Digital Transformation | BPM Tips

Practical Business Process Modeling and Analysis available for preorder

Zbigniew — Tue, 29 Apr 2025 17:16:19 +0000

As you may have heard in the recent episode of the What’s your baseline podcast, I am honored to co-author a new book with BJ Biernatowski and Jim Sinur, which will be published soon. You can already pre-order it on Amazon and the Packt website.

What to expect from this book? Let’s start with a brief excerpt from the description:

“Every business transformation begins with a question: How can we do this better? Whether it’s eliminating inefficiencies, optimizing business operations, automating repetitive tasks, or reimagining entire workflows with the help of AI, success depends on understanding and optimizing business processes.”

Inside the book you will find 10+ chapters covering various aspects of practical business process modeling and analysis. You will find there insights about the role of process modeling and BPM in digital transformation initiatives, the use of process architecture, BPMN, measuring the value of the process transformation, and much more!

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Back to school 2021 – free online courses for BPM professionals (and not only)

Zbigniew — Tue, 31 Aug 2021 17:56:49 +0000

Do you want to sharpen your BPM skills and learn something new? This post is for you!

Below you can find list of free courses and trainings based on past editions of this post (in case you are curious here are the links: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015).

Let’s start with the gold standard of BPM courses

1) Fundamentals of BPM

Since some time 2 MOOCs by professors Marcello La Rosa, Marlon Dumas, Jan Mendling and Hajo A. Reijers are no longer available on Future Learn and QUT platforms, BUT:

a) You can access all the videos via Fundamentals of BPM website (there are also slides and other materials!): http://fundamentals-of-bpm.org/mooc/

b) You can also jump directly to YT playlists for those 2 courses
Introductory MOOC: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9iw99lS3PrhyvCeigicFy0ncMOimILeX

Long MOOC: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9iw99lS3Prg0hPSCiOz9AXeEmj8W8fL8

c) Professor La Rosa kindly allowed me to present this content in a form more convenient for you.

Materials from a short introductory MOOC, “Business Process Management: An Introduction to Process Thinking“:

Business Process Management: An Introduction to Process Thinking – Week 1

Business Process Management: An Introduction to Process Thinking – Week 2

Business Process Management: An Introduction to Process Thinking – Week 3

Materials from the long MOOC “Fundamentals of BPM”:

Part 1: Process identification and discovery
Interviews

Introduction to BPM

Process Identification

Essential Process Modeling

Advanced Process Modeling

Part 2: Process analysis and redesign
Qualitative process analysis

Quantitative Process Analysis

Process Redesign

Part 3: Process implementation and monitoring
Process-Aware Information Systems

Process Implementation with Executable Process Models

Process Monitoring & Closing

Below you can find more courses and training videos organized by the platform.

2) Coursera

If you like to learn on the go you will appreciate nice mobile application Coursera offers. Most of the courses are by default paid ones (with access to all the content, possibility to check yourself and interact fully with others plus get a certificate), but you can always select the free path (called “Audit the course”) and access all the videos plus some of the course content. Courses on Coursera are MOOCs, so they have start and end dates, but you can switch sessions if you are falling behind (you may need it since they all start on the same date…).

2a) “Design Thinking for Innovation” (https://www.coursera.org/learn/uva-darden-design-thinking-innovation)

Course description: “Today innovation is everyone’s business. Whether you are a manager in a global corporation, an entrepreneur starting up, in a government role, or a teacher in an elementary school, everyone is expected to get lean – to do better with less. And that is why we all need design thinking. At every level in every kind of organization, design thinking provides the tools you need to become an innovative thinker and uncover creative opportunities that are there – you’re just not seeing them yet.”
Created by: University of Virginia
Taught by: Jeanne M. Liedtka

2b) “Digital Transformation” (https://www.coursera.org/learn/bcg-uva-darden-digital-transformation)

Course description: “Digital transformation is a hot topic–but what exactly is it and what does it mean for companies? In this course, we talk about digital transformation in two ways. First we discuss the pace of change and the imperative it creates for businesses. Next we provide the context for this transformation and what it takes to win in the digital age. Then we walk through BCG’s proprietary framework, which helps you identify key areas to digitize, including strategy, core processes, and technology.”
Created by: BCG, University of Virginia
Taught by: Michael Lenox, Amane Dannouni, Sonja Rueger, Ching Fong Ong

2c) “Introduction to Operations Management” (https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-operations)

