To help you make 2018 your best year ever I asked 20+ BPM experts about the skills that will be hot this year.

As you will see I kept the basic structure used in 2016 and 2017 version of this post, but to make it more actionable added a question about the best resources to learn the hot BPM skills.

Plus – this time I have something extra

The goal of this post is to help you stay sharp and relevant. That’s why you will find answers from people who live and breathe processes.

But to give you an overview of the megatrends shaping how organizations work I asked for opinion someone from the outside of BPM arena whose views on the market I appreciate greatly:

Anand Sanwal

Anand Sanwal is the Founder and CEO of CB Insights.

CB Insights enables Fortune 1000 companies identify emerging trends and threats early by ingesting & analyzing massive amounts of unstructured data beyond human cognition.

WWW: https://www.cbinsights.com/
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @asanwal

What are the trends that will impact the way organizations work and interact with customers in 2018?

In 2018 and beyond, large corporations will start to use Expert Augmentation and Automation Software (EAAS) to make better decisions in areas they’d never thought of “processes” before.

For example, an area like competitive intelligence has never been treated like a process in most large corporations. They have a bunch of analysts and consultants running around creating ad hoc decks opining on what a competitor’s strategy is based on the latest article or transaction or last quarter’s results of a competitor.

The same can be said for corporate strategy, assessing new markets and new products or even identifying M&A targets.

These are all areas that have historically been viewed as expertise-driven or what folks would describe as “more art than science” suggesting that these areas are solely reliant on human cognition.

The reality is that selecting new markets for entry or understanding competitors so you can respond appropriately are major decisions which will become more process-driven with technology and data because machines can provide a level of understanding that is more rigorous than humans can.

Let’s take an example.

If you asked an analyst at a corporation to analyze Google’s strategy in 5 days and you gave them 40 quarters of earnings transcripts, 10k Google patents, every job they have open, all their investments, M&A and partnership arrangements over time (thousands) and tens of thousands of press articles about Google, you know what they’d do with the thousands of pages of info you gave them?

Nothing.

They’d read an equity research report and a couple of articles about the company from media outlets and summarize them.

And because their inputs into their analysis are incomplete garbage, the end result is garbage. Garbage in, garbage out.

It’s willfully ignoring all the digital clues Google has left out there about its strategy. Google’s strategy is where it is allocating its resources and time. Where it is investing and acquiring, what its smartest people are researching, what it’s discussing with Wall Street, what it’s talking about with media, etc.

But there is so much of that information that it’s beyond human cognition and so analysts have to rely on shortcuts for their analysis.

Machines don’t have these limitations. We now have the technology and software to extract, classify and analyze this vast array of unstructured information, make sense of it and glean meaning from it with machines that are tailor-made for this.

Of course, Expert Automation & Augmentation Software will be more focused on augmentation, i.e., helping analysts do countless complex tasks that are either beyond human cognition and/or inefficient for human beings to do (read thousands of pages of patents and understand key topics).

Think of these AI-enhanced assistants as junior analysts who never tire and who can process information beyond human capacity but who will still need the steady eye of a manager to make subjective judgments.

If you want to learn more about the trends poised to reshape industries in 2018 there’s also an interesting (free) report by CB Insights called “15 Trends Shaping Tech In 2018”

Which BPM skills will be hot in 2018?

Now when you know the broader context, I want to share with you answers from 20+ BPM experts. You can either read everything or use the navigation below. Enjoy!

BJ Biernatowski
Roger Burlton
Alan Fish
Ian Gotts
Paul Harmon
Barbara Hodge
Sandeep Johal
Abhijit Kakhandiki
Sandy Kemsley
Mathias Kirchmer
Marcello La Rosa
Bob Larrivee
Juergen Pitschke
Alex Rawlings
Adrian Reed
Clay Richardson
Pedro Robledo
Michal Rosik
Alexander Samarin
Phil Simpson
Jim Sinur
Shik Sundar
Keith Swenson
James Taylor
Roger Tregear
Miguel Valdés-Faura

Now, let’s dive into the answers.

BJ Biernatowski

BJ Biernatowski is an advanced BPM Practitioner with 20 years of IT experience, 15 of which spent implementing Business Process Management solutions. He has practical experience with Pega, Appian, Tibco AMX BPM and K2 blackpearl including large-scale, mission-critical systems.

BJs areas of interest include CoEs, Knowledge Work automation, and business-driven development. He can be found blogging at the Healthcare BPM Practitioners LinkedIn group, which he founded, as well as chasing Bigfoot on the Olympic Peninsula. UW Foster School of Business alumni and a Seattle, WA resident.

WWW: http://www.healthcarebpm.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @bjbiernatowski

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

Adaptability: The whole industry seems to be going through a couple of tectonic shifts i.e. adoption of the Cloud, IOT, Machine Learning,

Personal Case Management and Task Automation, Cloud Process Automation solutions. Some of these trends either complement or fully replace traditional BPM approaches.

Low Code: The need for quicker and simpler solutions will further drive adoption of low code process automation technologies causing confusion with the positioning of pure-play BPMS vendors.

Business and Solution Architecture awareness: A plethora of different automation technologies requires BPM practitioners to see through overlapping stacks as new products and platforms enter the market. Vendors only seem to be adding to this confusion, by releasing new features, components to further differentiate themselves from the competition. The use of nonstandard technical jargon and the lack of clarity around the positioning of these tools in the Enterprise Architecture stack don’t help either.

Great Communication: As BPM practice gets recognized as a critical component of your company digital transformation, the ability to communicate with different stakeholders, inspire, story tell, and lead through chaos becomes paramount.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

Publishing house:
Future Strategies

Conferences:
bpmNEXT, OPEX Week, vendor and industry-specific conferences: Microsoft Ignite, PegaWorld, TibcoNow, Appian World

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

In terms of the hype, the Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies does a great job forecasting new trends and fads from a multiyear perspective.

Given the high number of different modeling and prototyping tools out there that are still non-compliant or even closely related to BPMN, one cannot stop wondering about the future of this standard. Today it is possible to engage in business process automation activities without actually touching or modeling business processes. Beware of process automation m-architects using hyped presentations to lay the foundation for transformation programs – BPMN exists for a reason.

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Roger Burlton

Roger is the president of Process Renewal Consulting Group Inc. He is also co-founder of BPTrends Associates; the services firm of the world-leading BPTrends.com knowledge portal. He started the pioneering Process Renewal Group (PRG) in 1993 and was at the forefront of process-centric ways of running businesses.

Roger chairs several of the largest and most influential BPM conferences in the world and is a sought after speaker dealing with the tough issues of business change in a thought provoking and entertaining manner.

WWW: http://www.processrenewal.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @rogerburlton

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

* Process Architecture / Value Stream mapping directly linked to the external stakeholder so that every process is connected to and driven by value creation.

* Understand how to design the business for Business Agility – design for changeability. This is not the same as Agile software Development.

* The difference that digitalization (not digitization) can make to end to end processes and how the work flow changes now that the customer is no longer outside the process but is now an actor in conducting the process

* Data flow analysis that tracks date creation, updating, and reference across a whole chain to ensure integrity. This is critical in digitalized process solutions.

* Connecting processes to decisions and making sure process flows are NOT used to represent a flow of rule execution.

* Concept modeling which becomes the foundation for information, process, capability, rules and measurement definition. The definition of the business concepts and terms is critical to processes and all connecting domains that the process depends on to execute properly.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

* Start with articles to get a range of perspectives or go to a relevant conference

* Read some books relevant to the perspective that resonates with you

* Take some training and practice the approach as well as the subtleties that can only come from interacting with a knowledgeable human

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

No Longer:
* For business level modeling – you do not need to know or use detailed BPMN 2.x – just the core is sufficient if you are a process analyst.

* Multiple and deep levels of root cause analysis – keep it higher – you don’t have the time anymore and the changes will not be at the tweaking of processes but of the rethinking of them.

Not yet practically applicable yet:
* AI for process analysis and design efforts – may be a good choice however for high volume or very complex business problems.

* Broad scale process mining unless the process is highly transactional – especially if your organization is not very process mature.

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Alan Fish

Dr Alan N Fish is Principal Consultant in Decision Solutions with FICO, having over 30 years’ experience in the support, automation and optimisation of organisational decisions. He invented the “Decision Requirements Diagram” (DRD) which exposes the structure of a domain of decision-making, and developed Decision Requirements Analysis (DRA): a methodology for building and using such decision models. He is the author of “Knowledge Automation: How To Implement Decision Management in Business Processes” (Wiley), and co-author of the OMG specification Decision Model and Notation (DMN).

WWW: http://www.fico.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @AlanNFish

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

First and foremost, the ability to model the complete scope of automated processes formally, including not just the process flows but all decision-making and user interactions. This is best done using the OMG “Triple Crown” of standards: BPMN (for business process modelling), CMMN (for case / UI modelling) and DMN (for decision modelling). Secondly, the commitment to ensure that change management is planned and rolled out with due consideration for the users whose roles have been redesigned.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

A good book covering the Triple Crown is the 3rd edition of Real-Life BPMN, with introductions to CMMN and DMN, by Jakob Freund and Bernd Rucker. And my book Knowledge Automation is still a useful introduction to the principles of automating decision processes.

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Ian Gotts

Ian is a founder of Q9 Elements, tech advisor, investor, speaker and author.

Q9 Elements is a startup software company. It is looking to disrupt the BPM marketplace and enable clients to deliver huge levels of ROI.

WWW: iangotts.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @iangotts

If you want to be more valuable, get promoted, increase day rate, make a bigger difference, have more influence

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

Business analysis, critical questioning, challenging status quo (esp at senior level), understand implications of GDPR as a driver of change. Digital transformation is more revolution than evolution. Great read: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/why-digital-transformation-is-now-on-the-ceos-shoulders

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

Get the big picture, think about how your industry can transform, reengineer from the customer perspective, understand industry drivers and compliance, follow @iangotts !! BTOES conference, TED talks

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Understanding different technical standards UML, BPMN, DMN RPA and AI are still emerging so practical skills are not very usable and standard/approaches are still evolving…. wait and see how they turn out.

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Paul Harmon

Paul Harmon is a Co-Founder, Executive Editor, and Senior Market Analyst at Business Process Trends – www.bptrends.com – an internationally popular website that provides a variety of free articles, columns and book reviews each month on trends, directions and best practices in business process management.

Paul Harmon is an acknowledged BPM thought leader who is concerned with applying new technologies and methodologies to real-world business problems. He is a speaker and has developed and delivered executive seminars, workshops, briefings and keynote addresses on all aspects of BPM to conferences and at major organizations throughout the world.

WWW:www.bptrends.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @harmon_bptrends

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

BPTrends has just finished reviewing the data from the 2017-2018 BPM Survey. Among the new trends are Transformation, Digitization, and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Transformation, as far as I can tell, is just another name for large projects. (We asked respondents to give examples of transformation projects and most of the examples were things they would have described, in earlier survey’s as large scale redesign projects or as business process reengineering.)

Digitization is a bit more subtle. In part it just refers to more automation, but in part it seems to refer to a new attitude towards automation — an attitude that values information in digital format — information that can be transformed and stored with greater ease and reused more readily. Thus, for example, using digital formats, a company can take video and store it, and then later search existing videos for given faces using facial recognition software. It means that the original video is much more useful and can be used by applications in ways that would have previously required hours of real time review by human observers. Digitization seems to refer to a whole new mindset about how to tie complex processes together using data stores and tools that allow rapid access to that data. Clearly that’s going to be a growing concern in the future.

Finally, there is a growing interest in AI. AI is a bit confusing because the term refers of a wide range of technologies and approaches. It refers to robotic devices, to sensors of all kinds, and to intelligent algorithms that make sense of data. Consider self-driving vehicles that will become more and more ubiquitous in the near future. First the vehicle needs a sensor array that can “picture” the surrounding environment, then it needs a “brain” that can evaluate the sensor data and decide what moves it can safely make, how to plot a path to a given location and how to execute the journey. Finally it needs physical mechanisms that can steer the car. It might also want a natural language capability to obtain directions from a passenger, or to give the passenger information on demand. In short, a robotic automobile isn’t a single thing, but a whole collection of AI capabilities coordinated to achieve a very flexible set of processes.

Many organizations are exploring specific AI technologies, like Analytics, or Robotic Process Automation (RPA), but these are really only stop-gaps — things to do while waiting for more sophisticated options. The more sophisticated options will require teams of people to organize and train the AI systems. Whatever AI apps may do in the long run, in the short run they will create an array of new jobs and require new skills on the part of managers and process practitioners. Intelligent business processes are definitely in the future of most organizations.

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Barbara Hodge

Barbara Hodge is SSON’s Global Editor, and has been with the organization since 2000, having joined to launch Shared Services News. She is now responsible for SSON’s online portal content, including industry reports, case studies, surveys, interviews, etc. – as well as everything else that makes SSON the most trusted space for practitioners from around the world.

Prior to joining SSON, Barbara was Editorial Director at Armstrong Information, a London-based specialist publishing firm, with responsibility for launch and editorial content management for a number of management journals, including corporate communication, change management and business process reengineering. She started her career with Deutsche Bank Capital Markets in London.

WWW: http://www.ssonetwork.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @ssonetwork
Twitter: @abrakabarbara

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

Today’s value add is all about understanding what automation can do for your operations, and at the same time ensuring that you have the strategies in place to prioritize data management. Automation is only as good as the data you can feed into it. That is a defining, and also limiting, mantra for the year ahead.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

Experience is probably the best resource. And what I mean by that is finding the individuals with experience to lead or at least support in-house initiatives. While just a few years ago experience was sparse, today we see more and more successful case studies where intelligent automation has been successfully integrated. Of course we at the Shared Services and Outsourcing Network (SSON) have focused very much on the technology trends, alongside talent management and skills evolution. Our conferences offer a great opportunity to network and learn from the experience of others, and we are constantly sharing case studies, interviews, and white papers online.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

As a non-practitioner, I can only share what practitioners tell me and that is that you no longer need to be an accountant to provide value add within finance and accounting processes. While that may be simplifying it – accountants need not fear – the truth is that today understanding how a process works, and how technology drives that process, and where the relevant data sits in the enterprise and what to do with it once it’s been worked on are probably more significant in terms of driving value out of any given function.

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Sandeep Johal

Sandeep specialises in Business Process Management with deep roots in process analysis, architecture design, modelling, improvement and governance. Industry sectors that have engaged Sandeep include finance (banks, superannuation and hedge funds), education, mining, government (state and local), energy and utilities.

Sandeep’s consulting takes him to both national and international destinations including the Americas, Middle East, New Zealand and the UK. He is often invited to speak at national and international conferences and is regarded as a contributor to the Business Process Management body of knowledge. He holds a Masters in Information Technology (BPM), an honours in Business Management and a diploma in Mechanical Engineering.

WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @deepology

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

I’ve observed a return of Agile principles and techniques in delivering results consistently. Specifically, there’s a real push towards the ability to collaborate with a range of stakeholders (including business representatives and external vendors) keeping everyone ‘honest’ and expectations in check. I also see a strong emphasis on customer experience – which regularly transcends into human experience. The focus of process management is to produce superior customer experience. BPM practitioners have known this since the dawn of time, however, there’s a greater reliance on technology to enable this. Which means deeper automation, self-correction, machine learning and A.I. Since these are already becoming household terms, I would highly recommend BPM practitioners to be savvy in contemporary solutions and offering in that space (e.g. iBPMS, RPA, Streaming Analytics, etc.).

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

The best resources to learn those skills are subscribing to the correct Youtube channels, podcasts, vendor websites (including any online courses), attending/speaking at local and international conferences and engaging in online forums (like BPM-Tips of course)

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

For a long time, I’ve been an advocate of understanding the current state of processes. Current state understanding pertains to measuring the status quo so we’ll know we’ve improved. We would usually do this through laborious workshops, system investigations and document analysis. While satisfying and useful, I see less appetite for this type of work. Additionally, if organisations are increasingly automating, the human skills to document processes will quickly become a thing of the past.
To add salt to the wound, as systems become smarter (and self-correcting), process improvement skills may go out of vogue. The ability and speed of a human to process multiple (hundreds/thousands of) data points does not come close to the ability of specialised systems. Skills in these areas will also see a reduction. Instead, we (the humans) will focus on decisions and soft skills.

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Abhijit Kakhandiki

Abhijit is a Senior VP, Products at Automation Anywhere. He is a seasoned executive with a proven track record in new product development, go-to-market, and improved product P&L performance.

What you didn’t know…: Besides forging successful product paths in the corporate world, Abhijit has also made tracks in nature—particularly upward. (He’s climbed Machu Picchu, Mt. Whitney, Mt. Shasta, Half Dome and Mt. Fuji, to name a few!)

WWW: https://www.automationanywhere.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @Akakhandiki
Twitter: @AutomationAnywh

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

BPM practitioners can use RPA Bot creation skills (that are very easy to pick up) to rapidly increase their customers’ Digital transformation velocity.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

RPA providers such as Automation Anywhere have invested heavily in eLearning to create a growing and thriving community of RPA practitioners. Taking some of these courses and getting certified is a great first step.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

With technologies like RPA gaining adoption, skills in tackling complex, time-consuming, back-end integrations might take a backseat.

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Sandy Kemsley

Sandy is a “technology catalyst” with a 20-year history of software design and systems architecture in several technology areas, combined with a deep understanding of business environments and how technology can impact them.

Sandy blogs about BPM, enterprise architecture and other intersections of business and technology at www.column2.com

WWW: https://column2.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @skemsley

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

The greatest value that BPM practitioners can bring to their organization is the ability to translate need into action. There has been a lot of focus on determining needs (by business analysts) and developing technical skills with the BPM platforms (by developers), but too few people can act as the catalyst between those two worlds. “Citizen developer” tools help to some extent by allowing the less complex applications to be built directly by the business analysts, but there will always be the need for combining the skills of the analysts with those of the developers. At this point, too few people on either side of that divide speak the other side’s language, resulting in a mismatch of what the business needs with what IT delivers. This is not a new problem, but is reaching a critical point in part because the availability of low-code tools for citizen developers is creating the perception that any application can be built by non-technical people using these tools.

