structures of process management. To top it off, risk and control content has been integrated (in most cases partly) into the repository and the workflows around business processes. I have experienced this firsthand during a lot of the interactions I have had with our larger clients. It is no longer just about one of the three topics, but very often about a mix of all three.
2) Even more focus on process mining
I believe this to have been a bit of an open door on my behalf, given the fact that process mining still is (and will remain to be) one of the hottest topics in the BPM field. Relating back to prediction 1, I also see that the process mining functionalities left and right are being aligned more with the process management way of working. After all, when finished with a process mining initiative it would be wastefull to simply archive or delete the findings (and basically re-invent the wheel in a year or two when you revisit the same process). Nevertheless, I foresee a continued focus on process mining and task mining as I think we have just finished scratching the surface on what process mining can do.
3) BPM coming back to the boardroom agenda
For a long time BPM has belonged to the CIO function and it has served mainly as an enabler for large ERP transformation or implementation projects. This of course has changed over the course of the years but one of the trends that diminished the BPM star slightly was the fact that the CIO is no longer a structural part of the managing board (or executive committee). Already for a while now they became part of the CFO function. Now, in the last few years we’ve seen a resurrection of BPM and this time it is happening through the ranks of the COO or directly under the CFO (but no longer under the CIO) and one of the main reasons for this I believe is the rise of the business transformation topic and the realisation that a business transformation is a company wide initiative that is not just about digital anymore, but also and predominantly about people and processes. So, maybe not in the traditional form of BPM, but process-centric management has made it back to the boardroom agenda as an enabler for business transformation, a more connected way to manage risks and controls or simply to help increase productivity.
What other things did I learn about the state of BPM in 2023? Let’s visit them briefly, shall we?
1) It happens less and less that I need to explain to organizations that BPM is much more than just process modeling and trust me, only a few years ago this was still a major topic. Now, don’t get me wrong, process modeling is still an important and fundamental activity but it is no longer the end goal of BPM. It has become much more a matter of getting valuable knowledge out of a BPM system than it is putting it in, however you can easily imagine that garbage in, garbage out (or GIGO) still applies. If you don’t treat the process documentation stage seriously, you will have a hard time extracting any type of knowledge out of the process repository.
2) Keep it sweet and simple. When you engage in BPM and you have thought about documenting your processes, roles, applications, risks and more, one pitfall to avoid is to think that whatever you document should also be opened up to everybody. This will unfortunately makes things quite complex and 90% of the people you would like to use your BPM platform for retrieving information will get hopelessly lost in the forest of irrelevant information (for them). Instead, make a distinction between the different user groups and tailor the way they digest the process-related information to their needs. Only a ‘handfull’ of process experts actually need to see / digest the full monty of process information. So, keep it simple for the majority.
3) When starting with process documentation most organizations start by building up a functional oriented process hierarchy and more often than not, this hierarchy also serves as a framework for distributing process ownership (and rightfully so). In many cases, organizations choose to let the organizational hierarchy and the process hierarchy coincide and the ultimately responsible person for a functional domain (let’s say: procurement) also is the global process owner. Again, in essence nothing wrong with that. It becomes more complex when the organization is ready to start documenting the end-to-end processes and then needs to decide on who will be the process owner for the end-to-end, knowing that it will span multiple functional domains and thus multiple global process owners? This is where the topic of span of control also becomes included in the mix and there is no one sizes fits all answer for this one. My rule of thumb for choosing the process owner for an end-to-end process is to look at the function with the most influence on the outcome of the process (in supply chain terms this is called the chain director).
4) Starting a BPM initiative in your organization is not all too difficult. You need a believer, some funds and a first goal (this can be an upcoming audit or a wish to engage in process optimization, it could be a lot of things actually). Scaling a BPM project from something local to a company-wide initiative is something entirely different I’m afraid. This involves organization politics (just think about the span of control and ownership as discussed in point 3) and in order to succeed you need a power broker. Somebody on the highest levels of the organization that fully buys into the BPM philosophy and is willing to convince his or her peers about it and back it up with support and funding. This power broker is typically called your executive sponsor and without one you can start but hardly ever scale your BPM endeavors.
I think we’ve looked back to 2023 enough now, so let’s look forward to 2024. What do I believe to happen with and within BPM in the coming 12 months (and beyond probably)?
1) You can ‘do’ process management and process mining in splendid isolation, but the added results in the end will not be as valuable compared to when you combine process management and process mining (ideally into one platform, but this is not mandatory). Looking at the BPM vendor landscape we do see that more vendors are aiming (or already achieved) the incorporation of both process management and process mining into one solution stack, reducing the time you need to move information from one to the other and back. Think about a combination of discovered process variants that you would like to preserve (or document) and all you have to do is select them and push a button.
So, the convergence of process management and process mining will continue in 2024…
2) Operational Resilience professionals will discover BPM as an enabling concept. The term operational resilience has been rising through the ranks at the trend maps all over the place. Disruptions in our dialy lives (Suez channel & Evergreen rings a bell?) made us realize that any chain is as strong as its weakest link. So the question becomes how to identify your weakest links and what better way to do that than via process-centric management where you bring together the activities, the roles, the risks and the applications that are required to execute your business processes. Based on that you can start identifying your critical business components and defining mitigating actions in case something goes wrong. You could even imagine that you are using the insights from process mining to monitor and identify potential weak spot even before they become a problem.
So, stay on the look out for operational resilience…
3) One of my all time favorite topics is that of management of change (MoC). How well is your organization capable of dealing with and processing changes to either processes, applications, risks and control or all of it combined at the same time? The better you are at this, the more agile you are as an organization. First of all, the implementation and execution of such a management of change process is quite a challenge for many organizations, but just imagine the sheer power a well documented process repository can have on the effectiveness of this MoC process. Every time you need to start working on a change request, the first thing you can easily do is to run an impact analysis that provides you with valuable insights in the potential consequences of the proposed change. So no more unintended consequences to parts of the organizations that you hadn’t even considered to be impacted.
Unfortunately, I fear that the power of BPM for the Management of Change process remains underrated…
4) Already for years or maybe even decades people have been talking about the 3 P’s (people, processes, programs (or applications)) but very little organizations are actually dealing with these three as a trinity and they focus most if not all of their attention on one or maybe two of them, leaving the other one to be picked up by somebody else. Whatever you wish to accomplish within your organization, you will have to look at all three of them simultaneously, because whether you like it or not, they are connected at a very fundamental level.
I believe that this realization is slowly settling in with organizations and this is one of the reasons why BPM is making a comeback, it provides a platform to look at your organization from all three major angles (and more).
5) Of course I cannot predict anything for 2024 without touching upon GenAI. The first movements I see in the market here is the application of GenAI with process modeling or interacting with process analysis platforms, such as process mining. Where will this lead? The sky’s the limit and low hanging fruit might be a lot of the administrative tasks that come around when maintaining a BPM repository, freeing the admins of the majority of the mundane, repetitive tasks and enabling them to spend their time on more value adding activities.
So, here’s my open door prediction for 2024: GenAI will increase its impact on BPM activities further.
That’s it for now, hope you enjoyed the read and please let me know what you think…
Ciao for now,
Caspar