How Might Best Practice BPM Look in 2030?

what will BPM look like in 2030?

It will be white, round, ergonomic, will fit in the palm of your hand all snug and neat, have a logo of a fruit on it.. you'll look at it in a special way, think about a wonderous business capability and marvel as the reality of managed operational execution unfolds before you as if a magician had waved his wand. Your soft utterance of "what's happening in my business" will be met with a swift and decisive "don't worry about it, we have it all under control". It will also make you a nice espresso and tasty sweet pastry. However, this is the 'executive edition' which costs about £50 per enterprise.. though you can additionally purchase the 'Implementation Edition', which comes as a big brown bag full of spanners, wrenches, screwdrivers, circuit boards and a few first aid kits, which costs around £100m per process and offers you an additional consultancy service to support the upgrade of an Implementation Edition into an Executive Edition at around £9,000 per day, with a minimal purchase of 200 people for 25 years.

Or something along those lines....

By 2030 the BPM term would be the equivalent to using ancient lingo like �bootstraps� and “hexadecimal� today. BPM devices would be just another component embedded in the system, that nobody need to see anymore (except by a few designers and technicians) Nevertheless there will be ubiquitous systems interacting with the user or its day-to-day “e-environment� (the sum of all Internet version 2030, biz tribes, bio-medical, transport, e-government, social networks, market ecosystem, DNA fate, astrologist, preferences, computerized clothes, dietician, avatars, gerontologist, etc.), learning about everything the user (hopefully) allows the system to know about its “e-ecosystem� and proactively developing alternative solutions to satisfy the user's needs. Probably there will be political pressure to fight for the users' right to choose its alternatives, rather than being imposed on them by marketing, government, mafias, and social networks. The term of the day would be computer-assisted process improvement (assuming that we will be use the word computer), meaning that the many systems that will be part of practically everything we work with, taste, touch or sleep on will have the capability to lean about what we do (Process As Is), be able to analyze it, and propose a more efficient and effective way to do it better in order to satisfy our needs (Process To Be) . If our democratic system still survives by then, probably we will be able to choose the implementation of the improvement in our way of life (continuous improvement).

I think we have learned a lot about business process in the past decade, and support for business process in the future will follow some trends which we have been seeing in manufacturing and in business management. Particularly a lean, just-in-time approach for business processes.

If you think about it, BPM is based on Taylorist ideas that you can separate a process from all others, identify the one single best process, spend a lot of up front effort to automate it, and then run millions of identical instances to recoup the investment. Thus BPM in the 2000's was mass production of business processes. That works fine in routine work which is entirely predictable and takes no real thinking.

Knowledge work is now the domain needing support: it is more valuable work by its nature, and becoming a higher percentage of the workforce every year. This requires an Adaptive approach to processes, where processes are not defined ahead of time, but rather assembled in real time as you work. WfMC is calling this Adaptive Case Management, Forrester is calling this Dynamic Case Management, but under any name, the trend for just-in-time process management is upon us.

http://kswenson.wordpress.com/tag/case-management/

Sorry, I missed the 2030 date part of the question. Extrapolate this trend, and a couple of things happen: just like using a spreadsheet in business has become second nature, so will describing work in terms of a BP diagram by 2030. A manager or team leader will sketch a diagram of what is to be done. This will flip easily between process diagram and project gantt chart. Cases will be represented in a real-time multiple editor environment much like Google Wave, where anyone can add (or remove) at any time. I am not talking about "process definitions" but instead running cases (process instances). Assigning a task to a person will be easier than sending an email message, and more effective. Like Facebook, you will be able to access a person's profile, and get an personalized instant status report of all the things they are currently doing (that they want you to know know) and the status of those tasks. The entire web will be "Person Oriented" - you will go to a person (actually their avatar) in order to get anything done, instead of the document-oriented nature that the web has today. You will even go to a "person" to browse a web of information that that that person has access to,and want to let you personally have access to. History will be tracked uniformly, and powerful BI technique will be built in to give you a high level overview of what has happened. As processes become more just-in-time, it will be harder to predict future behavior based on meta-data, but instead future will be predicted by mining patters out of the history. And ... there will be no central point in all this ... it will all be hosted in the cloud entirely distributed, like the web is today.

I think the most important difference that far into the future is less about what BPM looks like and more about the pervasiveness of the process-centric culture. BPM can really change the way that business people look at their businesses, but how many business schools currently teach it? Not many.

In 2030 the BPM mentality will be pervasive in the business community. For example, when a company is considering an acquisition, the business people who are doing due diligence will ask for to see the business processes of the company they are thinking about acquiring. And they will get them, since the target business will have considered their processes to be a key asset of the company.

The unfortunate thing is that the best technologies in the world, now or then, cannot compensate for poor process design. And, organizations are remarkably poor at process. That was true 20 years ago and it is true now.

What may look different is the role of a process czar or Chief Process Officer. This would be an individual that can champion process definition across functional areas, silo's, business divisions and other organizational barriers.