My advice for business analysts/users who are eliciting requirements is that they become proficient with the low-code BPM platform at use in their company, and use it to create at least an initial prototype of an application that they walk through with the business users, rather than just handing off written requirements to developers; this will allow them to understand a bit more of what it needed to create all parts of an application rather than just the happy path.

My advice for developers is to spend time shadowing business users as they do their job, taking note of the things that slow them down and result in a lot of non-value-added manual work such as logging cases in a spreadsheet; if you don’t see it for yourself, you can’t really understand what’s required to make their work better.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

The skills that I recommend for business analysts is to learn how to build applications using the low-code BPM platforms. For this, they may need a short training course (hopefully available online, depending on the vendor) but usually the platforms allow someone to get started with very little training, then learn more as they progress: I suggest just diving in and start building some real applications with the tools and see what happens. At some point, they should engage with developers to review their application since that will provide more of a technical analysis and help to improve their application building style in terms of reusability and standardization.

For developers, I’m also a big fan of hands-on work rather than just reading about it. Ask for an opportunity to sit with a business user at their desk one-on-one (in a meeting room with a group is not a good substitute) for a period of 30-60 minutes, watch while they just do their normal job, ask questions about what they’re doing and why, and document what you see. If you observe your way through a series of business users from one end of a process to the other, you’ll gain insights into how to improve the overall process (which will impact the underlying process model) as well as the work for any particular user (which will impact the application at their point of interaction).

In general, I think you can learn more about these skills by hearing about the experiences of other people who have done the same thing. Attend related conferences, webinars and local meetups whenever you have the chance. I do a lot of conference blogging, but I’m not the only one: following blogs that write about the specific sessions at conferences can give you a great deal of insight even if you can’t attend in person.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

In all technology fields, not just BPM, we’re seeing a lot of about interest in two technologies: artificial intelligence and blockchain. They are both relevant to BPM, but still at the bleeding edge in most situations, so not something that you need to spend too much time on (unless you’re a researcher) until they become more mainstream and embedded in commercial products. Keep an eye on what’s happening, but don’t count on a huge contribution from these in day-to-day business in 2018.

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Dr. Mathias Kirchmer

Dr. Kirchmer is a visionary leader, thought leader and innovator in the field of Business Process Management (BPM), successfully integrating business and technology initiatives. He has combined his broad business experience with his extensive academic research to deliver pioneering management approaches that have proven to be both, sustainable and provide immediate benefits.

Dr. Kirchmer has published 11 books and over 150 articles. He is affiliated faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and teaches regularly at several other universities. In 2004, he received a research and teaching fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.

WWW: LI profile
WWW: http://bpm-d.com
Twitter: @mtki2006

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

* Discipline of Strategy Execution and Value-driven Digitalization: BPM is seen more and more as the management discipline focused on strategy execution across the enterprise. Digitalization has become part of basically every business strategy. BPM aligns people, their organizational units and the supporting digital technology, focusing everything on creating value for clients. Hence BPM becomes THE discipline that combines strategy execution with the related value-creation through digitalization. Process Governance becomes a key lever. BPM Practitioners have to organize their discipline accordingly.

* Rapid Process Improvement (RPI): Since the business environment changes so quickly rapid process improvement approaches will continue to replace slow traditional approaches. Using a value-driven approach to process modelling and repository tools in combination with process analytics and mining techniques resurfaces as a key enabler of sustainable agile process improvement.

* Robotic Process Automation (RPA): RPA has started to close an important gap in next generation process automation. Combining RPA with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Cognitive features makes it a powerful improvement component that eliminates more and more of the routine work in our offices.

* Integrated Process and Data view: The best process does not work without the right quality of data and data is not worth much without the processes transferring them into value. Therefore an integrated process and data view is required. This is especially important in a digital world which moves fast and does not give much time to adjust processes and data. As a consequence process and data governance will be integrated.

* Continuous People Enablement and Culture: The limits of process improvement will be determined by the imagination and capabilities of people rather than through the technology. The key to success will center around the collaborative engagement of people in owning and improving processes. The collaboration is enabled through robust approaches to providing ongoing information, communication, training and education related to emerging process improvement tools, technologies and approaches. This includes specifically executive education on the new realities of value-driven process management so that decision makers can be more effective in the digital world. Result is a more process and performance driven enterprise culture.

* Process-driven Project Portfolio Management and Value Realization: Improvement projects need to be systematically prioritized regarding their importance for the overall business strategy and focused on best value-creation per dollar spent. After project conclusion the value realization has to continue seamlessly. The BPM-Discipline has to deliver the appropriate approach – enabling systematic growth in our digital world.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

* A good overview over the topics mentioned is provided by industry organizations, like ABPMP or the BPM-Institute, and by specialized service firms like BPM-D. It is worth to compare training and education agendas to come up with the right mix.

* There are more and more eLearning offerings available covering at least some of those topics, such as the module “Strategy Execution in a Digital World: The BPM-Discipline” from BPM-D.

* A deeper and more comprehensive education in many of the areas mentioned is provided by academic institutions, such as Widener University (Master in Business Process Innovation) or the University of Pennsylvania (Program of Organizational Dynamics in the School for Arts and Sciences).

* In addition there are first books available covering those topics, such as “High Performance through Business Process Management – Strategy Execution in a Digital World” or “The Drivers of the Digital Transformation”.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

I think many of the traditional statistical improvement tools and related traditional approaches, like e.g. Six Sigma, will continue to lose traction since their application in the office environment is too slow for the digital world.

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Marcello La Rosa

Professor Marcello La Rosa has been researching and teaching BPM at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) for over a decade. He has now left QUT to join The University of Melbourne, where he will lead the Information Systems group and establish a new BPM research team.

His research interests span different BPM areas, including process mining, consolidation and automation, in which he published over 100 papers. He leads the Apromore Initiative (http://apromore.org) – a strategic collaboration between various universities for the development of an advanced business process analytics platform. Marcello has taught BPM to practitioners and students in Australia and overseas for over ten years. Based on this experience, he co-authored “Fundamentals of Business Process Management” – the first, comprehensive textbook on BPM, which has influenced the curriculum of close to 250 universities in the world and has been translated to Chinese and Greek. Using this book he co-developed a series of MOOCs on BPM, which have collectively attracted over 25,000 participants.

WWW: marcellolarosa.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @mlr80

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

Despite the availability of a repertoire of techniques and software tools, both commercial and open-source, process mining is still largely an untapped new technology. It’s time to leave the worries behind and seriously invest in process mining[1] upskilling. In my experience, however, business analysts are still mostly unaware, or have just heard, about process mining. How to set up and conduct a process mining project? How to manage that? What are reasonable objectives to have for such projects? What data (and data attributes) are required? Is the data of good quality? What systems should I look into, to extract this data? What are the most suitable process mining techniques for my objectives? What tools are available that implement these techniques? How to interpret the results of such techniques and use these to build up a business case? In my opinion, these are some of the key questions a modern business analyst should be able to answer.

[1] In a nutshell, process mining is about inferring process knowledge from transactional logs, say logs recording executions of an order-to-cash or claims handling process. This knowledge that we can extract can take different forms. It can be, for example, a BPMN model that is automatically discovered, performance analytics pinpointing bottlenecks and resource overload issues, conformance analytics showing deviations from norms or high exposure to risks, or predictive analytics showing the likely outcome or duration of running process cases (e.g. orders currently open).

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

There’s plenty of literature available on process mining. A gentle introduction to the topic, including a classification of the various techniques available and plenty of hands-on exercises, can be found in Chapter 11 of the upcoming 2nd edition of “Fundamentals of Business Process Management”, by M. Dumas, M. La Rosa, J. Mendling and H. Reijers, Springer 2018 (https://goo.gl/taUX2b).

For the technical minds, you can consult THE reference book on process mining: “Process Mining: Data Science in Action”, by W. van der Aalst, Springer 2016 (https://goo.gl/d7Hjwo). Another book that treats the specific application of process mining to healthcare is “Process Mining in Healthcare: Evaluating and Exploring Operational Healthcare Processes”, by R. Mans, W. van der Aalst and R. Vanwersch. All these books are of course also available as eBooks.

But if you feel books are old school, you can always tap into an online course (MOOC) on process mining (https://goo.gl/oNK5nf). There are three that I know of: “Process Mining: Data Science in Action” on Coursera (https://goo.gl/C3uaST, open all year around), and a couple on Future Learn: “Introduction to Process Mining with ProM”, which teaches how to use the open-source tool ProM (https://goo.gl/G4WC8p) and “Process Mining in Healthcare” (https://goo.gl/LRF7Mg). There’s also plenty of commercial tools, such as Celonis, Signavio, Minit, myInvenio etc. as well as open-source tools such as Apromore (http://apromore.org) – catered towards end users, and ProM (http://promtools.org) – catered towards data scientists.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

I don’t think there are BPM skills no longer relevant. All are relevant depending on what value we want to get from BPM. For example, if we are up for improving the quality of our products or services, I think there’s (a legitimate) room for Six Sigma’s statistical techniques, or if we want to improve efficiency, there’s certainly room for applying waste analysis techniques from Lean.

As for the not-practically-applicable-yet techniques, I think that in the last couple of years a lot of effort has been spent toward promoting BPM as an enabler for digital transformation. However, we haven’t seen, yet, the establishment of techniques that concretely indicate how to go about using BPM for digital transformation. I feel at this stage it’s mostly wishful thinking.

Don’t get me wrong, I firmly believe that BPM can foster, if not lead, the digital transformation of an organization, but for that to happen systematically, we need the availability of concrete techniques that operationalize a set of well-defined principles for using BPM for digital transformation. And that hasn’t happened yet. So this is an invite to all those practitioners who have already experimented with BPM & digital transformation to start divulgating their practices and lessons learned, and at the same time, it’s an invite to academics to empirically evaluate these practices at scale, to derive reproducible outcomes.

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Bob Larrivee

Bob Larrivee, Vice President and Chief Analyst of Market Intelligence – AIIM.

Bob is an internationally recognized subject matter expert and thought leader with over thirty years of experience in the fields of information and process management, and recipient of the Cenadem Brazil – ECM pioneer Award. Bob is an avid techie with a focus on process improvement, and the application of advanced technologies to enhance and automate business operations.

WWW: Free Webinar: How to Plan Your Intelligent Information Management Strategy in 2018
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What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

I think that some of the hottest skills will be on the user side as the Now-Side/No-Code tools become more prevalent and available. They will need to be able to articulate and map their processes, which many can do today, but more will need to do tomorrow.

BPM is moving in a direction of placing more power in the hands of the business where business decisions need to be made on how it is conducted and transacted in order to meet customer demand, and deliver a great customer experience.

The power to design and modify business processes by the line-of-business personnel without total reliance or dependence on IT is a game changer in my view. There is still a need to have integration and IT working to link our information ecosystem on the back-end, and look for new and better ways of doing so. I see a future for BPM the takes businesses in new directions, opening the eyes of the user to options and possibilities they never knew existed, and freeing IT resources to extend their and strengthen the ecosystem to be more secure, more tightly connected, and ore accessible to internal and external customers.

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Juergen Pitschke

Juergen Pitschke is Partner and Managing Director at Process Renewal Group Deutschland.

His customers include companies as Kuehne+Nagel (AG & Co.) KG, Boehler Edelstahl or organizations like the Federal Office of Police in Switzerland.

WWW: http://processrenewal.de
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What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

Modelling is an important skill in Business Process Management. This stays valid.
In the last year discussion about notations reduced. The focus is really on application and becomes more mature. Beside BPMN DMN is the most relevant one. It is important to understand the concepts behind the notation and apply it to relevant problems.
In modeling the most usual problem is to manage the right abstraction level. This leads directly to the discussion of Business Architecture and Business Agility. Modeling is a must. But how can you be agile if your models are not agile?

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

The best books this year are about DMN: “Real-world Decision Modeling with DMN” by James Taylor and Jan Purchase and for Business Process Management in general: Reimagining Management: Putting Process at the Center of Business Management” by Roger Tregear.
For “Agility” the book from Scott Ambler about Disciplined Business Agility are a good inspiration even if this is oriented to software development. You can learn a lot from it. Reflect this and apply it to your business problems. Compare it with the Business Agility Manifesto by Ron Ross, Roger Burlton and John Zachmann.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

In the last year we spoke about CMMN. It seems not to reach the practice. I hope this improves in 2018.
A hype topic for me is Process Mining as it is in the moment. To mine just to find out about the as-is process. To improve this is not enough. And you have to find the different abstraction level. The current tools have to become more integrated with other tools and techniques.

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Alex Rawlings

Alex leads the FLOvate Marketing team and is working to establish LEAP as the market leading low code software platform. With over 15 years in marketing, Alex is a well-established communicator and enjoys working with a wide number of organisations to explore and define authentic business value. She works as part of a focused and talented team dedicated to support businesses looking for a way to drive innovation within their operational structure.

WWW: https://www.flovate.com
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What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

The most important technique a BPM Practitioner can bring to their organisation is the ability to pace and plan their approach carefully.

Fundamental basics which are often overlooked such as thorough company overview, discussions with key decision makers/end users and realistic process challenge analysis are all key skills to ensure that critical changes are made to secure greater value.

Finally, never overlook customer feedback. No matter how forward-thinking your system is it has to be functional and deliver what your consumers believe to be important, such as a simplified agile working and a humanized approach. – The most important skill to ensure you create authentic process value is to directly learn from the people that use and administrate that system daily.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

From personal experience of leading/attending process workshops and training courses I can vouch for their effectiveness. The more you practice your craft and immerse yourself within in the world of process improvement and BPM the sooner it will become common sense in practice.

Looking to online communities, listening to podcasts and attending BPM and Process Excellence Shows will also provide invaluable insight to benefit your skill set.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Robotics and AI for the majority are overhyped with many organisations not being ready for this technology (some are of course). The data we gather is mostly in such a mess that it will be a long time before businesses are routinely using Robotic learning to initiate better decision making. Most companies just need to work towards these advancements – utilising the other alternatives available to operate better.

Hard-coded process solutions are quickly becoming an obsolete method due to the static processes that are created as a result. With more beneficial and quicker options available such as the agile workings of Low-code which is mostly configurable and can be adapted to company and legislative change, the need isn’t there for this long and tedious alternative.

Department centric working is quickly becoming an irrelevant way to effectively operate. Companies are discovering that mobile teams provide more value as they collaborate and look at the bigger picture and the roles that bleed into each other. The popularity and rise in companies utilising Scrum Teams highlights this.

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Adrian Reed

Adrian Reed is a true advocate of the analysis profession. In his day job, he acts as Principal Consultant and Director at Blackmetric Business Solutions where he provides business analysis consultancy and training solutions to a range of clients in varying industries. Adrian is President of the UK chapter of the IIBA and he speaks internationally on topics relating to business analysis and business change. You can read Adrian’s blog at http://www.adrianreed.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/UKAdrianReed.

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What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

Wow—that’s a broad question! And an important one too.

It would be tempting to talk about analytical and modelling skills here, and of course those skills are extremely important and we shouldn’t neglect them, but in many ways they have become a staple baseline. There are many skills that I could talk about here, and I have always found interpersonal skills are crucial. In fact, I feel they are becoming even more relevant in the complex and fast-changing world in which we live. So, I would say understanding the human side of process management and process change is paramount.

Some examples might include:

• Influencing/”Selling”: It’s often crucial to get people to see the value of business process management or business process improvement initiatives. There are some techniques that we can borrow from the world of ‘sales’—I am not implying we should become full-on sales-people (and we certainly shouldn’t ‘hard sell’), but using techniques like the features and benefits table can help us to determine the best way to showcase our activities and get people on board.
• Stakeholder Analysis, Engagement and Communication: Process management and process change relies on high levels of stakeholder engagement and regular communication. This is probably something we all do implicitly, but it is always useful to sharpen our skills!
• Facilitation & Conflict Resolution: There will always be differences of opinion in organizations. Being able to acknowledge and reflect upon different stakeholder perspectives, and help the organization ‘learn its way through’ a tricky situation will make it much more likely that change will stick.

All of these skills help us create a situation where we co-create with our stakeholders, so there is true shared ownership.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

I find the book ‘Getting to Yes’ by Fisher & Ury provides a practical perspective on negotiation, introducing the idea of ‘principled negotiation’. I have utilized the essence of these principles many times in my working life.

I also find there are many useful articles and blogs on the Harvard Business Review website.

However, interpersonal skills are probably largely enhanced through doing. This often requires us as practitioners to step out of our comfort-zones, step-up to situations where there may be conflict, and do what we can to ensure that the best interests of the organization are pursued. It can be scary, but it feels very rewarding being part of a team that has resolved a conflict and ‘unblocked’ a tricky organizational situation!

Classroom based training can create a useful ‘safe space’ in which to learn the theory and practice these skills too, but it is most beneficial when it is followed up quickly with a real-world application.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

I think what is relevant really comes down to the organizational context. I certainly struggle to think of a skill that would never be applicable.

I suppose a personal reflection would be that over the past few years I have found less need for lengthy, written reports or presentations. We now live in a world where there are many ways of communicating, and time is precious. I’ve experimented with using short videos instead of lengthy reports—and the feedback so far has been really positive. Of course, it depends on who the particular recipient is, and their preferred communication style.

So, although there are certainly some uses for lengthy report-writing, perhaps there will increasingly be more of a focus on succinct and even visual communication. And of course, as practitioners who are used to modelling, we are extremely well-placed to find visual ways of communicating!

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Clay Richardson

Clay is the co-founder of Digital FastForward. He has spent most of his career helping leaders build and execute strategies around new disruptive technologies. Formerly with Forrester Research, a leading market research firm, Clay oversaw research and client advisory projects focused on digital innovation, digital automation, design thinking, and lean startup practices. Clay is a frequent keynote speaker at digital innovation events and conferences.

WWW: https://digitalfastforward.com
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What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

By now, most BPM practitioners know they need to refresh their skills in order to lead digital transformation within their organizations. Design thinking is still at the top of my list of skills that BPM practitioners need to build to step into new digital roles. Design thinking provides processes and techniques that help frame and accelerate new innovation opportunities.

