The future of the past
The future is the best decision-making tool we have. Real business effectiveness comes not only from anticipating future trends, but also being in tune with what will exist tomorrow, so innovation can drive your decision-making, today.
Since he co-founded Signavio in 2009, Dr. Gero Decker has embraced innovation, and been at the forefront of advancing BPM for everyone. So, uncover Gero’s 2019 BPM predictions and strategize your success with the devices and working practices of today, with the future of your business in mind.
Dr. Gero Decker's 2019 BPM Predictions
1. Customer experience will become the North Star for all value-added operational excellence and business transformation initiatives.
Progressive operational excellence (OPEX) and business transformation excellence leaders already recognize the need for a more customer-centric approach to their programs. However, many OPEX and business transformation efforts are still disconnected from customer experience teams within their organization.
This disconnect has two significant risks. One is that OPEX will be increasingly sidelined or downsized due to the perceived lack of added business value. The other is that organizations will fail in their efforts to consistently deliver the exceptional customer experiences that will ultimately decide their fate.
This is why I predict that forward-looking OPEX and business transformation leaders will increasingly leverage techniques such as customer journey mapping to rethink how they deliver maximum value to their organizations, and ensure their continued relevance.
The worldwide take on customer success
Globally, the organizations leading the field of customer experience, or using customer experience to differentiate themselves, seem to have at least one thing in common which separates them from their competitors.
For them, customer experience is not a fashion or an afterthought; it lies at the very heart of how they organize and run their enterprise. They have aligned and optimized their processes around the delivery of those customer experiences.
2. 2019 will be the beginning of the end for stand-alone process mining, with the market likely to entirely disappear by the end of 2020.
As a key technology, process mining has come from nowhere and generated significant interest. However, its specialized nature and the high cost of entry, lead many organizations to question the long-term value of an ‘analytics-only’ toolset.
Though it is true that significant savings can be made in analyzing key end-to-end system processes (like Order to Cash or Procure to Pay), organizations also want to take action and effect change, to justify continued high investment over a long period.
I am not predicting that people won’t want or need to invest in process mining. What I am suggesting is that the technology will be seeking a new home, new price point, and a different value proposition.
From a Signavio perspective, I already see that clients need to mix the system processes that they can view through process mining with the manual steps that inevitably take place in a true end-to-end process. In fact, many performance issues can immediately be traced to a misalignment between manual and automated processes.
With this in mind, and as Gartner discusses, a prime use case in 2019 will be that of process discovery. In other words, process mining will be subsumed as an inherent capability within any good professional business process analysis tool. Process mining will, therefore, aid the faster creation of baseline models from which to perform analysis and process improvement.
Real-time process monitoring
The need for the continual monitoring of process health will lead to a switch in the application of process mining to that of real-time process monitoring. Leveraging process mining technology and applying it in this way will ensure that organizations can more readily obtain cross-system views.
While many BPMS or iBPMS systems already provide monitoring, this is usually only within their applications, and oversee mostly performance issues. Process mining based performance monitoring will also look at the overall health of the process and not just monitor from a queue or resource perspective.
The exception to the rule
An exception to the above two scenarios, leading to a decrease in market interest, will be in the case of audit firms. For them, the application of current process mining and intelligence will prove to be a great auditing tool. The ability to leverage the technology to identify exceptions, trap non-compliant behavior, and to protect against anomalies, will be vital to avoiding corporate governance and misreporting lawsuits.
3. The inability to scale Robotic Process Automation (RPA) implementations will negatively impact the expected return on investment.
Robotic Process Automation is an all-consuming process automation technology. The hype around immediate high returns and fast implementations is sucking the oxygen from other automation technologies, such as BPMS. RPA is even impacting the ability of ERP vendors to promote their technologies.
Right now, the majority of RPA rollouts are still at the project level, with many large organizations deploying or testing many different RPA tools, vendors and solutions in various organizational contexts. In fact, this fragmentation may yet deal a killer blow to the promise of large-scale adoption. In a recent Gartner survey, 24% of respondents using RPA cited scaling RPA as their number one problem, while five percent also said they already had ‘buyer’s remorse’.
Although this may seem a low percentage, given how relatively new RPA is, this must be a worry for many. Additionally, Gartner shared that the number one inquiry they receive is about how to scale the technology.
The importance of scaling RPA...
Obviously then, scaling is a real challenge from an RPA vendor perspective and end-user standpoint. Indeed, I’ve had many conversations with both groups over the past 18 months about leveraging process models and using firm analysis and design practices to help them.
It is fair to say that for the first 12 months many RPA vendors shunned the need to partner, or to become involved in a broader solution story. Instead, many organisations were keen to focus on fast implementation.
But things are changing. RPA vendors are discovering that the upsells many will rely on are not happening quite as easily as they’d hoped, and better planning and support is needed. Enterprises are finding out that unless they take the time to think about where and when to apply RPA best, they are not getting the value they expected.
Many years ago, Bill Gates noted, “Computers just mean that you can do the wrong things faster than ever before.” And for many, the same can be said of RPA. The difference is with with robots, we can make those mistakes at a cheaper rate, too!
... Scaling RPA with Signavio
Helping organisations to apply RPA at scale successfully, lies at the very heart of what Signavio offers. This means assisting companies to understand where best to use robots, helping identify what potential cost savings might be, and monitoring the performance of robots. But moreover, this means the creation of environments to enable the simpler implementation of robots, and even the combination of different robot types from different vendors.
The power of process
Step into the future with Signavio
Clearly, 2019 will be a year of dramatic change and growth in the world of process management and RPA. To see how Signavio can help you navigate the exciting times ahead, including an increased focus on your customers, contact us or register now for a free 30-day trial.