Another best practice would be IT portfolio rationalization. That would be the consolidation of multiple redundant systems into a more streamlined footprint to reduce costs and increase agility. As a result, BPM initiatives would have far less baggage to deal with.

But, if organizations can't get themselves process oriented the best technology in the world won't help them.

My recent blog posts give hints as to where it's heading in the next decade or two: http://www.bpmredux.com/blog

if we examine current tech trends and look at social networking, mobile platforms, touchscreen hardware, virtual worlds, I believe BPM Suites will follow these too as they mature. Right now it's all about communication, collaboration and community. Next 10 years could add mobility onto this, dynamic adaptive intelligent processes and workflow.

Looking at the business discipline of BPM I reckon we'll see holistic process networks rather than rigid organisational charts and process architectures. Trouble is, if the last twenty odd years is anything to go by we'll still be clinging onto what BPM means today as a philosophy. Lean, Six Sigma, Continuous Improvement have hardly moved from Deming like cycles in this time have they ?

As an aside, isn't it courtesy to offer your own insight when asking such a question David ?
What are your thoughts ??

I've written about BPM in ten years time - morphed into The Business Operating System - in my blog:
http://sourcing-shangri-la.typepad.com

In 2030? I see two countervailing trends. I agree that business life may be far more social-oriented - with Facebook style as the cultural norm. But I also suspect that regulatory and compliance requirements may be even further advanced - driven by ethics and green thinking -and that is likely to require more rigor and governance.

LOL at the 'Executive' and 'Implementation Edition' described in the first comment.

To effectively describe what BPM will be like in the future (20 years out) it's important to look at what has happened in recent history. The sad reality is not much has really happened in the last 10 years to create the kinds of cultures in business to really make a difference in BPM. Most business leaders don't even understand the power of creating a process driven culture. It's no wonder why not much has changed. We've seen businesses assign process leaders and this person or department is responsible for driving the process agenda. It's everyone's business to drive and improve processes. It needs to be in everything we do, every employee needs the mind set and then the skills and tools.

I think it's safe to say the cultures to support rapid change will continue to be slow to adopt anything really meaningful. The technology to support BPM will continue to exceed our ability to use it effectively. Tools will be available to do anything, anytime on everything for anyone. IT leaders and early adopters will be running around amazing others with their abilities to understand, develop, optimize and improve. But the majority will be less focused and unaware of the available tool set so will extract little value from the available technology or improved methodologies.

By 2030, many more business leaders will be rewarded and compensated for creating the kinds of process driven cultures that create sustainable value for customers, shareholders and employees. Employees at every level in every department will also be rewarded and focused on creating products and providing services that are repeatable and deliver maximum value every time. Then we'll start seeing the BPM revolution!

BPM as a focus area has been in existence since early part of this decade and we have seen a major change in the concepts, applications, technologies and methodology over the years. Predicting the trend after 2 decades is like gazing a crystal ball. However, it is nice to stretch our imagination and take a wild guess! I foresee BPM not existing as a specialized area with dedicated focus. Instead it would become a way of life and every technology would have BPM features embedded in their core offering. The reason why we see BPM growing as a focused area today and in the near future is because we are using BPM to bridge the gaps in our legacy technologies. We are also seeing a dedicated focus, as most companies are still exploring what is BPM and how they can leverage processes to manage their operations.

But two decades down the line, this won’t be the scene. We would have seen at least 5 generations of technologies come and go by 2030. Our experiences of the past decade will decide what will be coming in the next decade.

We would see emergence of industry specific platforms which would handle more than 50% of the business processes and transactions prevalent across majority of the companies. IT would cease to be the differentiator. Most processes would be managed through standard and maybe outsourced systems hosted on cloud. BPM will be a way of life and standard component of any enterprise technology platform. I agree with most of the views presented by other contributors but this is just another perspective !

2030 is too far into the future for us to make any prediction close to being accurate.

But BPM design will be very different from the way we know it now and a lot of things will influence this. For a start, consider this – devices used by businesses will be totally different from the ones we have and Laptops and desktops will not be the main devices driving usage. BPM will be designed not to be fit into the limitations of a device, rather devices will adapt to specifically for user need/usage (like the iPhone and iPad of 2009/10).

Host of new communication possibilities will push email out of the top. New types of communication (like Twitter, Wave of 09/10) will be more prominent. New ways of communication will be the order of the day – there will be several Human Interface Devices that will radically change the way we communicate, collaborate and operate. So BPM design will exploit all that to unlock workforce effectiveness further.

As an approach, BPM on the ground will be less and less about technology and more about specific business objectives. All technology components necessary will be available as ready-to-use components and a BPM app will be a heavy mashup built by anyone who knows how to click, drag and drop. And the IT team will have the job of creating those components for the organization to use.

And Peter and I will see this post on eBizQ in 2030 and laugh. For it may be nothing close to what has been predicted here. It could just be much more dramatically different and unexpected!