The Millennials & Processes: The Engine for Creative Collaboration

1) Generation Y aka the Millennials:   The networked generation place a great importance on communicating and sharing at each stage of their decision-making processes in their personal lives, what is this generation looking for when it comes to Business Process Management? 

The experts say Generation Y is marked by an increased use of and familiarity with communications, media and digital technologies and is willing to trade high pay for fewer billable hours, flexible schedules and a better work-life balance. I think this translates to better collaboration on knowledge intensive work. This might allow organizations to leverage creative collaboration and the cognitive surplus on the Internet. Since gamification appeals, organizations could insert machine intelligence as part of this collaborative opportunity. 

2) What are the specific challenges with case management vs. process automation.  Is there an increase in Case Structures vs process structures, and how does that affect the tools used for automation?

Traditional processes were historically dominated by structured processes (doing by design), but more of the work today is much less structured (design by doing) and aimed at customer pleasing and knowledge intensive work. This leads to more of a balanced approach to process management. Over time more collaboration between people and machines as well will tip the balance towards case management as work becomes more complex and processes expand in scope. Process models will be used more as visualizations of what really happened rather than a map to always follow. This will kick off a “better practices era” and goal driven technologies.

3) How important are integrations for process automation, and can BPM be used with core apps to engage users and add flexibility and agility to an organization? 

As process expand in scope (aka Big Processes), there will be a need to integrate more resources including systems resources. Since processes are being leveraged as a strategy to incrementally transform organizations by tying people engagement to systems of record, integration that can flex over time becomes essential.

4) How quickly are organizations deploying new applications to introduce new processes?  And, is the deployment speed meeting expectations? 

Since organizations do not readily embrace “big bang” approaches, they will likely implement incrementally starting with customer pleasing approaches with high visibility for business goals. This strategy is quite successful for a good number of organizations. This way the benefits can be gleaned to fund down-stream process efforts.  Incremental transformation, through agile processes, seems to be successful, but this approach puts strains on change management efforts.