In our 2017 Digital Workforce Survey, we uncovered a large gap in skills for robotic automation and artificial intelligence. Only 11% of respondents reported their organizations had expert level skills with artificial intelligence, and only 5% reported expert level skills with robotic automation. These two capabilities represent the next wave of skills BPM practitioners must learn to create value for their organizations.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

My take? Hands-on and experiential learning are the best ways to learn these new digital skills. Particularly for design thinking, since it really does require that you get your hands dirty with brainstorming and rapid prototyping.

Last year, I attended an on-line artificial intelligence course from Udacity to see what the learning experience was like. The course itself was pretty complex, I needed to brush the dust off my linear algebra and statistics books from college. I thought the course provided a great overview and introduction to basic AI concepts, but required a huge time commitment.

I think most BPM professionals don’t have the time or patience to go through an eight-week course to learn basic AI or robotic automation concepts. A hands-on three-day course will be a much more appealing option for busy professionals. For example, we’re working with the Digital Business Institute to offer a four-day training program that covers key digital skills, including design-thinking, robotic automation, and AI.

Also, books are a great way to jumpstart learning new skills, such as design thinking. For example, I recommend checking out “Creative Confidence” by John and David Kelly of IDEO, one of the world’s leading design thinking consultancies. The book provides a thorough overview of key design thinking concepts, and helps build a foundation before moving on to hands-on training and application.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

In our survey, 24% of respondents expressed interest in attending training on data science. True data science training, focused on learning how to build and deploy complex prediction models and business rules, is not yet accessible for most BPM professionals. However, as low-code solutions extend to support building sophisticated data and analytics models, data science will become more accessible to BPM professionals that don’t have a PhD in predictive modeling.

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Pedro Robledo

One of the most influential Spanish thought leader in Process Management using BPM, as for +15 years he has been dedicated to promote industry awareness of Business Process Management in Spain and Latin America. Director and Professor of BPM Master in UNIR. BPM Interim Manager for helping Organizations in its BPM and Digital Transformation initiatives. International Speaker about BPM. Since 2013 participates as jury of the WfMC Awards for Excellence in BPM and Workflow. He writes about BPM and Digital Transformation in his blog: El Libro Blanco Sobre La Gestión de Procesos.

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What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

In 2018, for most companies, it is the moment when they will have to approach their digital strategy and begin to apply it more broadly. Digital innovation in companies requires reviewing all current processes to make the necessary changes to achieve their digital and corporate objectives. And BPM discipline and technology plays a key role. The market continues with the need for BPM professionals, It is estimated that an increase of 66% of professionals with BPM knowledge is necessary all over the world to cover the current demand for employment. The true picture on process automation is starting to change with the arrival of disruptive and smarter technologies applied to BPM initiatives, as Artificial Intelligence (machine learning, deep learning and cognitive systems), Internet of Things, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Virtual Assistants, Immersive user experience systems (Virtual/Augmented/Mixed Reality), Analytics (Augmented, Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics), Event Processing, Process Mining… They will drive the next wave of disruption, agility and productivity in the digital company and they will lead to great advances in all organizations.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

For Spanish speakers, they have the most complete and official university postgraduate in Universidad Internacional de la Rioja (UNIR), a 1 year online university master: “Business Process Management for Digital Transformation” that the next edition will start in March 2018. This official UNIR Postgraduate is the only practical one with different BPM technologies and, in addition, it covers all BPM Life Cycle and the disruptive technologies applied to BPM initiatives.
About books, the most important library of English Books is Future Strategies. For Spanish readers, BPMteca.com, focused on BPM books in Spanish. In my blog (http://pedrorobledobpm.blogspot.com.es/), I have some posts with bibliography by topics, and I will write more during this year.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

As BPM maturity is low in the market yet, all the traditional BPM skills are relevant. BPM Professionals need to go deeper into BPM discipline and not stay in automation of departmental processes, so they must eliminate the vision of vertical developments with BPM technology and focus on transversal processes and process management aligned with the corporate strategy.

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Michal Rosik

CPO, Minit.io
Michal Rosik is responsible for building and scaling process mining tool Minit.io.

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Twitter: @minit_io

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

The year 2017 has been a year of Data Science or better said a year of Data Science being inflated to enormous size. Disciplines, methods, techniques, algorithms, technologies – everyone added a thing or two, trying to create a cure for every illness. Even the best data scientists were overloaded with news, trying to keep up with the tempo.

The year 2018 should introduce a lot of housekeeping tasks:
i. Learning how to select valuable and relevant techniques
ii. Understand use cases and scenarios best fitting specific methods
iii. Learn how to explain even the most complex algorithms to business users
iv. Enable easy repetition of analytical tasks

Specific techniques such as process mining bring a lot of valuable insight, but cannot stand on their own. They must grow into a complex business intelligence platform with simple, visual interface and lots of built-in intelligence and automation.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

While in 2017 it was enough to find and identify the problem, the year 2018 eagerly waits to receive the full root cause analysis. It will ask what is the reason for the issue, why did it happen?
Predictions will evolve, but slowly.
Simulation is dying in its complexity (although there are specific industries where it’s vital).

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Alexander Samarin

Alexander Samarin is an Architect for Achieving the Synergy between Strategy, Good Business Practices and Disruptive Digital Technologies

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What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

1. Proactive apply the power of BPM (i.e. managing by processes) for solving enterprise-wide wicked problems such as:

– security – see https://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.bg/2015/01/enrich-rbac-and-abac-with-probac.html

– GDPR – see http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.bg/2017/06/gdpr-as-bpm-application.html
– digital transformation – Consider that digital organisation is an organisation building life cycles of its primary artefacts on the primacy of explicit, formal, computer-readable and computer-executable presentation of those artefacts, and then apply practical process pattern “LifeCycle As A Process (LCAAP)” – see http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.bg/2013/11/practical-process-patterns-lifecycle-as.html

2. Consider “go upstream” to understand architecture, for example, https://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.bg/search/label/%23BAW

3. Know how to handle the hype by decomposing it into its functional components and find that some of them are useful. Examples:

– RPA – https://bpm.com/bpm-today/in-the-forum/5786-you-know-a-company-could-really-use-robotic-process-automation-when

– no-code / low-code – https://bpm.com/bpm-today/in-the-forum/5800-how-important-is-low-code-no-code-development-to-digital-transformation

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Phil Simpson

Phil Simpson is JBoss product marketing manager at Red Hat where he’s responsible for market positioning and messaging activities for JBoss Enterprise BRMS. Phil has extensive experience with business rules and BPM solutions. He led the product management function at an early business-rules pioneer and has held senior marketing roles at several leading technology companies. Prior to joining Red Hat, he was product manager for the data analytics firm Renesys and was a director at SeaChange International, Ironhead Analytics, and Rulespower. Phil holds a bachelor’s degree from Southampton University in the UK.

WWW: https://www.redhat.com
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What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

We’re beginning to see greater engagement between the business and IT sides of organizations as businesses tackle the challenges of digital transformation projects. My advice to BPM practitioners is to embrace the opportunity to learn about the technologies and practices that IT will use to develop the next generation of business applications. These apps can only be built by business and IT working together, and so it’s more important than ever that both sides share a common grounding. To start, I’d recommend BPM practitioners take a look at “DevOps“, or even “BizDevOps“. These practices are becoming more widely employed particularly for developing cloud-based applications. From a technology perspective I think BPM practitioners would benefit from a basic understanding of Containers and Microservices architectures, since this is likely how BPM models will be incorporated into future apps. Of course there is a long list of other emerging technologies that are impacting digital transformation projects, and if I were to pick one for BPM practitioners to focus on it would be Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Pick a mainstream RPA product, and learn how to use it. You’ll be a step ahead when you finally need to fully automate that manual process.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Traditional BPM skills are still relevant in 2018. I wouldn’t ‘unlearn’ anything. The key will be learning how to apply them, in collaboration with IT, to the development of new applications. There are some new technologies that are still early in the hype cycle though. AI for example. If you have a project that needs a specific AI capability, like a chatbot, it can be a useful skill to learn, but in general I don’t think broad AI solutions are ready for widespread adoption by the business this year.

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Jim Sinur

Jim Sinur is an independent thought leader in applying business process management (BPM) to innovative digital organizations. His research and areas of personal experience focus on business process innovation, business modeling, business process management technology (iBPMS), process collaboration for knowledge workers, process intelligence/optimization, business policy/rule management (BRMS), and leveraging business applications in processes. Jim is also one of the authors of BPM: The Next Wave. His latest book is Digital Transformation. Innovate or Die Slowly.

WWW: https://aragonresearch.com
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What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

There are a number of skills that BPM folks could pick up as there are many coming out of the digital evolution, but my top seven would be the following:

1) Journey Mapping for Customers, Employees and Partners including touchpoint analysis and persona creation.

2) Embedded Advanced Analytic and Augmented Reality Capabilities. Process plus big and fast data mining is on the grow.

3) Adaptive and Goal Driven Processes (often in Case Management and also Explicit Rule enabled)

4) AI looking for opportunities to add automation or more smarts like Robotic Program Automation (RPA). Machine learning is hot and Deep Learning is starting to gain momentum.

5) Cognitive Collaboration for Knowledge Intense Processes or Cases. AI Assistance is starting

6) Signal and Pattern Detection (often needed for agility, IoT and business strategy). IoT integration is a new emerging theme

7) Merging Control on the Edge with Central Control. Decisions and actions at the edge is starting to emerge

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

While there are no skills that one should drop, there are several that are considered common and receding. My top three would be the following:

1) Central control approaches and siloed skill sets

2) Water Fall project methods are taking a second seat to incremental development, RPA and rapid experimentation,

3) Large blocks of dumb frozen code are giving way to smart components, micro services and late binding rules guided by constraints

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Shik Sundar

Shik Sundar currently leads global sales and partnerships at Pipefy, the “no code” agile process automation platform used by over 15,000 companies in 150 countries. Shik brings 10+ years of hyper-growth startup experience to Pipefy, across a diverse array of products such as mobile-first safety applications and digital marketing. Shik began his career in healthcare technology, having co-founded Benefitter (acquired by HealthMarkets) and leading sales at Adreima (acquired by nThrive). He holds a B.S. in Neuroscience from Emory University.

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What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

Agile process management. The pace of change is going to continue to accelerate over the course of 2018 and businesses will have to adapt quickly to their new realities. You’re going to face new competitors, new business models, and new customer expectations… all of which will require new processes and new controls to guarantee execution. Bringing a culture of agility to the organization will be essential to achieve sustainable success/growth. How can you design solutions that balance the requirement of the business to have consistency, efficiency, and quality outputs while still providing a framework to change quickly if needed? How can you provide your users with tools that enable them to change quickly?

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

* Stanford University’s Design Thinking crash course: https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources-collections/a-virtual-crash-course-in-design-thinking

* Agile, Lean, and Design Thinking course on Lynda: https://www.lynda.com/Interaction-Design-tutorials/Agile-lean-design-thinking/476938/551733-4.html

* McKinsey Quarterly article “Why agility pays”: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/why-agility-pays

* McKinsey Quarterly article “The keys to organizational agility”: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/the-keys-to-organizational-agility

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

BPM programming. As tools increasingly become more self-serve and user-friendly, it will become irrelevant for practitioners to train on esoteric notation and tool-specific programming.

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Keith Swenson

Keith Swenson is Vice President of Research and Development at Fujitsu North America and also the Chairman of the Workflow Management Coalition. As a speaker, author, and contributor to many workflow and BPM standards, he is known for having been a pioneer in collaboration software and web services. He has led agile software development teams at MS2, Netscape, Ashton Tate & Fujitsu. He won the 2004 Marvin L. Manheim Award for outstanding contributions in the field of workflow. Co-author on more than 10 books. His latest book, “When Thinking Matters in the Workplace,” explains how to avoid stifling creativity and enhance innovation through the appropriate use of process technology. His 2010 book “Mastering the Unpredictable” introduced and defined the field of adaptive case management and established him as a Top Influencer in the field of case management. He blogs at https://social-biz.org/.

WWW: https://social-biz.org
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Twitter: @swensonkeith

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

The most important skill and technique to learn in the process space for 2018 will be Deep Learning. Alpha-Go showed us a system that can play a game that was considered unsolvable only a few years ago, and it did this without any programming by humans. Tremendous advances in (1) big data and (2) cheap parallel computation, but….

At the same time, the most disappointing innovation for 2018 will be Deep Learning as well. Learning systems really have not solved broad open ended problems such as we need in the process space. Currently limited to hand-coded algorithms. Deep learning exhibits very quirky reliability: some amazing results, but lots of overwhelmingly problematic results on the long tail of exceptional situations. In such a system it is hard to understand what has been learned, and hard to modify and adapt it without starting over. Automatically improving a process requires understanding the business (cultural, moral, etc.) far outside the system. This important step is only the beginning.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

All the best resources for artificial intelligence (big data, cheap parallel computing, deep learning) are available on the Internet for cheap or free. Apache Spark seems like the best open source platform, and it is easy to run this on Amazon cloud computing. Finished books on the topic are all too preliminary, so you have to go to blogs, research papers, and other online resources.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

SOAP and traditional “large scale” web services with distributed transactions and such are no longer that important. Still needed, but the newer trend is to REST & JSON. ACID transactions are being replaced by sharded data spaces and “eventual consistency” approaches.

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James Taylor

James is a leading expert in decision management and in the development of Decision Management Systems. Experienced working with business rules, predictive analytics and other decisioning technologies to improve operational systems. Published author – Decision Management Systems (IBM Press), Smart (Enough) Systems (Prentice Hall), Real-World Decision Modeling with DMN (MK Press) – strategy consultant, writer and speaker.

WWW: http://jtonedm.com
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What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

An understanding of the importance of decisions and an ability to identify and describe these decisions so they don’t get implemented piecemeal as process steps. While practitioners will find decision modeling and the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard helpful, they shouldn’t think that modeling decisions is part of modeling a process – it’s a separate activity.

An awareness of the power of advanced (predictive) analytics and how it can be applied to process analytics AND to decision-making. Analytics is a hot topic for good reason but too many BPM practitioners think about analytics only in terms of process analytics. They need also to think about how analytics can be used to improve the decisions their processes rely on.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

DMN is best learned from the book I wrote with Jan Purchase – Real World Decision Modeling with DMN – and this has a chapter on decision identification. Those looking for a quick overview might find the Microguide to BPMN and DMN that I wrote with Tom Debevoise useful.

The only real way to learn decision modeling, though, is to do it and to get mentored by someone who knows how. Classes run by practitioners – people who build decision models for a living rather than software companies or generic training companies -are also great.

The analytics industry has spawned a huge array of free online training classes. Take one.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

AI is obviously over hyped but BPM practitioners should look for subsets of AI that are useful e.g. in analyzing documents or images, replacing UIs with chatbots etc as some of these do really work.

Rules outside of decisions are done. Don’t capture rules at a process or enterprise level – model them as part of a decision model if you need to capture them.

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Roger Tregear

Roger Tregear delivers BPM education and consulting assignments, bringing to them 30 years of management consulting experience. He spends his working life talking, thinking, and writing about the analysis, improvement, innovation, and management of business processes. His work has taken him to Australia, New Zealand, Bahrain, Belgium, Nigeria, South Africa, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, The Netherlands, Jordan, United Arab Emirates, and the USA.
Roger is a regular columnist for BPTrends. He is author of Practical Process (2013), co-author of Establishing the Office of Business Process Management (2011), and contributed the chapter Business Process Standardization in The International Handbook on BPM (2010, 2015). With Paul Harmon, Roger edited Questioning BPM? (2016). Roger’s iconic book, Reimagining Management, was also published in 2016. Process Precepts (2017), Roger’s latest book, involves a cosmopolitan, global team in discussions about the process of management.

WWW: http://www.leonardo.com.au
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @rogertregear

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

Having re-read my responses for last year, there is nothing I would change, so:
Process-based management (BPM as a management philosophy) is a radically different way to think about any organization and how it executes its strategy by delivering value to customer and other stakeholders. Practitioners must properly understand this big picture and then provide the leadership and communicate the ideas. They must be able to clearly describe the value proposition and sell and realize the change. The details of methods, techniques, and technologies are critically important, but the real benefits of process-based management are born of shared ideas about the cross-functional exchange of value, not models and IT systems.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Perhaps the more important question is about habits we need to lose. Effective and sustained process-based management is often about linking together much of what has been done to date and giving it a new focus on continually improving organizational performance. To get there we need to break habits like:

• Thinking the M in BPM stands for modeling
• Investing vast amounts in managing up and down the organization chart and very little in managing across the chart where the real action happens
• Confusing BPM with IT
• Thinking process management and improvement is different to innovation, automation, augmentation, transformation, and similar terms
• Thinking BPM is a low level operational issue and not relevant at the executive committee/board table

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Miguel Valdés-Faura

As Chief Executive Officer and co-founder, Miguel leads the charge in Bonitasoft’s mission: to democratize Business Process Management (BPM), bringing powerful and affordable BPM to organizations and projects of all sizes. Prior to Bonitasoft, Miguel led R&D, pre-sales and support for the BPM division of Bull Information Systems, a major European systems provider. Miguel is a recognized thought-leader in business process management and passionate about open source community building.

WWW: http://www.bonitasoft.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @miguelvaldes

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2018?

With the emergence of Digital Business Platforms, BPM practitioners will be more and more involved in digital business transformation initiatives and as a result they will need to adopt the following priorities:

* Focus on digital user experiences for both customers and employees. The user experience as a whole includes a well-designed, easy-to-use user interface that is entirely supported by agile, simple, and efficient processing of all the underlying business processes.

* Improve exception management for existing services and offerings through the application of next-generation BPM technologies.

* Allocate more time and resources toward security, including consideration of how blockchain technologies might play a role.

* Invest in platforms focusing on DevOps experience, allowing developers and operators to build, test, and deploy enterprise applications more rapidly and with faster iterations.

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

Maybe I’m a little biased, but I think the book Designing Efficient BPM Applications by Antoine Mottier and Christine McKinty gives a pretty good foundation for getting started on process-based application design.

Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD Advisors has always good insights on both technologies and the direction of BPM, and I’ve been following Jim Sinur of Aragon Research since he was with Gartner. Sandy Kemsley and Scott Francis have also been following BPM trends and technology for a long time now.

I also recommend Rob Dunie (Gartner) and Rob Koplowitz (Forrester) research on the evolution of BPM platforms and the role of BPM as an important enabler of Digital Transformation.

Jaisundar at Bouncing Thoughts and Pritiman Panda, the BPM freak!! are fun to read too.

Last but not least, experimentation is the best way to learn, and for that I recommend to leverage open source BPM technologies and communities to get started, prototype and experiment. This is how you can get started for example with Bonita OSS platform.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Number one is traditional waterfall development approaches. Customers in all industries are moving away from detailed, long-term project plans with single timelines to embrace a more iterative (agile) development approach.

Recent focus on customer-facing applications is going to accelerate demand for agile/iterative methodologies as, for example, customers will be involved through the whole development process. Projects where changes in deliverables are discouraged, or where resources, scope, and time are fixed are bound to fail.

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PS. Do you want to learn more about what to expect in 2018? Read the posts “The Year Ahead for BPM – 2018 Predictions from Top Influencers” from BPM.com and “Process Predictions for 2018” from Jim Sinur.

Some of the things we were traditionally doing as BPM practitioners are no longer seen as important. New trends are emerging. Hype level is very high.

Do you want to know which BPM skills will be really useful in 2017?

I do

To help you focus on relevant things and skip things that will not give results this year I asked some of the best BPM experts in the world two questions:

1. What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

2. Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)

In a hurry? Get the “BPM skills in 2017” guide as a convenient, downloadable PDF.

Yes! Give me my PDF

Below you can find the answers from 26 experts. You can either read everything or use the navigation below.

Roger Burlton
Scott Draeger
Alan Fish
Ian Gotts
Sandeep Johal
Ryan Johnston
Emiel Kelly
Sandy Kemsley
Mathias Kirchmer
Harald Kühn
Marcello La Rosa
Bob Larrivee
Connie Moore
Nathaniel Palmer
Juergen Pitschke
Ian Ramsay
Adrian Reed
Pedro Robledo
Pramod Sachdeva
Alexander Samarin
Suresh Sambandam
Jim Sinur
Keith Swenson
James Taylor
John Tesmer
Miguel Valdes

Now, let’s dive into the answers.

Roger Burlton

Roger is the president of Process Renewal Consulting Group Inc. He is also co-founder of BPTrends Associates; the services firm of the world-leading BPTrends.com knowledge portal. He started the pioneering Process Renewal Group (PRG) in 1993 and was at the forefront of process-centric ways of running businesses.

Roger chairs several of the largest and most influential BPM conferences in the world and is a sought after speaker dealing with the tough issues of business change in a thought provoking and entertaining manner.

WWW: http://www.processrenewal.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @rogerburlton

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

Business Architecture that does not dismiss processes and replace them by capabilities will be essential to connect all the dots of integrated transformation.

Keeping the business model NS Business Operating model connected through value creating end to end business processes with ownership and governance. All of this must be tied to measured performance focused on the end to end for customers.

Being able to do all the process work as part of digitization of end to end processes driven by customers. The process is still the process and has to be designed for all aspects to work together.

Business analysts must learn to see their work as designing a flow of work.

Stakeholder analysis and design for EXTERNAL stakeholders putting aside the wants of internal stakeholders. It’s all about the result that the organization is mandated to deliver externally.

Connecting process performance to stakeholder value needs not departments.

Dealing with customer experience if there is general parity in the industry on the basic products and services. Example is mobile telecoms where everyone offers the same thing but the experience varies widely.

Developing cultural change skills must become part of process work.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Low level analysis of portions of an end to end.

Everything else should still be needed but on a wider end to end scale.

It is still going to take a while to get all aspects working in an organization so diligence and patience is needed.

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Scott Draeger

Scott Draeger is the Vice President of Product at GMC Software Technology. He joined the software industry in 1998, after earning a B.A. from University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He started managing processes as a document designer using several CCM technologies. He has more than 15 years of experience in the customer communication software industry as both a transactional document designer and a software vendor. Lately, he is interested in the intersection of experience design and enterprise systems.

WWW: https://www.gmc.net
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @scottdraeger

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

This year will test your organization’s flexibility. If you made an organization that is too rigid, you might find yourself in trouble. You can expect that new regulations will allow less time for you to implement the changes they require. This means that your team, tools and processes need to expect change in 2017. With this much chaos on the horizon, it would be wise to get a group together to brainstorm likely chance scenarios for more regulation, less regulation, and a events that could impact your processes. Some early brainstorming might prepare you for a variety of unanticipated situations that could catch your competitors off guard.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Process mining, because this is a year of change that will be major. It’s not a year of small tweaks that can be identified and optimized. There will be major changes for finance, insurance, utilities, government and other industries that will require rapid implementation. Process mining might regain prominence in the future, but focus on designing replacement processes quickly.

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Alan Fish

Dr Alan N Fish is Principal Consultant in Decision Solutions with FICO, having over 30 years’ experience in the support, automation and optimisation of organisational decisions. He invented the “Decision Requirements Diagram” (DRD) which exposes the structure of a domain of decision-making, and developed Decision Requirements Analysis (DRA): a methodology for building and using such decision models. He is the author of “Knowledge Automation: How To Implement Decision Management in Business Processes” (Wiley), and co-author of the OMG specification Decision Model and Notation (DMN).

WWW: http://www.fico.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @AlanNFish

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

Effective BPM requires practitioners to be aware of the principles of decision management, and to be able to model decisions formally in DMN. This allows organisational decision-making to be identified, tied to specific “decision points” in the process, and optimised. Whether decision-making is to be automated using decision services, constrained using decision support systems, or left as a free human activity, it is vital to understand the scope and structure of the decisions made, how they relate to data collected / generated by the process, and how the business knowledge applied in making the decisions is to be managed over time. Such business knowledge is a valuable corporate asset which cannot be managed unless it is first identified and modelled.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

BPMN / CMMN / DMN is becoming the de facto set of standard modelling notations. Learn these thoroughly and forget the others, and do not rely too heavily on the proprietary notations of any particular tool: knowledge of the standards is transferrable.

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Ian Gotts

Ian is a founder of Q9 Elements, tech advisor, investor, speaker and author.

Q9 Elements is a startup software company. It is looking to disrupt the BPM marketplace and enable clients to deliver huge levels of ROI.

WWW: iangotts.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @iangotts

Paradox of skills for 2017

– managing balance of evolution (continuous improvement) and revolution (digital transformation)
– deciphering techno-babble from practical, implementable, real-world solutions
– making change seem easy, yet driving pace to keep up
– staying agile whilst maintaining keeping compliance

Leave behind

– choosing a strategic BPM solution; mix and mash-up is the way forward
– thinking BPM is a standalone discipline or toolset

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Sandeep Johal

Sandeep has contributed professionally and academically to Business Process Management for 10 years. He specializes in business process modeling and governance. He currently leads a team of Business Process professionals in the United States.

Sandeep is a BPTrends accredited Business Process Management Professional and has a Master of Business Process Management.

WWW: LI profile
WWW: http://www.leonardo.com.au
Twitter: @deepology

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

– Willing to change by example
– Lead when required and, more importantly, follow when needed
– Active listening
– Solid grounding of business analysis techniques (e.g. process measurement)
– Shape mind-sets of diverse stakeholders
– Driving iterative and incremental change
– Awareness of contemporary industry trends of value delivery (e.g. digital transformation)
– Use of a variety of communication channels including (but not limited) social media

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

– Big-bang change
– “Knowing the solution” or “God complex”
– Relying on traditional media alone for the traditional field of transformation
– Only having technical capability (e.g. starting with technology)

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Ryan Johnston

Ryan Johnston is the Director of Operations for Camunda Inc. in North America. He has a diverse background in business process application design and implementation, working with several of the commercial business process suites in addition to most of today’s popular open source business process suites. He sees open source solutions as flexible, powerful, and preferable alternatives to commercial enterprise software packages, allowing for more complete and robust coverage of companies’ individual business requirements.

WWW: http://www.camunda.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @rjcamunda

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

The mindset of the typical BPM practitioner should be different here in 2017. In many cases, our goal just a few years ago was to implement BPM and to identify business problems we could solve along the way. Now, instead of working in reverse, we look first to solve real-world business problems, and BPM, related technologies and standards such as BPMN, CMMN and DMN are a set of tools in a larger toolbox full of customizable software products that allow businesses to solve those problems… and to gain the required competitive advantage over their rivals. If the typical BPM practitioner can shift his/her mindset to align with that reality, that person will be much more well-positioned to recommend the right tool or combination of tools to address any individual client’s needs.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the need for flexibility in today’s tools. Gone are the days where companies would buy software packages and align their processes with the capabilities of those tools, and that is why more flexible, customizable tools are gaining more and more traction. Thus, if you want to be a leading BPM practitioner these days, work to be fluent in the core concepts and strive to gain experience with tools that are malleable and can be tweaked as necessary to satisfy specific business requirements.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Two items come specifically to mind… First, we used to talk a lot about adapters to existing, proprietary enterprise systems, and that was big business. Not anymore; with the true, post-hype emergence of REST API’s literally everywhere, adapters are – in most cases – simply no longer necessary. If a tool can speak over a REST interface, then it can generally integrate with almost any enterprise software package in the market today. The only exception is Robotic Process Automation (RPA); in some cases, RPA focuses on automating how users interact with human-based user interfaces, and those “adapters” are clearly much more specialized (and not yet standardized).

Next, and perhaps more importantly, the days of proprietary coding languages and formats are numbered, much more so than they were in the past. If you’re working with a tool that leverages a proprietary coding language (or any other proprietary mechanism for building business solutions), you should seriously consider whether continuing to work in that area makes sense for your long-term career path. Even the proprietary vendors are switching more and more to open standards and/or open source software components, which is a boon for developers, architects, and their employers due to newfound skills portability.

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Emiel Kelly

Emiel has been working as a trainer and consultant for vendors of software like BPM tooling, since 1999. He also started his own initiative, Procesje.nl, a valuable source of practical and common sense information about Business Process Management and how to avoid blindly following the trends.

He is also a contributor to bpm.com where he is a very active participant of discussion forums. You can also find lots of his both informative and entertaining tweets on Twitter.

WWW: http://procesje.blogspot.nl
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @Procesje

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

Why do companies have processes? No, not to model them. No, not to analyze them. No, not to automate them. These are just means. What’s the goal?
The goal of processes is to solve your customer’s problem(s).

So, I think the skill with most value has always been, and still will be, the skill of “listening”. And I don’t care if that is done with ears, Artificial Intelligence or IOT sensors.

Listening with the goal to find out what’s going on. To find out what problems should be solved. But don’t forget that a speedometer is quite useless if you don’t understand what the numbers tell you and don’t know how to act upon that information.

So I would add “Learning” and “Acting” to the skills. Listen, Learn, Act. Sounds cool, doesn’t it?

But is it special? Absolutely not. It is what every company (and person) should do to stay relevant and be valuable. It’s an attitude and it should happen every day. It’s daily business. BPM is daily business.

And Listen, Learn, Act happens on different levels of BPM.

First of all on a more strategic level. Because our beloved processes are just a means to solve a problem. A problem of a person, a group or society. So, good BPM starts with being able to understand these problems. Being aware what is going on and provide the services or products to solve those problems.

And yes, processes need to be executed for that. The right processes. And that needs a good understanding of what are the customer’s needs and being able to adapt your collection of processes to that needs.

As said, it’s also about learn and act. So to me that means skills that enable fast process development. Although they still exist, but most processes won’t last for 20 years. A good understanding of tools and technologies that help you to continuously support the right processes seem valuable to me.
This is a trend you see. A trend I would call “Anti Enterprise Software”. No more expensive big systems that have to run for 20 years to pay a return on investment. But easy to change applications to support your processes.

Maybe it’s a little weird to talk about “throw away processes” but I believe every executed case should be a trigger for process improvement. And wouldn’t it be cool if your supporting software is built with that mindset?

That automatically brings me to a more operational level. On that level it is about understanding what is going on in your processes. What is the need of individual cases, what is the status, etc? And being able to adjust your “plan” if needed. Not by lengthy procedures and hierarchical approvement chains. But by the people who execute the processes. Process change power should be as close to the shop floor as possible. That needs a different culture.

All these points are partly wishes, partly observations, but if I had to summarize them, I would say it is about being able to turn data into valuable action on the different levels of BPM.

Technology can help with that. Isn’t E-listening what AI actually is meant for? Turning data into useful information so someone or something can act upon it. With acting being the most important. It is cool that a google car can identify there is a traffic jam ahead. But without being able to brake, that information is useless.

So, if you have to turn Listen, Learn, Act into more business terms, it would be things like data science, Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning and skills (and technologies of course) that enable you to easily change the systems that support your processes.

What skills are less needed?

Is it worth to talk about the skills less needed? For sure needed skills will change.

To me BPM never has been something that you do on top of, or next to, your daily business. BPM is daily business. And how you do it will change. Because of different needs or new technology.

Will 6 months of AS-IS mapping still be a thing? Will Lean still be a thing? Will process mining still be a thing? Will BPMN still be a thing? I don’t know. And that’s why we as “BPM peeps” also have to Listen, Learn and Act. To stay relevant for organizations that take “Managing by process” seriously.

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Sandy Kemsley

Sandy is a “technology catalyst” with a 20-year history of software design and systems architecture in several technology areas, combined with a deep understanding of business environments and how technology can impact them.

Sandy blogs about BPM, enterprise architecture and other intersections of business and technology at www.column2.com

WWW: https://column2.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @skemsley

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

I see a continuing split in BPM practitioners inside large organizations: a process improvement group that is focused on Lean Six Sigma or other techniques for modeling and improving processes, but no awareness of automation technologies; and an IT group that uses BPM as an agile application development and orchestration tool. Both groups need to improve their skills to really make a BPM program work for their organization:

– The process improvement team needs more knowledge of how BPMN modeling tools are more than just “flowcharts on steroids”, but can allow them to provide significantly more valuable input to the IT groups in the form of executable (or nearly so) process models that match the desired business processes. By developing skills in BPMN and related modeling tools, they add another process improvement technique to their toolbox, and can provide a helpful bridge for teaching business people more about BPMN.

– The IT team needs improved skills on using agile techniques and technologies (including BPMS) in order to deliver on the promise of fast deployment and flexible systems. Too many organizations are still being sold on long, monolithic software development projects that effectively pour concrete over the current state rather than providing a platform for flexible response to business change.

In addition to these two obviously BPM practitioner groups, the “citizen developers” — typically semi-technical business analysts embedded within business groups directly — need to gain skills on using low-code BPMS to create situational applications directly and without IT involvement. They are already doing this, except they’re using inappropriate tools such as spreadsheets: it’s time to empower them by giving them enterprise-strength tools to create useful departmental apps.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Many organizations are spending significant time and energy on Lean Six Sigma programs, but not seeing a lot of benefit from them since they tend to focus on incremental improvement rather than innovation. In manufacturing and other industries where physical assets dictate a more incremental approach, these techniques will continue to dominate, but they will become less important in knowledge-based service organizations, including financial services and insurance.

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Dr. Mathias Kirchmer

As innovative out-come-driven top executive and entrepreneur, Dr. Kirchmer has successfully led organizations and teams to achieve growth and performance goals in an international environment combining business and technology initiatives. He consistently overachieved results in his different roles, including CEO, Managing Director and Chief Marketing & Innovation Officer in the consulting and software sector as well as senior adviser, mainly in manufacturing industries. Dr. Kirchmer is a visionary leader, thought leader and innovator in the field of Business Process Management (BPM). He has combined his broad business experience with his extensive academic research to deliver pioneering management approaches that have proven to be both, sustainable and provide immediate benefits.

Dr. Kirchmer remains involved in academia as an affiliated faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania since 1998, the Widener University, Philadelphia University and the Universidad of Chile. In 2004, he received a research and teaching fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Dr. Kirchmer is a published authority of BPM authoring 6 books and over 150 articles for a variety of publications making him a much sought after speaker and expert.

WWW: LI profile
WWW: http://bpm-d.com
Twitter: @mtki2006

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

In 2017 BPM will continue its shift form a more or less tactical internal efficiency focus towards significant external value creation. BPM becomes the management discipline for strategy execution and ongoing digitalization. It must help to focus on what really matters, improve in the context of specific organizational challenges and sustain those improvements. Rapid improvements to react to fast market changes, standardization and customer journey planning for consistently best customer experience, value-driven as well as process-led digitalization and system-implementation become typical BPM initiatives.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Narrow technical skills will be less important. From an information technology perspective more and more of the configuration and adaption of process relevant tools and application is done on a business level, hence less and less of the traditional programming is required. But also the more conventional improvement skills, like many of the Six Sigma tools, will be less important in an information rich digital world. Their application is often too slow and not sufficiently integrated into the new opportunities digitalization provides.

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Harald Kühn

Dr. Harald Kühn is a member of the management board of the BOC AG. He is responsible for the product management and the related strategic aspects of BOC’s product portfolio. Dr. Harald Kühn works in the areas of metamodelling, BPM, EA and the usage of cloud technologies in these domains.

He is an author of over 20 publications about various aspects of BPM.

WWW: boc-group.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @BOC_Group

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

– Customer Journeys and Customer Touchpoint Analysis for Process Improvement
– Relating Data Governance with BPM
– Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and how this technology influences BPM

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Any knowledge and experiences gathered in the past will influence decisions for the future. Therefore, even if specific techniques or technologies are not really relevant any more, they are important to evaluate and apply new upcoming techniques and technologies. Process Mining is still a niche in the domain of BPM.

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Marcello La Rosa

Professor Marcello La Rosa is the academic director for corporate programs and partnerships at the Information Systems school of the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia.

