BPM for All

As such, IT and BPM are often exactly antagonistic to a pleasant customer journey. Customers, except for most misanthropic ones, naturally prefer human interaction instead of an IT system. It is enough to remember all frustration, which anybody had a chance to encounter at least once, while wandering across innumerous levels of auto-responder menu in desperate attempts to speak with a human operator. For a customer, automated service looks in most cases hostile and heartless. On another hand, any company is keen to automating customer journey with modern IT and BPM technologies because it gives enormous savings and improvement of control against comparable staff of human operators. For an organization, automation of customer services is a vital technology of survival and an essential competitive advantage. To avoid disappointment of clients in this contradictory situation, where interests of a business and its clients are predominantly opposite, a company must utilize modern BPM ap...

Almost all major BPM suites include now process publisher as their essential component. Process publisher normally implements an essential mission of sharing process knowledge in an organization. Historically, process publishing first appeared as automatic creation of static collections of web pages representing business diagrams in a company and linked together by navigation trees and embedded hyperlinks. Recently, these process libraries began evolving into dynamic process portals. For many cloud BPM suites these portals already serve as a primary front end for online process collaboration and knowledge sharing. Typical features of process portals include: ·          Hierarchical process tree. ·          Inventory of business processes. ·          Direct navigation through embedded diagram links. ·          Int...

BPMN has definite strength in technical process automation. It is achieved through dozens of proprietary and open source implementations of BPMN engines tailored for interoperability with an impressive array of business software from various target domains. This strength is additionally reinforced with high degree of standardization ensuring transparent exchange of BPMN processes among all these applications and technologies. Perhaps, BPMN is one of most commonly used business language in the area of technical automated business processing. Process transparency creates a unique ecosystem in growing family of tools supporting open BPMN process collaboration and increases its attractiveness for wider business generalization. However, exactly these voluntary expansions create a potential trap of BPMN misuse. In regard of generic business structuring and vision, usage of BPMN might look much less beneficial and relevant. There definitely exist many other dedicated language...

There are many languages in the world: hundredths and, perhaps, thousands with dialects. Is it convenient? No. It would have been much simpler, if everybody speak, e.g. English (or Chinese, or whatever other language around). Would you like to abandon English and further speak only another language, just for the sake of uniformity and common understanding? Is it possible at all? No. Because language bears not only utilitarian communication capacity but a fundamental cultural identity, which cannot be abandoned without literal destruction of personality. Multilingual world is a cornerstone for cultural pluralism, creative evolution and even existence of the humankind. Similar situation is also with technical languages in general and business languages in particular. Fundamental diversity of technical and business vocabulary is one of primary driving forces behind creative evolution of modern technology. Abundance of languages appears not due to a whim or ignorance of their authors on...

Before any process is automated, there must be done careful process mapping. Although the idea looks trivial and self evident, it is often ignored in vast majority of automation initiatives. As a result, true mapping reveals itself already after implementation. Surprisingly, it often has nothing in common with  original automation plan. This careless attitude to preliminary process study is one of the most common reasons for faults in process automation. As a next step, it is useful to do an exploratory process mining to reveal true variability of the existing process. If process is volatile, it might be very laborious or even impossible to automate. It is wrong to think that mining is suitable only for processes, which are already automated. Simple mining can be done even for a purely manual process by just recording its steps by hand and comparing them with previously prepared process map. Put together, these simple rules can ensure smooth implementation and good effect from auto...