Course description: “Learn to analyze and improve business processes in services or in manufacturing by learning how to increase productivity and deliver higher quality standards. Key concepts include process analysis, bottlenecks, flows rates, and inventory levels, and more. After successfully completing this course, you can apply these skills to a real-world business challenge as part of the Wharton Business Foundations Specialization.”
Created by: University of Pennsylvania
Taught by: Christian Terwiesch

2d) “Process Mining: Data science in Action” (https://www.coursera.org/learn/process-mining)

Course description: “Process mining is the missing link between model-based process analysis and data-oriented analysis techniques. Through concrete data sets and easy to use software the course provides data science knowledge that can be applied directly to analyze and improve processes in a variety of domains.”
Created by: Eindhoven University of Technology
Taught by: Wil van der Aalst

2e) “Six Sigma Principles” (https://www.coursera.org/learn/six-sigma-principles)

Course description: “This course is for you if you are looking to learn more about Six Sigma or refresh your knowledge of the basic components of Six Sigma and Lean. Six Sigma skills are widely sought by employers both nationally and internationally. These skills have been proven to help improve business processes and performance. This course will introduce you to the purpose of Six Sigma and its value to an organization. You will learn about the basic principles of Six Sigma and Lean. Your instructors will introduce you to, and have you apply, some of the tools and metrics that are critical components of Six Sigma. This course will provide you with the basic knowledge of the principles, roles, and responsibilities of Six Sigma and Lean.”
Created by: University System of Georgia
Taught by: Bill Bailey, Gregory Wiles, David Cook, Christina Scherrer

2f) “The hidden value – Lean in manufacturing and services” (https://www.coursera.org/learn/lean-manufacturing-services)

Course description: “Lean is a powerful methodology that enables managers and employees to shift their mindset and helps companies to keep their business sustainable by creating competitive advantage. Today, in an increasingly complex and dynamic world, where companies struggle to maintain competitive advantage, Lean is more important than ever.”
Created by: École des Ponts ParisTech, BCG
Taught by: Aurélie Delemarle, Thomas Frost, Salvatore Cali, Elsa Blume

3) OpenHPI

This is an e-learning platform offered by German Hasso Plattner Institute. It offers a mix of MOOC and on demand courses (i.e. archives of past editions). Many courses are available for free (but you can also find some paid courses like e.g. HPI Academy: Strategic Design Thinking For Every Day – Winter 2021). Mobile application is available.

3a) “BPMN Meets DMN: Business Process and Decision Modeling” (https://open.hpi.de/courses/bpm2016)

As you can see from the URL this is a self-paced course based on a MOOC from 2016.
Course description: “This course introduces concepts of business process modeling using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) industry standard. Participants will learn the elements of process models and their precise meaning. Based on a thorough understanding of business process models, the last part of the course covers decision models using the Decision Model and Notation (DMN). Decision models complement process models by representing concrete, operational decisions, both with their structure and their decision logics. The course centers around concepts and language to describe and analyze business processes and decisions. It does not cover methods on how to model, improve, monitor or implement business processes. Still, a deep understanding of business processes and decisions is a useful basis for these activities.”
Taught by: Prof. Dr. Mathias Weske

3b) “Business Processes: Modeling, Simulation, Execution” (https://open.hpi.de/courses/bpm2019)

This is a more recent course
Course description: “Business process models play a central role in analyzing, simulating, and executing business processes. They serve as a communication vehicle for professionals with different background and expertise, ranging from business administration, quality management, and organizational development to systems architectures, and software development.

This online course introduces concepts of business process modeling and decision modeling using the industry standards Business Process Model and Notation, BPMN, and Decision Model and Notation, DMN. The course also covers concepts to describe and analyze business processes and decisions, and to simulate and execute them using modern BPM tools.”
Taught by: Prof. Dr. Mathias Weske

You may also want to take a look at the courses from openHPI Summer School.

4) Courses and materials provided by tool vendors.

4a) Automation Anywhere (https://www.automationanywhereuniversity.com/)

Automation Anywhere provides a nice library of online courses. Some of them are free, others are very reasonably priced.
There is also free introductory course on Udemy by Automation Anywhere.
https://www.udemy.com/beginners-guide-to-rpa-automation-anywhere/

4b) Bizagi (http://elearning.bizagi.com)

Bizagi offers 10+ courses about their tools.

4c) BOC Group (https://knowledge.boc-group.com/en)

If you want to find lots of webinar recordings (also done by yours truly about various aspects of BPM, search no more!

4d) Bonitasoft (https://www.bonitasoft.com/videos)

There are dozens of video tutorials, webinars and other materials.