His research interests span different BPM areas, including process consolidation, mining and automation, in which he published over 80 papers. He leads the Apromore initiative (www.apromore.org) – a strategic collaboration between various universities for the development of an advanced process model repository, and coordinates QUT’s professional training program on BPM (www.bpm-training.com). Marcello has taught BPM to practitioners and students in Australia for over ten years. Based on this experience, he co-authored “Fundamentals of Business Process Management” – the first, comprehensive textbook on BPM, which has influenced the curriculum of over 100 universities in the world. Recently, using this book he co-developed a MOOC on BPM, which attracted over 7,000 participants.

WWW: marcellolarosa.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @mlr80

Below you can find few good practices and common errors mentioned by Prof. Marcello La Rosa in a video interview. You can watch the full interview HERE.

Good practices:

If we want to start implementing BPM as a management practice within an organization, we need to start moving away from the scope of a single project and have an enterprise level focus to manage holistically multiple BPM projects.

We also need to prioritize the management of the various business processes from a business process architecture using their strategic importance.

The enabler for all of the above is the establishment of a sound BPM governance structure, which defines BPM decision processes, roles and responsibilities, standards and guidelines in the use of BPM methods and software tools.

Bad practices:

One of the most common errors is focusing on methods and tools rather than on the value these methods and tools should deliver for the company. For example, training 30 Green Belts when the company’s strategic priority is elsewhere: outsmarting the competitors through innovative products. Lean Six Sigma is not going to help to achieve that, yet there is no link between the choice of the methods and tools and the strategic objectives we must achieve.

Another common error is to have a siloed BPM initiative, where multiple projects are conducted in isolation from each other. Overlooking the relations (hierarchical, temporal and generalization-specialization) between business processes may lead to a situation where improving one process creates inconsistency with other processes, besides missing out on opportunities for identifying shared solutions.

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Bob Larrivee

Bob Larrivee, Vice President and Chief Analyst of Market Intelligence – AIIM.

Bob is an internationally recognized subject matter expert and thought leader with over thirty years of experience in the fields of information and process management, and recipient of the Cenadem Brazil – ECM pioneer Award. Bob is an avid techie with a focus on process improvement, and the application of advanced technologies to enhance and automate business operations.

WWW: Free eBook: What We Learned from the AIIM Community in 2016 And What We See in 2017
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @BobLarrivee

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

I think the key is an ability to see beyond the symptoms of a problem, and get to the root cause. If the problem statement is that processing times are too slow or review cycles too long, that is an issue but not the underlying problem. Once the problem is identified, then work to resolve it. This is where process mapping is of great benefit. Document and validate the process, identify the players, and related content, then look for ways to improve that process. If possible, look to automate wherever possible, but do not put technology first, it is a tool.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

It is my belief that every skill has a time and place to be used. While some things may be considered obsolete or outdated, it is amazing how they suddenly become relevant again, when nothing else works. It is also my belief that skills learned and acquired, while they may not applicable to a current situation, is knowledge gained that provides enhanced insight into that which could be, when the time is right. For example, I once trained to become a Certified Insurance Services Representative and gained my certification in that field, yet I never worked in the insurance industry. Years later, working for a software solution s provider, I was able to apply that knowledge when addressing the insurance sector to enhance their content management environments and improve their operational processes.

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Connie Moore

As Senior Vice President of Research at Digital Clarity Group, Connie has unparalleled experience working with senior executives in business and IT, technology marketing, and government, from SMEs to large enterprises throughout the globe. She has managed international teams of analysts focused on a wide range of technologies such as social and collaboration, content management, business analytics, business software (e.g. ERP, CRM, HCM), and BPM suites. Her research encompasses business transformation, business process management, customer experience management, information management, the future of work, new business models and organizational change management. Connie is highly sought as a keynote speaker and conference chair on five continents. This year, she was honored by her peer group for thought leadership in business process transformation, adaptive case management and BPM software when she received the highly coveted Marvin Manheim Award from the Workflow and Reengineering Association (WARIA).

Prior to DCG, Connie was a Vice President, Principal Analyst and Research Director at Forrester Research for more than 20 years, where she pioneered new data-driven research on global Bring Your Own Technology trends, forecasted and defined the next generation of business suites, and drove innovative dialog among marketing, business process and IT senior executives about how to succeed at large-scale business transformation.

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WWW: http://www.digitalclaritygroup.com
Twitter: @cmooreclarity

Skills that business process practitioners need to continue are:

– Process transformation/improvement methodology skills, particularly Lean and Six Sigma or Lean Six Sigma. Use Lean for initiatives that involve analyzing the big picture and use Six Sigma or Lean Six Sigma to analyze and drill down into a specific part of a business process.

– Organizational change management. This perennial topic comes up with virtually every project because it is a big possible point of failure. Skills in change management could include the ADKAR methodology from Prosci or it could be more specialized, even “home grown” methodologies. Conferences that focus on operational excellence are good events for learning more about how business process executives have successfully tackled organizational change. No matter what methodology or technique the practitioner uses, it’s vitally important that the practitioner and executives focus on communication, communication, communication.

New skills that business practitioners should add:

– Entity modeling is a different way to model processes that is being supported by a number of BPM vendors. It is a significantly superior way to build processes, particularly for dynamic processes and for situations where many processes are being automated in parallel. Business analysts and development teams should develop or deepen their skills in this modeling approach. (see references below)

– Customer journey mapping is important for business process practitioners to understand. Often related initiatives are being pursued, unbeknownst to the different teams, that are related to the same business process. BPM teams may be looking at how a cross-functional process works within or inside the organization, while marketing and customer experience teams may be looking at the same cross-functional process from the outside in perspective. The BPM team is most likely using a process modeling tool while the customer journey team is most likely using a journey mapping tool. These two teams may discover each other at some point in their unintegrated projects, and decide to join forces or at least collaborative. At that point, it is helpful to know and understand the journey mapping tooling the customer experience team uses.

– Net promoter scores are important KPI metrics for executive dashboards, and business process practitioners need to understand how they work and how to integrate them into the BPM reporting and monitoring system.

– Analytics are everywhere, and this explosive growth will only continue over time. BPM practitioners need a working understanding of analytics, whether it is analytics for monitoring process results, predictive analytics that initiate steps in a process or something else. Having a working knowledge of analytics will be very helpful.

References:
http://www.digitalclaritygroup.com/use-change-management-build-operational-excellence-culture/

http://www.digitalclaritygroup.com/role-organizational-change-management/

http://www.digitalclaritygroup.com/podcast-entity-modeling-business-process-management/

http://www.digitalclaritygroup.com/entity-modeling-simplified-business-process-automation/

http://www.digitalclaritygroup.com/transform-customer-experience-and-operational-excellence-by-going-digital-outside-and-inside/

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Nathaniel Palmer

Rated as the #1 Most Influential Thought Leader in Business Process Management (BPM) by independent research, Nathaniel Palmer is recognized as one of the early originators of BPM, and has led the design for some of the industry’s largest-scale and most complex projects involving investments of $200 Million or more. Today he is the Editor-in-Chief of BPM.com, as well as the Executive Director of the Workflow Management Coalition, as well as VP and CTO of BPM, Inc. Previously he had been the BPM Practice Director of SRA International, and prior to that Director, Business Consulting for Perot Systems Corp, as well as spent over a decade with Delphi Group serving as VP and CTO.

He frequently tops the lists of the most recognized names in his field, and was the first individual named as Laureate in Workflow. Nathaniel has authored or co-authored a dozen books on process innovation and business transformation, including “Intelligent BPM” (2013), “How Knowledge Workers Get Things Done” (2012), “Social BPM” (2011), “Mastering the Unpredictable” (2008) which reached #2 on the Amazon.com Best Seller’s List, “Excellence in Practice” (2007), “Encyclopedia of Database Systems” (2007) and “The X-Economy” (2001). He has been featured in numerous media ranging from Fortune to The New York Times to National Public Radio. Nathaniel holds a DISCO Secret Clearance as well as a Position of Trust with in the U.S. federal government.

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Twitter: @nathanielpalmer

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

Three skills which represent even greater opportunity BPM practitioners to deliver value are 1) User (or Customer) Journey Mapping; 2) Data Modeling and Analysis; 3) Decision Modeling. Overall, process modeling remains a critical skill set, and one of the greatest challenge for new hires (hiring managers) among BPM practitioner teams the general lack of ability to properly represent and differentiates process, data and rules.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

In 2017, Lean Six Sigma will remain no longer relevant, likely the least relevant, and closely large architecture frameworks (TOGAF, et al.) in contrast with localized business architecture practices and leverage of standard notations such as Archimate.

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Juergen Pitschke

Juergen Pitschke is Partner and Managing Director at Process Renewal Group Deutschland.

His customers include companies as Kuehne+Nagel (AG & Co.) KG, Boehler Edelstahl or organizations like the Federal Office of Police in Switzerland.

WWW: http://processrenewal.de
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Twitter: @jpitschke

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

Decision Management: I mean not only learning the notation Decision Model and Notation (DMN). But to understand more application areas. Decision Management is important not only for compliance. Other important use cases in the context of BPM are improving communication and using Decision Management for predictions.

We need to improve our soft skills to apply traditional and new concepts. How can we apply new techniques?

Another field to look for are BPM-Systems for implementing. We see a discussion about “zero-code”-systems. But complex individual applications need sometimes more complex features. I believe that we will see more frameworks for different areas which combine process engines with complex application frameworks.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

… no longer relevant …
We are fast to declare something irrelevant. I believe you can learn a lot from traditional techniques and methods, also from other fields and industries. Try to understand what was the goal, what was good, what was not workinng. Combine with new techniques and methods. It is always good to have many techniques in your toolbox.

…not yet …
I give the same answer: Understand what is not yet working and what is the goal. CMMN is such a hype topic. We see CMMN in systems and used by experts. But how to explain it to “normal” users? Or who is the target audience for such a concept?
I mentioned the use of decision management for predictive analytics. We have the same issue: Who is the target audience? How to explain and use in a practical way?

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Ian Ramsay

Ian Ramsay works as an independent consultant in Business Process Change and Automation specialising in complex financial service operations.

Currently, Ian is engaged in commercialising a radically new and cost-effective approach to Business Process Analysis, Design and Execution with an associated book.

WWW: http://www.8020bpm.com
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What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

Despite a number of potentially useful standards, BPMN and DMN come to mind, the range of technical implementation platforms is now more diverse than ever and few standards prevail. So technical BPM practitioners need to become ever more skilled in fewer vendor platforms. Perhaps just one. I expect AI based services to be soon woven into BPM data structuring and decision making introducing the new role of Process Knowledge Engineer.

Business Architecture has emerged more recently as an important (and long overdue) BPM role. Avoiding the definition of impossible or uneconomic solutions, with the diversity of quite technical BPM tools and approaches, demands that BPM analysts, of all levels, must also possess a solid appreciation of implementation technologies. Unfortunately, BPM technology still influences the business solution design.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

Effective process management, automated or otherwise, is totally dependent upon data. Especially structured: process, reference and business data. This fundamental reality is often been overlooked (typically by sales and market marketing). It emerges to be the major cause of BPM delivery failure and business value destruction.

The rapid corporate adoption of simple, secure and performant REST services has more recently eliminated the need for an expensive, parallel data integration / ESB programme to underpin BPM value creation. The need for highly paid Integration Engineers is diminished.

REST services also opens the door to an abundance of cost-effective externally hosted services to add even more BPM business value.

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Adrian Reed

Adrian Reed is a true advocate of the analysis profession. In his day job, he acts as Principal Consultant and Director at Blackmetric Business Solutions where he provides business analysis consultancy and training solutions to a range of clients in varying industries. Adrian is President of the UK chapter of the IIBA and he speaks internationally on topics relating to business analysis and business change. You can read Adrian’s blog at http://www.adrianreed.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/UKAdrianReed.

WWW: http://www.adrianreed.co.uk
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Twitter: @UKAdrianReed

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

Now that is an interesting question! The words that jumps out at me is the phrase ‘create value’. I think that as practitioners we often assume that there is an instinctive understanding of what value is. Yet, so often in organisations there are different perceptions and perspectives on this thorny topic. In fact I suspect we’ve all worked in organisations where some of our stakeholders haven’t really considered the value they are seeking!

With this in mind, I think a really useful skill is the ability to understand people’s perspectives and to help define the value that organisations are seeking. Is ‘quicker’ better–if so why? Is ‘cheaper’ better, if so why? This involves understanding organisational strategy, linking that strategy to BPM as well as change projects, process improvement initiatives and so forth. It also involves ensuring we have a firm understanding of our organisations external environment, value proposition, and the value expectations of its customers. After all, if a product is positioned at the luxury end of the market, then its customer support processes are probably very different to one at the economy end of the market–and it’s crucial that we know that!

Understanding value has another advantage. In linking BPM to value, we make it easier to ‘sell’ to our stakeholders. We position BPM & analysis against that business value.

I think we’re also seeing a shift towards a (very sensible) view that it isn’t really possible to ‘create value’–or certainly not in isolation. What we can create are the conditions where value can emerge. I.e. we work with stakeholders to co-create value. This might sound very abstract, but it’s actually really important. It shows the need for a rich and deep connection with our stakeholders–from top to bottom of the organisation–and reinforces the need for us to spend time knowing them, networking with them and understanding their worlds.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

I’m not sure that any skills are completely irrelevant, but I think that we are seeing that the borders between disciplines are becoming more and more blurry. Perhaps, going back a few years, there were certain tasks/techniques that were seen as within BPM and others that were seen as outside of this. The same with business architecture, business analysis, and other intersecting disciplines. I think we’re seeing a really positive growth of interdisciplinary communities, and that is such an exciting thing. It’s not ‘either/or’ it can be ‘both’.

So, one thing that is no longer relevant (or no long as relevant as it used to be) is the expectation of fixed silos. It’s far more about experienced people doing awesome work to co-create value.

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Pedro Robledo

One of the most influential Spanish thought leader in Process Management using BPM, as for +15 years he has been dedicated to promote industry awareness of Business Process Management in Spain and Latin America. Director and Professor of BPM Master in UNIR. BPM Interim Manager for helping Organizations in its BPM and Digital Transformation initiatives. International Speaker about BPM. Since 2013 participates as jury of the WfMC Awards for Excellence in BPM and Workflow. He writes about BPM and Digital Transformation in his blog: El Libro Blanco Sobre La Gestión de Procesos.

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Twitter: @pedrorobledoBPM

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

In 2017, all BPM practitioners need to pay attention to the value of Business Process Management in Digital Transformation, so their roles are very important in the transformation journey. So they need to focus add skills in technical disruption forces (SMACT – Social Mobile Analytics Cloud Things) in order to manage BPM projects where it should be possible to use Process Management Social Networks, Streaming Analytics and Big Data, Mobile Process Management, Event Processing and Internet of Things.

But, due to the cultural change of the Digital Transformation and BPM implementation, it is important to improve the skills focus on how to make an effective communication, empathy and relationship with all stakeholders to get the cultural change without rejections.

Another important consideration is to be focused on methodologies of continous improvement (Lean, SixSigma and TOC), as companies are more aware of applying these methodologies for business and process improvement.

And the last skill but not the least, Adaptive Case Management skills, as more and more companies wants to implement structured processes and not-structured processes.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

All the skills are relevant as BPM maturity is low in the market yet, and the professionals need business knowledge and technology expertise of the all BPM lifecycle to advance in the maturity and to be able to develop the process transformation with the new value chain in the digital transformation of a company. But it is required to advance in terms of the focus, as many companies need to change the perception of what is a BPM Project, as it is not a Project of Technology, but a Management Project to optimize the Business Processes aligned with the Corporate Strategy.

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Pramod Sachdeva

Pramod Sachdeva is the Founder and Managing Director at Princeton Blue. Pramod has been an evangelist for Digital Transformation using BPM, Business Rules and Cognitive technologies since he founded Princeton Blue over a decade ago. With over 30 years of business and technology consulting experience, Pramod brings tremendous knowledge to help clients navigate their digital transformation journey. Pramod’s vision has helped Princeton Blue get recognized as a high-profile thought leader in delivering digital transformation by leading industry analysts.

WWW: http://princetonblue.com
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Twitter: @princetonblue

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

You’ll be amazed how many BPM projects don’t go back and measure the actual ROI vs the promised ROI. More often than not, the project team is more focused on delivering the technical challenges and less on quantifying the business value. Business value assessment and process performance measurement skills will help more clients justify the need to grow BPM from a project to an enterprise program.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

One of the features that differentiated iBPMS from its predecessors (BPM and Workflow) was Process Simulation – a capability we hardly see clients use these days. The promise of 100% code-free BPM development is not too far in the future. From a one-click responsive mobile application to low-code development, today’s leading BPM platforms allow non-Computer Science majors to develop quality BPM solutions in weeks.

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Alexander Samarin

Alexander Samarin is an Architect for Achieving the Synergy between Strategy, Good Business Practices and Disruptive Digital Technologies

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Twitter: @samarin

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

a) be able to think out-of-the-box, e.g. how to use BPM outside enterprises, for example, apply BPM to bigger (than an enterprise) domains: healthcare, digital contracts, IoT , smart-home.

b) consider flows-of-events (streams) and find synergy between Event Processing Networks (EPN) and BPM (http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.ch/2016/12/enterprise-patterns-cesar-entarch.html , http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.ch/2011/01/explicit-event-processing-agents-in.html, http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.ch/2011/01/from-epn-to-bpmn.html)

c) bring the power of microservices to BPM to achieve “Extreme delivery” practices (see http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.ch/search/label/%23microservices)

d) carry out transformation as a set of small inter-related projects (“saucisson” pattern)

e) become friends with business architects, solution architects and enterprise architects

f) remember the laws of BPM

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

a) pure agile because it is very bad for BPM

b) just documenting implicit business processes

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Suresh Sambandam

Suresh Sambandam is the Founder and CEO of OrangeScape Technologies. He is an investor, speaker, and has few patents to his credit. He has been disrupting the BPM industry with KiSSFLOW.

WWW: https://kissflow.com
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Twitter: @sureshsambandam

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

– Most BPM practitioners are good at process design but very bad at data mining. Data and processes must go hand in hand to build effective process automation. Data modelling is analogous to proper payload, proper modelling, etc. It’s high time that BPM practitioners understand the importance of data modelling.

