Business Process in 2015: The Year of Taking Digital to Heart

It's now time to take a shot at predicting 2015, since a number of us have tried to dissect 2014. My analysis of  2014 was http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/12/business-process-in-2014-year-in-review.html  I think that the themes for 2015 will be leveraging the emerging digital platforms and aiming them at "real customer interactions" starting with marketing and working their way into operations as a better understanding of what it means to be digital. I categorized the 2015 trends into three categories and they are Business Impact, Market Momentum and Technology Interactions.

Business Impact:

Business is enlightened enough to realize that better customer relationships goes beyond the processes that just enable "sheep stealing" processes that just make on-boarding a better experience. We all know that our clients are savvy enough to know there is a better way and they see it unfolding on their phones, so they expect the same experience in dealing with a long term business relationship. Their alternative is to pick another business, which they will keep doing, if we don't step up our efforts to keep them delighted. The start of these efforts is not just to do customer journeys, but to do behavior modeling to understand how customers will react to situations. This will help processes to handle needed innovations under varying circumstances. It will also help businesses take the new digital platforms seriously as responding properly will require platform that can better sense, decide and respond appropriately. Given this new ability to morph responses to real needs, a new visibility will be needed to govern and adjust the processes in a dynamic fashion. To read more about behavior modeling and transparency:

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/09/behavior-modeling-key-missing-context.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/12/giving-work-visual-transparency-is.html

Market Momentum:

The BPM related markets will continue to grow at double digit rates and there will be a larger number of new players that will take one or more of the technologies contributing to evolving digital platforms and drive them home to deliver benefit quickly while the big vendors take a longer time to evolve a complete platform. Medium sized vendors will pick a starting point, such as visibility to drive revenue while they expand their digital platform.

One of the side effects of the new digital platforms and the combining of technologies is complexity and the ability to manage it. BPM will let go of some control and push some of the intelligence and control to the edge with the agent enabled IoT (smarts at the source and destination). The big and powerful vendors will push incremental transformation that leverages the digital platforms advantages while dealing with a portfolio of legacy processes and applications. To read more about incremental transformation and the target digital behaviors:

http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/11/launching-process-transformation-effort.html
http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-top-10-behaviors-of-winning.html

Technology Interactions:

The pace of including emerging technology silos will quicken and I expect that there be flashes of technology innovation that will require collaboration and eventual inclusion into process efforts. The areas I expect to be hot are the Internet of things (IoT), Cognitive Computing, Personal Assistants (Intelligent agents), Machine Intelligence, Robotics, Improved Big Data Analytics and Advanced Visualization Capabilities. I also expect a raft of encouraging case studies to start to emerge in 2015 that shows the strong benefit of BPM and these new areas just like we saw on social, mobile, cloud and analytics. While these 2013 & 2014 themes will continue to show up in sharp case studies, these newer technologies will make the way into proof points as well.

Net; Net:

With the investment in technology soaring in the US in 2015 and BPM earning it's way into cost savings solutions in economies just approaching higher GDP growth, I expect another strong process year in 2015. These are exciting days.