Process in 2019

Processes have traditionally been the glue that coordinates and orchestrates tasks and resources together in a visible and accountable fashion. This theme will continue, but in new ways and approaches based on the popular drivers of 2019. I have identified three major themes for process in 2019 and they are as follows:

Customer Experience will be the major driver of process behavior, so we will see a convergence of customer mapping, human computer interface and visible explainable intelligence working in concert to serve customers, employees and partners in an ever improving fashion. There will be an emergence of emotion detection analysis and appropriate tone driven actions guided by intelligent assistants in 2019. There will be an emphasis on customer journey mapping in several ways. One is to create journey maps from actual customer behavior. This is great for incremental improvement and optimization for both the customer and organizational perspectives. The other is to create a target map for new and innovative journeys that may lead to new business models and better customer outcomes.

      Automation will continue to advance to beyond simple tasks to groups of intelligent and simple tasks dynamically orchestrated across multiple time periods with process from real time and straight through unattended activities to high touch skilled activities that require collaboration, mining assisted, cognitive assisted human decisions and actions over time. Automation should focus on end to processes that are directed by set of changing goals and guided by governance constraints. Automation will also increase it's scope to enhancing and automating resources that may or may not be tied to actual processes. Humans will be augmented with knowledge, machine learning and algorithms to become more powerful as they interact with processes and other process participants and resources. Software will be augmented with real time feedback and aggregated process mining results. Machines will also take part in the end to end processes and will be part of the overall orchestrations that lead to desired outcomes. 

Actions at the Edge of process reach will push intelligent and dynamic actions in and around mostly IoT enabled work. Goal driven and constraint guided processes of various size and scopes will be acting at the edge in an autonomous fashion thus putting a premium on better forms of decision management and action control. Patterns will be detected close to the action of processes and dealt with at the point through both decisions and actions with or without a centralized approach. Freedom levels will be established through goals and constraints. These type of processes are likely to small scoped and localized, but coordinated collaboratively with end to end processes.

Net; Net:
     
Process will start to exhibit new behaviors and forms in 2019. Processes will play a bigger role in end to end processes, but they will also play a major roles as snippets at the edge. Processes are evolving to support the needs of the evolving digital efforts that are emerging over time. Processes as a whole are becoming inclusive of emergent behavior as well as fixed and known behaviors and any mix of both to meet the balanced outcomes of both customers and organizations.