– Data analytics skills will be continue to be very important. Even though many BPM tools give process statistics and pre-processed reports, companies are still going to want custom reporting, and practitioners should be familiar with tools like Tableau, drilldown charts, pivots, etc.

– Predictive modelling through machine learning will be the thing that sets apart the elite BPM practitioners of the future. We should already be employing machine learning techniques that will find new patterns and correlations that weren’t thought of before to forecast better opportunities.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

– BPEL has become completely obsolete and has been fully replaced by BPMN

– Process simulation sound like an interesting option, but when it comes to practical applications, it is way to complicated to use. In many cases, process simulation just breaks down.

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Jim Sinur

Jim Sinur is an independent thought leader in applying business process management (BPM) to innovative digital organizations. His research and areas of personal experience focus on business process innovation, business modeling, business process management technology (iBPMS), process collaboration for knowledge workers, process intelligence/optimization, business policy/rule management (BRMS), and leveraging business applications in processes. Jim is also one of the authors of BPM: The Next Wave. His latest book is Digital Transformation. Innovate or Die Slowly.

WWW: http://jimsinur.blogspot.com
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Twitter: @JimSinur

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

There are a number of skills that BPM folks could pick up as there are many coming out of the digital evolution, but my top seven would be the following:
– Journey Mapping for Customers, Employees and Partners
– Embedded Advanced Analytic and Augmented Reality Capabilities
– Adaptive and Goal Driven Processes (often in Case Management and also Explicit Rule enabled)
– AI looking for opportunities to add automation or more smarts like Robotic Program Automation (RPA)
– Cognitive Collaboration for Knowledge Intense Processes or Cases
– Signal and Pattern Detection (often needed for agility, IoT and business strategy)
– Merging Control on the Edge with Central Control

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

While there are no skills that one should drop, there are several that are considered common and receding. My top three would be the following:
– Central Control Mentality
– Water Fall project methods are taking a second seat to incremental development, RPA and rapid experimentation,
– Large blocks of frozen code are giving way to components, micro services and late binding rules and constraints

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Keith Swenson

Keith Swenson is Vice President of Research and Development at Fujitsu North America and also the Chairman of the Workflow Management Coalition. As a speaker, author, and contributor to many workflow and BPM standards, he is known for having been a pioneer in collaboration software and web services. He has led agile software development teams at MS2, Netscape, Ashton Tate & Fujitsu. He won the 2004 Marvin L. Manheim Award for outstanding contributions in the field of workflow. Co-author on more than 10 books. His latest book, “When Thinking Matters in the Workplace,” explains how to avoid stifling creativity and enhance innovation through the appropriate use of process technology. His 2010 book “Mastering the Unpredictable” introduced and defined the field of adaptive case management and established him as a Top Influencer in the field of case management. He blogs at https://social-biz.org/.

WWW: https://social-biz.org
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Twitter: @swensonkeith

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

The BPM analyst often believes that it is all about drawing the process. Well, yes it is. Drawing the process is critical. But it turns out that is the easy part. With modern process modeling tools, I am finding that only about 5% of the time is spent drawing the process model. Indeed, that 5% is saving a ton of work that you would have had to do without the process model, so it saves many times more than you spend on it. But what I am finding is that most of the time – the bulk, maybe 40% to 50% — is purely on UI implementation. Users don’t want static forms, and they don’t just type values. They want ability to search and look things up, to validate values, to prompt with previous values, and all of this interaction has nothing to do with the business process, and everything to do with creating a good user interface. The BPM practitioner must know how to make a good UI.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

There was a fad long ago (around 2008) for pushing a process language called BPEL. That is completely irrelevant now. The problem was that BPEL worked in a completely different manner than BPMN did, and thus the translation from BPMN to BPEL was imperfect, and only caused errors. Current implementations just execute the BPMN directly.

Use of XML is fading. While it is still used a lot, newer implementations are switching to JSON data transfer.

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James Taylor

James is a leading expert in decision management and in the development of Decision Management Systems. Experienced working with business rules, predictive analytics and other decisioning technologies to improve operational systems. Published author – Decision Management Systems (IBM Press), Smart (Enough) Systems (Prentice Hall), Real-World Decision Modeling with DMN (MK Press) – strategy consultant, writer and speaker.

WWW: http://jtonedm.com
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Twitter: @jamet123

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

– Decision Modeling and the DMN standard
– Predictive analytics (not just process analytics)
– Declarative modeling

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

– Modeling business rules outside the context of decisions
– Embedding business rules directly into processes
– Procedural documentation

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John Tesmer

As director of the group responsible for managing APQC’s Open Standards Benchmarking® database and the Process Classification Framework®, John Tesmer coordinates benchmarking projects and is responsible for innovation in benchmarking processes and development of APQC’s various process classification frameworks. John has led the development of APQC’s benchmarking tools, including the benchmarking portal, the Benchmarks on Demand service, and the ongoing development of APQC’s Process Classification Framework to help users accelerate benchmarking, content management, and defining of business processes.

WWW: https://www.apqc.org
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Twitter: @johngtesmer

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

BPM practitioners in 2017 need to identify or create an holistic framework for thinking about process management in their organization. It’s time to start managing processes holistically within your organization, and that means integration with strategy, process improvement, IT, and more. You need to push your leaders and colleagues to all begin using a common terminology to represent all aspects of process management that need attention and control. Stop thinking in point solutions that address the current burning platform and one-off improvement-fests. Build a strong process management culture in 2017.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

The hype meter on analytics, neural networks, smart machines, enterprise IOT, intelligent automation, and more is going to blow thru the roof in 2017 as consumer applications of this stuff really hit the main stream and niches within enterprises are finding success. Don’t get burned on this by trying to implement it in your enterprise right now. It’s not time yet to replace your people with process automating robots – but know that wave of innovation is coming in the next decade. Start making sure that your culture, processes, and data are ready. Make sure your executives can understand how this massive change will affect your organization in the coming years. Create an environment where your people can continue to add value in the face of ever-increasing automation.

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Miguel Valdés-Faura

As Chief Executive Officer and co-founder, Miguel leads the charge in Bonitasoft’s mission: to democratize Business Process Management (BPM), bringing powerful and affordable BPM to organizations and projects of all sizes. Prior to Bonitasoft, Miguel led R&D, pre-sales and support for the BPM division of Bull Information Systems, a major European systems provider. Miguel is a recognized thought-leader in business process management and passionate about open source community building.

WWW: http://www.bonitasoft.com
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Twitter: @miguelvaldes

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2017?

I see more and more demand for highly personalized user interfaces in BPM applications. User Interfaces in which BPM practitioners focus on end users, decides on the level of process details revealed and make things such ergonomics, design and accessibility a priority.

Highly personalized UIs is an essential piece of what I call “process-based applications”. Those applications are a highly viable alternative to custom development. With the additional advantage that the resulting applications can be changed after deployment, on the fly, to keep up with changing business needs.

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

I would say that traditional BPM simulation techniques are not relevant anymore (aka, evaluation of the way processes runs under different resource availabilities and different load profiles).

Traditional BPM simulation is usually based on specified number of iterations over a specified period of time and are run either with simulated data or with assigned probabilities.

Business are more and more used to work with bigdata and predictive analytics technologies so now its all about real-time data

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In a hurry? Get the “BPM skills in 2017” guide as a convenient, downloadable PDF.

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Many of my readers asked those questions, so I decided to bring you answers

I asked some of the best BPM experts a question “How to sell Business Process Management in an organization?” and got really amazing answers you can find below.

PLUS – 10+ experts extended their answers and recorded video interviews as a part of BPM Value Summit.

Do you want to watch videos from BPM Value Summit?

Yes! I want to learn from BPM experts

The post is pretty long, so I have added navigation to make your life easier:

Jim Boots
Lloyd Dugan
Prof. Marlon Dumas
Ian Gotts
Paul Harmon
Sandeep Johal
Sandy Kemsley
Mathias Kirchmer
Alberto Manuel
Derek Miers
Connie Moore
Adrian Reed
Pedro Robledo
Alexander Samarin
Ivan Seselj
Alec Sharp
Jim Sinur
Andrew Spanyi
John Tesmer
Steve Towers
Roger Tregear
Neil Ward-Dutton

Now, let’s dive into the answers.

Jim Boots

Jim Boots worked at Chevron Corporation for 30 years in a wide array of functions including sales, total quality management, business development, supply chain management, business management, e-commerce management, health safety & environment management, enterprise architecture, and Business Process Management (BPM) program development.
He was the primary force behind building Chevron’s BPM foundation from 2005-2010.

He is author of the book, “BPM Boots on the Ground: How to Implement Strategic Business Process Management: Lessons Learned from one of the World’s Largest Organizations” and co-author of a recent book “Questioning BPM?”. Jim runs his own BPM consultancy known as Global Process Innovation.

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In terms of getting executives to understand BPM and commit to implementing a robust version of it, it is hard, if not impossible, to persuade an executive who doesn’t have a naturally process-oriented mindset. Some executives don’t have that. Some simply rely on communicating goals and then assume that their knowledgeable employees will be able to figure out the processes needed to achieve the desired outcomes. If an executive is not “process-receptive,” then probably no amount of persuasion will help. A good first test of an executive’s mindset is to ask him or her whether it is worthwhile for executives and employees to spend time talking about how work should be done rather than always exclusively focusing on actually doing work. Some people have no patience for talking about work; they only feel useful if they are doing work rather than talking about it. People who have this strong “action orientation” probably will not perceive process work as useful.

If an executive is receptive to the idea that work processes (and the results that come from them) can be improved by rigorously talking about and documenting them, then there is a chance of persuading the executive that implementing BPM will add value. There are many things one can say about the benefits of BPM, but most people are more receptive when they see an example that is meaningful to them. So, after a brief introduction of what BPM is and its benefits, it often is helpful to focus on the business of the organization – which executives care deeply about – by asking them to help draw the top level of the organization’s process architecture. Someone who is skilled at process mapping can develop a draft process diagram within 30 minutes (preferably using commercially available software, but a piece of paper also is acceptable). As the executive begins seeing his/her organization’s work processes represented at the top level, the persuader can explain how the top level diagram can serve as the primary framework for a BPM project wherein priority areas are identified by the executives, then employees create lower level diagrams that are decomposed from – and are therefore aligned with – the top level. Such an approach makes the discussion more concrete. Otherwise, executives often feel that BPM conversations are too theoretical and/or that they get mired in detail.

Once an executive buys into the idea of a BPM initiative, getting employee buy-in in most organizations can be relatively straightforward. My suggestion is to frame the initiative as one that empowers or enables employees to perform their responsibilities with excellence. Most people like that idea. As employees do process mapping or undertake process improvements under the guidance of a skilled facilitator, they often take pride in the accurate depiction of best practice processes that have been distilled from their collective knowledge. (An exception can be in organizations that are focused on cost reduction as employees may feel that more efficient and effective processes will lead to workforce reductions. Naturally, they may be resistant to making processes work better if they might lose their jobs as a result.)

In summary, the hardest – and absolutely essential – thing is to have an executive sponsor who is committed to BPM over the long term. Different executives respond to various arguments in favor of BPM, but demonstrating process thinking by drawing the top level of a process architecture can make it seem real for some. Once the right executives are behind the BPM initiative, focusing on employee empowerment usually builds enthusiasm across the workforce.

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Lloyd Dugan

Lloyd Dugan is a widely recognized thought leader in the development and use of leading modeling languages, methodologies, and tools, covering from the level of EA and BA down through BPM, Case Management, and SOA. He specializes in the use of standard languages for describing business processes, systems, and services, particularly BPMN, CMMN, and DMN from the OMG. He has developed and delivered BPMN 2.0 training to the U.S. Department of Defense and large consultancies. He has nearly 30 years of experience with public and private sector clients, and has an MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University. He is an OMG-Certified Expert in BPM (OCEB) – Fundamental, a member of the Workflow Management Coalition and its BPSim Working Group, a member of the OMG’s BPMN Model Interchange Working Group (MIWG), and a Contributing Member (author), Meta Modeling and BPM-BA Alignment Collaboration Teams Member, and Advisory Board Member of the Business Architecture Guild. He is a frequent speaker at national and international conferences on BPM, BPMN, Case Management, SOA, and BA. He is a published author or co-author on BPM, BPMN, and BA. He serves as the Chief Architect for Business Process Management, Inc. (see www.bpm.com), for whom he delivers BPM-related training and client advisory services on BPM-related matters and technologies.

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It is undoubtedly a cliché to say this, but a business case is needed – even for BPM efforts. With its focus on processes (principally automation of same), the business case vectors to leverage have traditionally been efficiency improvements over quality improvements. In the case of the former, this was often (preferably and more palatably) presented as “cost avoidance” – the consequence being the capability to scale without increasing the cost base – as opposed to “cost reduction” (though that was often the hidden agenda). Clearly, this was predicated on showing some serious ROI on the generally expensive investment in the BPMS platform from which to automate those business processes – a heavy burden given the price of the platform and a long history of over budget and past due deliveries.

As a specialized sub-discipline (or at least on overlapping one) of BPM, case management shifts the emphasis to quality due to its focus on outcomes. This actually makes KPIs even more important than in traditional BPM efforts. The business case then must address more of the business importance of improved outcomes, which may or may not be easily monetized for discrete comparisons ala ROI. Thus, the burden in these situations is still high but for a different reason: better outcomes must be objectified in a way that sells the work.

Aside from the fact that good business case construction is a poorly understood and only loosely practiced discipline (despite claims to the contrary), there is a much larger problem associated with selling the value of BPM efforts: whatever one calls the NPV for the work, it is a result often devoid of what the business (in the form of the senior managers) really needs to see as the reason(s) for doing the work. Consider that ordinal or even cardinal measures of value are inextricably tied to the dimensions of the BPM effort itself, which may or may not align well with how the business actually sees itself. For that perspective, you need some kind of Business Architecture in which to see how a BPM effort improves one or more value streams (with receiving as well as participating stakeholders), or one or more capabilities that impact the success of the effective business model or the ability to execute on strategic goals and objectives. Too often BPM efforts proceed without establishing and/or aligning with this context, leaving the “value” being sold to be a more subjective exercise.

In the end, selling BPM to the organization must learn, embrace, and reflect back the vocabulary with which the business understands itself. Otherwise, it is a software license sale that is seen as a cost center moment, and can be subject to overly reductive evaluations.

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Prof. Marlon Dumas

Marlon Dumas is Professor of Software Engineering at University of Tartu, Estonia where he leads a team of 15 researchers focused on Business Process Management (BPM). Previously, he was faculty member at Queensland University of Technology and visiting researcher at SAP Research, Australia, where he led several BPM-related applied research projects. Prof. Dumas has provided consultancy and training to a dozen organizations in Australia and the Baltics. He is co-inventor of six granted US/EU patents in the field of BPM and co-author of the textbook “Fundamentals of Business Process Management”, now used in more than 100 universities worldwide.

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When making a case for BPM, it is crucial to align it with the strategic directions of the company. The Value-Driven BPM (VBPM) framework is a useful tool in this context. At the heart of this framework is the “transparency” value, which refers to the ability for BPM to help different stakeholders in the business to better understand and monitor their processes. Once transparency is in place, BPM can deliver value along three axes, each one corresponding to a pair of values. The first axis is the efficiency-quality pair, which captures the tradeoff between fulfilling the needs of the customer effectively (quality) and streamlining the processes to fulfill these needs efficiently (e.g. at minimum cost). The second axis is the agility-compliance pair and captures the dichotomy between being able to rapidly adapt to a changing business environment vs. safeguarding the processes to ensure that they comply with relevant regulations and standards. The final axis (integration-networking pair) captures the dual imperative for organizations to maintain their internal resources and systems well integrated, and to expose these systems optimally to customers and to external parties in order to exploit collaborative business opportunities.

Traditionally, when making a case for BPM, we tend to focus on transparency, quality, efficiency and sometimes compliance. However, the emergence of digital disruptors makes it necessary to re-focus BPM towards adaptability and networking. BPM can significantly enhance the ability for the organization to change continuously and effectively. It also allows organizations to optimize their customers’ experience, to
collaborate with external parties and to become more anticipatory. Successful global and regional retailers are doing just that, for example Walmart, CVS, Amazon and Kogan. Having optimized and computerized their processes along the quality-efficiency axis for years, they have managed to turn them into an asset for enabling adaptability and networking.

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Ian Gotts

Ian is a founder of Q9 Elements, tech advisor, investor, speaker and author.

Q9 Elements is a startup software company. It is looking to disrupt the BPM marketplace and enable clients to deliver huge levels of ROI.

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External stakeholders don’t really care about operational processes. They absolutely don’t care about process analysis. And if you talk about BPM they’ll look straight through you. Never talk to an exec about BPM.

Exec’s care about results. Outcomes. Impact.

Listen to the words they use in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsEALCm3zUU

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Paul Harmon

Paul Harmon is a Co-Founder, Executive Editor, and Senior Market Analyst at Business Process Trends – www.bptrends.com – an internationally popular website that provides a variety of free articles, columns and book reviews each month on trends, directions and best practices in business process management.

Paul Harmon is an acknowledged BPM thought leader who is concerned with applying new technologies and methodologies to real-world business problems. He is a speaker and has developed and delivered executive seminars, workshops, briefings and keynote addresses on all aspects of BPM to conferences and at major organizations throughout the world.

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I’ve rarely seem BPM or process sold by itself. Generally an organization has another problem – it wants to improve sales, or avoid some defective practice, or standardize ERP. Someone from the process area steps forward and says: “I know how to solve this problem!” and proceeds to describe a process-based solution.

Process is all about seeing problems as wholes; its about seeing how diverse groups or activities somehow work together to generate the desired results. Obviously I’m using the term “process” broadly. I don’t mean to suggest that one simply draws flow diagrams, or looks for “waste” that can be eliminated — although those approaches can be valuable in the right circumstances. Instead, I am advocating an attitude or a comprehensive perspective, if you would, that begins with an overview of all of the activities that must be undertaken to deliver value to customers and return on investment to management, and so forth. Once one has a holistic perspective, then one is prepared to begin to see relationships that may not be seen by someone looking at a problem from some more limited perspective. In essence, selling process involves selling a perspective — a way of thinking about business problems.

