"To muse is to consider something thoughtfully"
business processes in the eyes of leaders
short-term / near-term horizon
Leaders 'often' care too much about short-term profits / gains.
As such they omit factors that only affect the long-term viability of the company.
denial and ignorance
Leaders 'often' deny the lack of maturity of their business processes and information householding OR have adopted a narrow, isolated view of their business ignoring all kind of external and internal inter-dependencies.
unbelievable confidence
Leaders 'often' believe their carefully chosen business application suites are able to support the whole organization.
Now it is time to look at things differently
We need to take a different view at business applications!
Today complexity of changes in business environments increases by the month and business application users are dealing with a growing diversity of critical opportunities, challenges and problems in their daily life. They have become real knowledge workers no longer talking to customers only about sales orders but also managing quotation requests, product catalog distribution and handling disputes, and much more.
In future years this will get worse because we will have fully automated standard tasks - such as creating sales orders and issuing invoices.
But our highly praised business applications are still task driven / oriented - there is a menu option for each activity to be executed. Well yes they are no longer running on premise but in the cloud, and yes they are accessible at any time, at any place with any device.
However our knowledge worker is no longer task-oriented but goal-oriented. He or she handles business complaints - validates whether they are justified - and at the same time ensures new products are shipped to customers with the highest urgency or goods returned to suppliers for replacement. Meanwhile answering questions over the phone or via chat coming from prospects, customers, suppliers or sales people in the field. Yes, the future knowledge worker no longer deals with the whole organization but with the whole supply chain - all internal and external stakeholders.
Work can no longer be done in a functional task oriented manner. The knowledge worker needs context-driven and goal-oriented access to prescribed business processes. Moreover the knowledge worker wants to be able to adjust ways of workings or approaches based on knowledge gained while doing the work. And wants to be able to reuse this knowledge.
When dealing with a request of a customer the knowledge worker wants, instead of executing a predefined business process, to choose which prescribed business process to execute based on the status of information at hand supported by decisions made in similar situations.
I am modeling the work of a future knowledge worker combining BPMN, CMMN, DMN and integrating this with business applications.
We need to take a different view at business processes!
We deal no longer with structured business processes but work will become unstructured for the greater part with lots of decisions and process variants.
As it looks to me now, our current business information systems / applications (just to name a few: ERP, CRM, PLM, ...) in their current fashion will no longer be suitable / capable to support the knowledge worker. I doubt whether with the growing diversity they can still support the business.
So we need a combination of process management and decision management controlled no longer by the process control flow but by context - cases and it need to integrate with all kind of devices and application systems of business partners. And it need to be adaptive - extensible on the spot by generating new functionality or integrating it with existing solutions in the cloud.
What we need is the intuitive way of working / the human logic in the head of some knowledge workers that already today deal with so many business information systems such as ERP, CRM, SRM, B2B platforms to get their job done.
What we want is MAKE LIFE at work MORE ENJOYABLE for the knowledge worker of the future.
Tags: BPM, BPMN2, DMN, Process Modeling, ACM