But, as I’ve already suggested, selling a perspective is hard. It’s better to demonstrate the value of the perspective by showing, in concrete situations, how it can solve problems.

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Sandeep Johal

Sandeep has contributed professionally and academically to Business Process Management for 10 years. He specializes in business process modeling and governance. He currently leads a team of Business Process professionals in the United States.

Sandeep is a BPTrends accredited Business Process Management Professional and has a Master of Business Process Management.

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Here are my thoughts on selling BPM:

Problems and context:

• Selling BPM is difficult
• But without delivering value BPM cannot be sold
• ‘Traditional selling’ techniques have produced limited success
• Needs different thinking to solve issue of selling BPM

General principles, approach & solution:

• Use contemporary ‘inbound’ selling techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbound_marketing
• Offer only value: Less ‘selling’, more ‘benefits’
• ‘Follow up’ and have customers come back to you
• Get people excited about BPM

On-the-ground tactics for selling BPM:

• Involve marketing and communication professionals. This job of selling should not be confined to just BPM professionals.
• Perform a buyer persona analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(user_experience)
• Communicate, communicate, communicate (e.g. create digital watercooler)

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Sandy Kemsley

Sandy is a “technology catalyst” with a 20-year history of software design and systems architecture in several technology areas, combined with a deep understanding of business environments and how technology can impact them.

Sandy blogs about BPM, enterprise architecture and other intersections of business and technology at www.column2.com

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BPM as a management practice provides the benefit of being able to see the end-to-end processes within an organization, to really understand what goes into making the company’s product/service and serving the customer. It allows everyone to understand how their role contributes to that customer journey, which can be a big incentive for workers regardless of their level in the organization.

When you add BPM technologies to that, it brings the ability to automate the tedious parts of the process, such as data entry, which allows workers to focus on more interesting tasks that require their experience and decision-making skills.

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Dr. Mathias Kirchmer

Dr. Kirchmer is a visionary leader, thought leader and innovator in the field of Business Process Management (BPM), combining his broad practical business experience with his extensive academic research. He has added significant value to organizations of various sizes and industries in an international environment.

Dr. Kirchmer remains involved in academia as an affiliated faculty member at University of Pennsylvania, Widener University, Philadelphia University and guest professor at the Universidad de Chile. In 2004, he received a research and teaching fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Dr. Kirchmer has published 6 books and over 120 articles.

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To convince top executives and stakeholders you don’t sell business process management (BPM). Business leaders are normally not interested in methods, tools and approaches. They often don’t even have a clear understanding about the meaning of “business process”. Instead it is much more effective to position and sell the value and outcomes of BPM.
Process management has emerged as the discipline of people and technology-based strategy execution, delivering fast results at a minimal risk level. According to a Gartner Study only 13% of business deliver on their yearly strategic goals, hence for most organizations strategy execution is a real challenge. The BPM-Discipline delivers the transparency required to achieve values like quality and efficiency, agility and compliance, external integration into enterprise networks and internal alignment, innovation and conservation. These are the topics executives are interested in. Once they buy into the outcomes, you can position the BPM-Discipline as the enabler behind those. But remember: you don’t need to explain a person who asks for the time how a watch function.

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Alberto Manuel

Alberto Manuel is an Enterprise Architect at Microsoft. He has over 15 years of experience in design, improvement, adaptation and implementation of business processes, creating a vision and designing frameworks and methods to enterprise transformation, pre-emptying the challenges of organizations.

Alberto is also the chair of the BPM Conference Portugal and Post Graduate on BPM.

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Long were the days were selling BPM was about positioning an automation capability combined with professional services on process redesign. As operational complexity increased, combined with rapid business change, decision makers soon realise that making an investment focused on achieving process automation was not enough.

Selling BPM technology turned into selling solutions that spam out of the typical features a BPM suite offers, independently if a particular vendor is ranked high in advisory reports. In the era of the digital business model, it is necessary to combine Internet of Things, Advanced Analytics or Perceptive Intelligence, just to name a few.

Selling BPM is a journey that must address at least: understand what are the next trends in terms of digital business; to create a script oriented to the personas that will benefit from the proposed digital transformation; mapping how the proposal digital transformation supports enterprise strategy, create a set of future digital scenarios that can be implemented; construct quickly a prototype and demonstrate that the new business model can be supported by the envisioned solution.

Selling BPM is not anymore about conning a customer on making an investment decision in technology, it is able to demonstrate the ability to transform an enterprise.

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Derek Miers

Derek is a principal at Structure Talent Ltd and has 20+ years of experience as an industry analyst.

Derek focuses on the methods, approaches, frameworks, techniques, and technologies of business architecture, transformation and target operating models. His deep competence is around BPM; business process improvement; and organisational change. He places a special emphasis on an outside-in, outcome-based, customer-focused approach. His engagements usually focus on helping major organisations charter and establish their change programs, ensuring the change has the best chance of success.

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Do you want to learn more about creating engagement? Check our awesome blog post by Derek about Co-Creation!

As regards the main question – you make an assumption that BPM is the answer rather than a way of achieving the organisational goal. All projects are business projects. Just like the phrase “Transformation Project” is an oxymoron … the real challenge is not the technology or selling BPM Suites, or any of the technological issues … the real challenge is engaging the people to make it their own. BPM becomes how they go about it, building the business case, etc. becomes a whole order of magnitude easier when you focus on the why rather than the how.

In the end, people don’t come to work for the beautiful efficiency of the operations resident in the organisation – they come to work for the outcomes and value they deliver to their customers. Starting with the efficiency angle is a sure way of killing your BPM initiative before it gets started. Sure the CFO probably wants to reduce the risk and lower the costs of business, but the customer doesn’t care (as long as the cost of the service or product is appropriate).

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Connie Moore

As Senior Vice President of Research at Digital Clarity Group, Connie has unparalleled experience working with senior executives in business and IT, technology marketing, and government, from SMEs to large enterprises throughout the globe. She has managed international teams of analysts focused on a wide range of technologies such as social and collaboration, content management, business analytics, business software (e.g. ERP, CRM, HCM), and BPM suites. Her research encompasses business transformation, business process management, customer experience management, information management, the future of work, new business models and organizational change management. Connie is highly sought as a keynote speaker and conference chair on five continents. This year, she was honored by her peer group for thought leadership in business process transformation, adaptive case management and BPM software when she received the highly coveted Marvin Manheim Award from the Workflow and Reengineering Association (WARIA).

Prior to DCG, Connie was a Vice President, Principal Analyst and Research Director at Forrester Research for more than 20 years, where she pioneered new data-driven research on global Bring Your Own Technology trends, forecasted and defined the next generation of business suites, and drove innovative dialog among marketing, business process and IT senior executives about how to succeed at large-scale business transformation.

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All too often BPM is positioned as way to achieve greater operational efficiency and effectiveness. While this is important and can deliver substantial benefits, business processes must always start with a customer—who usually needs and expects much more than efficiency and effectiveness. When firms focus on their customers’ expectations and try to delight customers by building great experiences into the entire end-to-end process, the business is transformed. Whether firms start with the inside process and work toward the outside process, or flip it around and start with the outside process and work toward the inside process, truly great business results are driven by an outside/inside approach.
[Excerpt from the report “Transform Customer Experience and Operational Excellence By Going Digital Outside and Inside. Learn more and download free report here]

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Adrian Reed

Adrian Reed is a true advocate of the analysis profession. In his day job, he acts as Principal Consultant and Director at Blackmetric Business Solutions where he provides business analysis consultancy and training solutions to a range of clients in varying industries. Adrian is President of the UK chapter of the IIBA and he speaks internationally on topics relating to business analysis and business change. You can read Adrian’s blog at http://www.adrianreed.co.uk and follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/UKAdrianReed.

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This is a very thought provoking question, thanks so much for inviting me to be a part of this post! Being the ‘cheeky’ British person that I am, I think the first thing we need to do is re-define the question. So often, when trying to build buy-in, we focus on what it is that we are doing or what we want to be done. This might be BPM, or business analysis, process improvement and so on. Yet really, what people buy is results and outcomes. So the question I would ask is not “how can we sell BPM” but “what outcomes are our stakeholders trying to achieve, and how will BPM help them to achieve it”.

There are many examples of valuable outcomes I could give here — the ability to understand how the ‘work works’, the ability to drill down and diagnose problems and impact assess changes, the ability to be responsive to change etc — but when ‘selling’ BPM to our stakeholders it is important to start with the stakeholder first. What interests them? What makes them tick? And how can we work with them to co-create value. By creating what we do, to the tangible and intangible things that they care about, we are able to create a compelling case and a proposal that they can say “yes” to.

In summary: Stakeholder value first, approach and techniques second!

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Pedro Robledo

One of the most influential Spanish thought leader in Process Management using BPM, as for +15 years he has been dedicated to promote industry awareness of Business Process Management in Spain and Latin America. Director and Professor of BPM Master in UNIR. BPM Interim Manager for helping Organizations in its BPM and Digital Transformation initiatives. International Speaker about BPM. Since 2013 participates as jury of the WfMC Awards for Excellence in BPM and Workflow. He writes about BPM and Digital Transformation in his blog: El Libro Blanco Sobre La Gestión de Procesos.

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When someone wants to provide arguments in order to sell BPM to the organization, focusing on the business benefits rather than technology is crucial and of utmost importance. If your focus is to explain BPM technology, they will think on an application and they will not understand what is BPM, so you will not succeed. My recommendation is not to list all generic arguments of BPM’s benefits for Business and IT. Please pay your attention to important needs that the Organization has to give an answer. For instance, companies must comply with rules, external laws, standards, operating rules… and BPM can ensure that the processes comply now continue to meet in the future. Another example, companies need to be oriented to customer, more than ever, so they will have to review their customer journeys or they need to start a digital transformation, and these projects will require a new value chain to produce the new range of products and services to meet the new business models, so they will have to review all current end-to-end processes to make the necessary changes to get the digital transformation or get the satisfaction of the customers. Another beginning could be to focus on concrete objectives, for example, to get full traceability of activities offering an absolute control of what is happening and want to happen in a specific process; or to improve the performance of a identified process who needs to save costs (time, resources, money) to achieve a desired strategic objective; or they have an integration requirement to link different independent applications together…

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Alexander Samarin

Alexander Samarin is an Architect for Achieving the Synergy between Strategy, Good Business Practices and Disruptive Digital Technologies

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Management by processes is not rocket science – we deal with a completely engineered system that does not have to obey the ruthless laws of nature. The necessary tools and technologies are available. The main limiting factor is the human factor.
Any enterprise BPM is, by definition, a socio-technical system. This type of system is designed for large audiences, but such systems are often built by someone who is not a user of the system. The book “The art of systems architecting” gives us a few good tips about the problems relating to socio-technical systems. One tip relates to the “motivation” insight – when there is a change, the question should be asked as to who benefits, who pays, who provides, who loses? In other words, watch out for tension amongst the stakeholders.

Another tip relates to another important fact – it is not the facts but the perception that counts. As a result, the most important heuristic for designing a socio-technical system, and sometimes a bitter lesson, is “How you do something may be more important than what you do”.
In general, the main area of contention is between the business units (potential users of the enterprise BPM) and the IT unit (the provider of the enterprise BPM). Reduction of this tension requires a lot of energy from the chief architect of the enterprise BPM, who has to obtain the confidence of the business staff (he/she should be the users’ agent/advocate) and to demonstrate in-depth understanding of the IT (he/she should be a helpful resource for the IT staff). Where the IT staff talks 95 % IT and only 5 % business, the chief architect of the enterprise BPM has to achieve a 50 %-50 % balance.

The concerns of the various stakeholders must be investigated and properly addressed. The IT manager is concerned about business continuity, e.g. what is the maintenance cost? The business process owners’ main concern is how quickly a new system can be adapted for new business practices, procedures, etc. Will each adaptation require significant resources from the IT unit or a third party? Can some work be delegated to the business staff members? Can the business staff members manage the evolution of the application without the systematic involvement of the IT unit? The business staff must feel “ownership” of the new system. The best way to address these concerns is to build a system for the users, via small incremental steps and at the users’ pace.

All users are important since they are the business process participants; some will probably be “super-users”. Their perception of a new system is important. The chief architect of the enterprise BPM may hear things like “I like this set of colours” or “My son implemented a similar program in PHP – can’t you just deploy it?”. To ensure that their perception is healthy, visit the users frequently and systematically. The chief architect of the enterprise BPM needs to know his/her users and understand their work to be able to respond to their needs. Also, he/she needs to be prepared that other stakeholders may actively prevent him/her from visiting the users!

Fortunately, our experience has shown that only about 10 % of the people within an enterprise are really opposed to change, and the others may need some teaching, training or coaching. It is typical that different people see different parts of the “big picture”, use different (inconsistent) terminology, approach new challenges with inadequate techniques, and are confused about which tools should be used for which job.

A potential way to sell BPM is to explain to everyone in an enterprise how the following BPM benefits ( see http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.ch/2014/05/ideas-for-bpmshift-delenda-est-vendor_9.html ) will address his/her concerns and how his/her current working practices will be changed for the better.

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Ivan Seselj

Ivan Seselj is founder and CEO of Promapp, a global provider of business process management software and a Deloitte Technology Asia Pacific Fast 500 company. Leveraging his finance and internal audit background, and 10+ years’ experience in business process improvement roles across a diverse range of organisations and industries, Ivan founded Promapp in 2002. Today, he manages the rapidly growing business as CEO. With his experience and passion for helping teams engage and improve their business processes and performance, Ivan has helped hundreds of companies around the world develop and foster a positive improvement culture.

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Sell the problem and the opportunity and connect it back to the business strategy

Everyone needs to understand that improving processes isn’t just about creating new flowcharts and Word documents; it’s about improving the consistency and quality of execution, increasing efficiency, and facilitating innovation within your organization. They’re the guidelines and workflows that, when managed effectively, can define and improve how your company operates, from the C-Suite to the server room.

Get your leaders on board right from the beginning by proving there is an issue that needs addressing – take advantage of a bad situation if necessary to introduce a new way of thinking. Use numbers and evidence gathered from sources such as customer feedback or employee surveys to convince the executive team it’s time to take action. Then assign a Chief Process Officer the responsibility as figurehead to communicate the process vision to the organisation. Process improvement should always be linked to strategy and your long-term goals though – if it’s just about putting out fires, it’s not going to make much of a long-term impact on your business.

Drive organization-wide engagement

Once you’ve gained that initial buy-in, driving organization-wide engagement can still be a challenge.

There is an essential role to be played by the executive team, who must communicate the importance of process management activity. Visible leadership is critical – the leadership team must clearly and regularly express their belief in the impact process excellence efforts will have on the organization’s long-term strategy and success – and in the role everyone in the organization plays in these efforts. When it comes to engaging teams in BPM as a way of thinking and creating value, it’s got to be easy and it’s got to be a part of the culture of the organization.

Businesses in virtually every industry wrestle with how to engage teams in business process improvement efforts. The good news is that driving engagement with process improvement is not impossible. In fact, a recent survey of more than 300 process improvement professionals across the Promapp client base revealed a number of ideas – from simple communication to system integration – that have proven it is possible for teams to not only to be engaged, but excited about process improvement.

My favourite ideas were:
Leadership. There is a lot to be said for senior management buy-in, but you also need ‘bulldogs’ on the ground to lead the charge for process improvement. It is important not just to involve the organization’s leadership team in process improvement communications, but to make sure their support is visible to the entire operation. It also helps to build up a strong champion or super-user network so that momentum can be maintained in all areas of the business

Collaboration. Process improvement is a team effort so it is essential to let everyone know “we’re in this together.” Businesses might consider holding process improvement brainstorming sessions to get teams thinking outside the box about process improvement. These sessions can also serve as an opportunity to work through process pain points together in order to jointly come up with the best improvement ideas.

Accountability. Giving staff the autonomy and resources needed to map, review, and ultimately own their own processes and improvement ideas will have a major impact on process engagement. To empower staff to be accountable, many organizations have set up a dedicated time slot for completing process related tasks. Some businesses also provide guidelines for dealing with feedback/improvement suggestions including suggested response times.

Daily Integration. Embedding process information into daily activities and other business systems (e.g. the company intranet) will drive employee engagement. Some businesses are now hosting essential documents that everyone needs to access only in their business process management tool to drive usage. Other organizations tie process into personal and team performance outcomes/expectations including KPIs, job descriptions, and personal development programs.

Bribery. Let’s face it – everyone is susceptible to a little bribery. If all else fails, a small incentive may be all it takes to drive motivation and participation. To encourage staff, some companies have instituted process improvement incentives, such as pizza or ice cream parties, movie ticket giveaways or, in some cases, cash bonuses.

View the full list here

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Alec Sharp

Alec Sharp has managed his consulting and education business, Clariteq Systems Consulting Ltd., for over 35 years. Serving clients from Ireland to India, and Washington to Wellington, Alec’s expertise includes facilitation, strategy development, business analysis, data management, and, of course, business process change. In addition to an active consulting practice that keeps him up-to-date on real world issues, he conducts top-rated workshops and conference presentations on these topics globally – on five continents last year alone! Alec is the author of “Workflow Modeling, second edition” (Artech House, 2009) which is widely used as a consulting guide and MBA text, and is a best-seller in the Business Process Management field with a “5 star” Amazon.com rating. He was also the sole recipient of DAMA’s 2010 Professional Achievement Award, a global award for contributions to the Data Management field.

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I do several briefings per year, at organisations around the globe, where my client’s objective is to have me “sell” their leadership on Business Process Management or Process-Based Management or whatever it’s called at their organisation. How I approach these briefings is driven in large part by a conscious decision I made 25 or 30 years ago, much earlier in my consulting career.
That decision? Eliminate the terms “convince” and “sell” from my consulting vocabulary and shift my thinking to “demonstrate.” I’m not sure how it happened, but after just a few years of being on my own as a consultant specializing in data modelling and data management, I ended up facilitating a lot of strategic planning sessions with executives, and doing various presentations for them. An early lesson, accompanied by some pain (as the best lessons often are) was that executives would rather be informed than be lectured to or pitched to. (The same is true for most everyone else, too.) I’m pretty sure one reason my briefings go well is that I never try to sell BPM or convince the execs they’re missing the boat if they don’t get into it. If you begin by thinking “How do I convince the executives of the value of BPM?” or “How do I sell BPM to the enterprise?” you’re likely starting off on the back foot. It’s better to think “How do I demonstrate the value of XYZ to the executives, and what can I tell them that will be interesting and informative?”
Besides, you’re probably not going to impress anyone with assertions that business processes are critical to:
1. Reducing costs and increasing efficiency (The perennial #1 BPM selling point) 

2. Improving customer service 

3. Increasing responsiveness, agility, and the ever-popular innovation) 

4. Ensuring regulatory compliance 

Of course, those are all true – attention to business processes can have a profound impact on those topics. However, every other approach, from Employee Engagement Surveys and Organisational Development to Mobility and Big Data, is making the same claims, so no one will believe you anyway. Keep one of my favorite tag lines in mind – “Don’t preach, don’t overreach.”
Instead, what I cover in a briefing covers three to five points that executives consistently find interesting, and which consistently stimulate discussion and interest. And that is what you really want to achieve – stimulate interest, and be prepared to follow up and follow through.
The points I cover were detailed in my January 2014 column at BPTrends.com – “Now’s Your Chance – What to Cover in an Executive Briefing on Business Processes.” It was probably the most popular column I ever wrote, so check it out at http://bit.ly/2dg9296
Two final ideas:
1. The first point I cover is always about getting clarity on what is meant by a “business process.” Practitioners often make the mistake of assuming everyone “knows” what a “business process” is (they don’t,) or providing a useless definition (“… a set of activities delivering value to stakeholders…”) that fail to clarify the concept of “end-to-end, cross-functional, business processes” which, ultimately, is what generated all the interest in business processes in the first place. To the first point, I often find upwards of 80 or 90% of people equate “process” with “procedure,” and we must demonstrate that a single, end-to-end process might incorporate scores of procedures. Remember another favourite tag line – “business process is a concept that can’t be defined, only demonstrated.”
2. There is often a lot of sensitivity, even antipathy, to the term “business process.” This is especially true in what I call the “mission-driven” fields – higher education, justice, health care, social services, and a few others. In these fields, “process” is seen as an imposition from uncaring bureaucrats, and “business” is a dirty word. I’ll often simply talk about “what we do and how we do it.” In a similar vein, I never use the popular “input – process – output” framework. If I do, for instance when talking to a medical doctor, they’ll think it smacks of manufacturing (which it does) and will start actively resisting. Instead, the main framework I use is “trigger – activity – results,” which is received much more favourably. The complete framework, by the way, to describe the nature and scope of a process is what I call “TRAC” –
• Triggering event
• Results (for each stakeholder)
• main Activities (or phases or milestones or subprocesses)
• Cases or variations
TRAC is covered in another of my BPTrends columns on “Scoping Models.”

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Jim Sinur

Jim Sinur is an independent thought leader in applying business process management (BPM) to innovative digital organizations. His research and areas of personal experience focus on business process innovation, business modeling, business process management technology (iBPMS), process collaboration for knowledge workers, process intelligence/optimization, business policy/rule management (BRMS), and leveraging business applications in processes. Jim is also one of the authors of BPM: The Next Wave. His latest book is Digital Transformation. Innovate or Die Slowly.

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There are any number of ways to sell BPM to management, but I have found that linking BPM to something management has on its’ plate as a challenge is the best way. If it’s a better user experience, show that BPM can help by surrounding old transactions. If it’s better revenue opportunities by attracting and new prospects, leverage BPM to show customer journeys that would attract. If it’s operational improvement, use BPM dashboards and process intelligence to show opportunities for improvement. If it is governance monitoring and enforcement, show management how BPM can be leveraged to watch and guide the right behavior. After the first success, incrementally use it in a larger context or for a more complex problem. I have seen this approach work where there is little executive vision and support to win to live another day until an executive gets how BPM is beneficial and reliable for fast changing conditions.

If you are lucky enough to have a high level visionary, then ask that visionary for a chance to educate the rest of the folks and start with a meatier and larger scoped effort. Back this visionary with education, usually from an outside source, and great results. If the rest of the executive team rejects the idea, then make the visionary a hero with a set of projects that has significant impact. This works as well, but the risk level is higher. A digital transformation program is an ideal umbrella cover for BPM.

Bottom Line:
There are many ways of winning management, despite swimming upstream with political debris floating your way. If you can find a visionary, leverage that situation otherwise, win each little battle until it delivers an overall victory. Keep in mind that there are many process and case types and apply the right process style to the right problem. BPM supports easy to use and change delivery that can be leveraged quickly to show the change resistant that BPM works. Sandboxing and incremental delivery seems to help either a bottom up or a top down BPM effort. I have personally used both in each kind of BPM program. Good BPMing!

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Andrew Spanyi

Andrew Spanyi coaches Process Owners and provides guidance on centers of excellence (CoE). Andrew’s contribution to process management is recognized internationally. He is a sought after keynote speaker and has delivered speeches and workshops in more than 10 countries around the world and has published articles in a broad range of print and electronic media magazines.

He is a member of the Board of Advisors at the Association of Business Process Professionals and is a frequent contributor and an instructor at the BPM Institute. Andrew has served clients in industries such as aerospace, banking, government, insurance, petro-chemical, pharmaceutical, and telecommunications.

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To effectively sell Business Process Management in an organization, it’s important to understand the needs of the various stakeholder groups and how BPM can help address the problems they wish to address. For example, executives might be interested in improving “perfect order” performance as that directly impacts customer experience and customer loyalty. In this instance, the case for BPM needs to be made with specific reference to how BPM can address the “perfect order” challenge.* Alternatively, the company leadership may be concerned about the time it takes to develop and introduce new products. In this instance, the case for BPM needs to be made with specific reference to how BPM can address the “new product development” challenge. It’s equally important to address the needs of employees and illustrate how BPM can help make their jobs easier and how BPM can help employees better serve customers – all the while maintaining focus on the business issue that needs to be addressed.

* “Perfect order” has been defined by the Supply Chain council as the percentage of orders delivered to the right place, with the right product, at the right time, in the right condition, with the right documentation.

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John Tesmer

As director of the group responsible for managing APQC’s Open Standards Benchmarking® database and the Process Classification Framework®, John Tesmer coordinates benchmarking projects and is responsible for innovation in benchmarking processes and development of APQC’s various process classification frameworks. John has led the development of APQC’s benchmarking tools, including the benchmarking portal, the Benchmarks on Demand service, and the ongoing development of APQC’s Process Classification Framework to help users accelerate benchmarking, content management, and defining of business processes.

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If you’re selling process management, you’re doing it wrong. You need to be selling “better customer experiences” and “increased agility to predict and accommodate customer needs”. Successful enterprises do this by giving everyone perfect information about their process environments. This means clear traceability in the environment in which work is done. Traceability is understanding what processes are executed by which systems, managed by which people against which specific business rules to deliver specific customer value. Can you answer those questions quickly and completely?

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Steve Towers

Steve Towers is a seasoned practitioner with 35+ years of hands-on experience in Business Process Management, Customer Experience Management, OutsideIn & the High Performance Organization. He leads the Professional network within the BP Group.

As co-founder of www.bpgroup.org in 1992 Steve developed the world’s first and premier network for Business Process Management & Performance professionals.

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You know after 25 years of BPM I have come to a conclusion. We have got to stop calling it Business Process Management as that sends a chill down the backs of most ‘C’ Level Executives. We have to talk their language for a change and relate what we are trying to achieve in that context. It isn’t about abandoning BPM; it is about liberating it to the top level.

For instance, the next time you are in front of the firing squad (sorry the top team) make sure you have done your homework. What is the burning platform this year? What does our organisation need to deliver to thrive? What is the biggest challenge we have to overcome? With those things in mind, BPM becomes the means to that end. But don’t label yourself as just another method, demonstrate through the logic that you can achieve objective ABC within a short time frame with a proven pragmatic approach.

After all isn’t that we have always been trying to do? Get BPM on the top table and deliver results? Good luck.

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Roger Tregear

Roger Tregear is a Consulting Director with Leonardo Consulting. He delivers BPM education and consulting assignments worldwide. Based in Canberra (Australia), Roger spends his working life talking, consulting, thinking and writing about the analysis, improvement, innovation and management of business processes. He works around the world, especially in Australia, New Zealand, U.S.A., India, Saudi Arabia and other Arab States. He is a regular columnist for BPTrends, author of Practical Process (2013), co-author of Establishing the Office of Business Process Management (2011), and edited the recent book Questioning BPM? with Paul Harmon. A new book, Reimagining Management, will be published later this year.

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Analyze stakeholders
You’ve just left the room where BPM was accepted. Everyone is happy and your budget and plans are approved. Who was in the room? What did they buy? Why did they buy it? Sell to each decision maker, not just one organization. Analyze the stakeholders.

Overcome objections
Four reasons for hesitation to adopt BPM, hence objections to be dealt with, are:
• lack of knowledge
• lack of compelling reasons
• lack of urgency
• lack of insight.

Lack of knowledge: The simplest reason is absent or faulty knowledge about the process view. To be valued, BPM needs a clear, agreed, and pragmatic definition of both the theory and the practice. Build knowledge, demonstrate success.

Lack of compelling reasons: Knowledge alone is not enough. Organizations, and their people, don’t change easily, and need to understand the compelling reasons for embarking on the BPM journey. Discover the compelling reasons.

Lack of urgency: The most matter-of-fact reason could be that the urgent displaces the important. Dealing immediately urgent demands leaves little space for contemplating longer-term change. Amplify the urgency.

Lack of insight: Organizations like continuous improvement but not the obverse, continuous problem-finding. Defining ‘good management’ as risk and error free creates a blinkered view favouring the organization chart over the process architecture, missing a vital management insight. Remove the blinkers.

Expose the costs of inaction
Failure to implement BPM has many costs.
The most obvious is the cost of not fixing problems: reducing customer support, rework, inefficiencies, and staff disengagement—a general lessening of efficiency.
Beyond fixing problems, a bigger cost will be opportunities missed. Without a systematic effort to find them, opportunities to improve process performance go unnoticed.
Recent Gallup* survey data shows that only 32% of US employees are ‘engaged’ at work. Such a waste! What if the un-engaged 68% were motivated to continuously improve processes?

Conclusion
To close the BPM sale:
• know stakeholders
• explain the process view
• find compelling reasons
• amplify urgency
• remove blinkers
• expose costs.
[Extracted from the book, Reimagining Management, by Roger Tregear to be published in October 2016]

* Gallup. 2016. ‘Employee Engagement in U.S. Stagnant in 2015.’ Accessed September 26, 2016. http://www.gallup.com/poll/188144/employee-engagement-stagnant-2015.aspx.

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Neil Ward-Dutton

Neil Ward-Dutton is MWD Advisors’ co-founder and Research Director, and is one of Europe’s most experienced and high-profile strategic business-technology advisors and industry analysts. His areas of expertise include digital transformation, business process management (BPM), enterprise architecture (EA) and IT strategy.

Neil acts as an advisor to large European organizations across industries and sectors as diverse as financial services, retail, utilities and government – as well as providing advice to a number of leading technology vendors.

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Know your business target and tailor your message. Centralised operations, architecture etc groups may be very open to the idea of improving and managing processes as a general concept; line-of-business groups (teams in sales, marketing etc) are more likely to be engaged not by general ideas (‘we can help you manage your processes’) but specific examples (‘I think we can help you onboard customers more quickly’).

There are multiple aspects of value you can sell. Efficiency is the obvious outcome to focus on; but business scalability is another angle that can work well. So for example, getting a set of business processes under management might enable a group to open up new retail locations more quickly, bring new products to market more quickly.

Tie BPM into the goals of digital transformation programs (this works particularly well if you are looking at the technology / process application development side of BPM). Digital transformation really requires a platform that has three characteristics: it enables fast, agile business change; it helps different business functions and teams share information and co-ordinate their work; and it’s instrumented, so teams can use a test-and-learn approach to understand how to improve quickly. Good BPM technology platforms provide capabilities in all these areas.

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Listen to the interview with John Tesmer, Jeff Varney and Holly Lyke-Ho-Gland from APQC where they tell about the PCF – most popular process framework in the world and the best practices of building the process architecture.

Interview

Quotes

“Adopt, than adapt”

“We have elements in the framework to represent everything an organization needs to do”

“The critical aspect is balance across those 7 tenets [of BPM]”

“Avoid the flavor of the month, big bang approach and go after a slow steady application of a structured approach”

“I would suggest to the new BPM practitioners to avoid thinking about the easy things and start thinking about the hard things”

“Don’t underestimate how much do you need to engage your frontline workers”

Resources mentioned in this episode

APQC Blog www.apqc.org/blog
APQC’s Seven Tenets of Process Management Interactive Framework www.apqc.org/knowledge-base/documents/apqcs-seven-tenets-process-managementinteractive-framework
Seven Tenets of BPM www.apqc.org/knowledge-base/documents/apqcs-seven-tenetsprocess-management
Improving Process Management Maturity: The Role of the Seven Tenets of Process Management www.apqc.org/knowledge-base/documents/improving-process-management-maturity-roleseven-tenets-process-management
APQC’s Process Classification Framework www.apqc.org/pcf
2015 Putting the PCF into Action www.apqc.org/knowledge-base/collections/2015-puttingpcf-action-collection

About APQC

APQC is member-based non-profit and one of the world’s largest proponents of business benchmarking, best practices and knowledge management research. APQC’s Process Classification Framework (PCF) is the most used process framework in the world.

Social Links

Holly Lyke-Ho-Gland https://www.apqc.org/holly-lyke-ho-gland

John Tesmer https://www.apqc.org/john-tesmer

Jeff Varney https://www.apqc.org/jeff-varney-pmp

Additional info

Make sure to sign up for the webinar “What’s Keeping Your Peers Up at Night? 2016’s Top Process Challenges!” on Jan 21th by Holly Lyke-Ho-Gland.

Listen to the interview with Professor Marcello La Rosa where he shares some of the best practices of building the process architecture that were covered in his very popular book and MOOC course.

Interview

Quotes

“organizations start from the misconception that they operate in a totally unique way different than any other organization”

“build the process architecture incrementally starting from the high level picture”

“a process architecture should never be built from scratch”

“strike the right balance between the number of processes and the scope of each individual process”

“if the scope of the process is too small, any improvement on this process would have limited impact”

“BPM is not about a single project”

“we should understand the role that people and organizational culture play for BPM success”

Resources mentioned in this episode

“Fundamentals of Business Process Management” – first comprehensive textbook for BPM http://fundamentals-of-bpm.org
“Fundamentals of BPM” MOOC http://moocs.qut.edu.au
QUT BPM Discipline http://bpm-research-group.org
QUT Information Systems School https://www.qut.edu.au/science-engineering/our-schools/school-of-information-systems
Professor Marcello La Rosa website http://www.marcellolarosa.com/

About Marcello La Rosa

Professor Marcello La Rosa is the academic director for corporate programs and partnerships at the Information Systems school of the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia. His research interests span different BPM areas, including process consolidation, mining and automation, in which he published over 80 papers.

He leads the Apromore initiative (www.apromore.org) – a strategic collaboration between various universities for the development of an advanced process model repository, and coordinates QUT’s professional training program on BPM (www.bpm-training.com).

Marcello has taught BPM to practitioners and students in Australia for over ten years. Based on this experience, he co-authored “Fundamentals of Business Process Management” – the first, comprehensive textbook on BPM, which has influenced the curriculum of over 100 universities in the world. Recently, using this book he co-developed a MOOC on BPM, which attracted over 7,000 participants.

Social Links

Twitter

LinkedIn

Additional info

Make sure to check also predictions about BPM skills in 2016 by Marcello La Rosa

Next edition of the BPM MOOC is planned for second half of 2016. You can check the exact dates on http://moocs.qut.edu.au or subscribe to my newsletter for updates.

Listen to the interview with BPM thought leader Roger Burlton to learn the best practices of building the process architecture.

If you want to learn more about the process architecture sign up for the free BPM EE Online Summit where I will be presenting about this topic.

Interview

Quotes

“The true business processes are end to end. They start with the outside world and go back to the outside world.” Click to tweet

“Our customers really wouldn’t care less about our org chart.” Click to tweet

“The one thing that holds everything together in business architecture is the business process architecture.” Click to tweet

“Hope is not a strategy” Click to tweet

Resources mentioned in this episode

BP Trends – monthly updates http://www.bptrends.com/join/

Business Architecture Essentials: The Business Architecture Landscape http://www.bptrends.com/business-architecture-essentials-the-business-architecture-landscape/

Business Process Change http://www.amazon.com/Business-Process-Change-Third-Press/

Business Process Manifesto http://www.bptrends.com/resources/bp-manifesto/

Business Process Management: Profiting From Process http://www.amazon.com/Business-Process-Management-Profiting

Process Renewal Group http://www.processrenewal.com/

About Roger Burlton

Roger is the president of Process Renewal Consulting Group Inc. He is also co-founder of BPTrends Associates; the services firm of the world-leading BPTrends.com knowledge portal. He started the pioneering Process Renewal Group (PRG) in 1993 and was at the forefront of process-centric ways of running businesses.

He is regarded globally as a thought leader and dynamic practitioner who brings reason, clarity, and practicality to complex business architecture and business change.

Roger’s insights can be found in his acclaimed book: Business Process Management: Profiting from Process, the Business Process Manifesto, the Handbook on Business Process Management and numerous other publications including his articles featured on BPTrends.com.

Roger chairs several of the largest and most influential BPM conferences in the world and is a sought after speaker dealing with the tough issues of business change in a thought provoking and entertaining manner.

Social Links

Follow Roger on Twitter

Roger’s LinkedIn profile