4e) Camunda (https://camunda.com/learn/videos/)

Camunda offers library of video tutorials. And they have something unique – a hawk
PS. They also have cool online conference: CamundaCon:

4f) Pegasystems (https://academy.pega.com)

30+ missions, 250+ modules – do I need to tell you more?

4g) UiPath (https://www.uipath.com/rpa-academy)

Many interesting courses for RPA pros and newbies.

4h) WorkFusion (https://automationacademy.com/)

4 free courses and many more additional options

5) Interesting online conferences.

5a) BOC Group – Global Business Impact Summit (https://www.boc-group.com/en/event-series/global-business-impact-summit-2021/)

5b) Camunda – CamundaCon (https://www.camundacon.com/)

5c) Mendix – Mendix World (https://www.mendix.com/mendix-world/)

5d) OutSystems – NextStep (https://www.outsystems.com/nextstep/2021/)

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BPM Skills in 2020 – Hot or Not (part 3)

Zbigniew — Mon, 17 Feb 2020 11:28:29 +0000

Do you want to learn more about BPM skills in 2020? Part 3 of the post is waiting for you!

Below you can see answers to the questions regarding BPM skills in 2020 from the following experts:
Tony Benedict
Pierre Col
Keith Swenson
Steve Towers

Tony Benedict

Tony Benedict is a Partner with Omicron Partners, LLC, a strategy advisory firm. He is a senior level operations executive best known for transforming organizations, improving operational excellence and profitability. Most recently, he worked at HonorHealth as Vice President, Procurement and Supply Chain where he was responsible for over $600M in spend management. One of his accomplishments was in the restructuring of the procurement and supply chain organizations post-merger within 12 months and consolidating two ERP systems within 18 months while implementing $31M in cost reduction initiatives. Previously, he was Chief Information Officer, Vice President of Supply Chain for Tenet, and Vice President, Supply Chain, Vanguard Health Systems at Abrazo Community Health Network in Arizona.
He is currently serving as President and Director, Board of Directors for the Association of Business Process Management Professionals International and is a co-author of the Business Process Management Common Body of Knowledge versions 2, 3 and the recently released version 4.

WWW: http://www.abpmp.org
WWW: LI profile

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

It would be the full spectrum of BPM knowledge areas, skills and competencies that go beyond just modeling and automating business processes. Automation is just one form of process improvement but it’s not the only avenue to improvements or business/digital transformations. I don’t recall where this came from, however, the concept is that the degree of one’s proficiency in any area of expertise has been shown to come from a mix of mentoring, training/education and experience with relative percentages at 10%, 20% and 70% respectively. This idea presumes that there is a set of foundational knowledge, skills and competencies in any profession that one must come to understand before one can gain proficiency from experience.

After 20 plus years, there should be no argument that good BPM practices create value for customers and organizations. ABPMP (Association of Business Process Management Professionals) decided to establish what the BPM the foundational knowledge, skills and competencies (KSCs) should be and that understanding led us to approach BPM practitioner roles as a continuum of learning and development comprised of set of KSCs and the experience that is acquired over the course of one’s career. The knowledge areas are addressed in our BPM CBOK (Common Body of Knowledge, more information here: https://www.abpmp.org/page/guide_BPM_CBOK) and are noted in the following graphic:

The skills and competencies are outlined in detail in our BPM Competency Model (available for free here: https://www.abpmp.org/page/CompetencyModel). All of the KSCs are embodied in a BPM Life Cycle model for constant renewal in the management of business processes for creating value for customers. The BPM Life Cycle Model is shown in the following graphic:

The experience component is acquired through “on-the-job training,” emphasizing that one has to routinely be doing the continuum of the work outlined in the BPM CBOK and BPM Competency Model over the required years to meet certain experience levels as a BPM practitioner: Technician (< 4yrs), Manager (=4<10yrs) and Leadership (->10yrs) levels. ABPMP has developed three levels of BPM Certification to test each level. This is shown in the following one-page summary graphic:

The BPM Foundation is multidisciplinary and as a practitioner moves up the career ladder in any organization, they are expected to lead people and manage change, especially at executive levels. Experienced BPM practitioners know how to lead cross functionally because they understand the horizontal nature of business processes and managed through years of experience, know when to throttle the amount of organizational change in business or digital transformations. This BPM leadership experience is correlated to an organization’s ability to deliver value to customers. (See McKinsey article cited in next section).

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

As mentioned earlier, the “one stop shop” for the commonly accepted BPM practices is the BPM CBOK (Common Body of Knowledge: https://www.abpmp.org/page/guide_BPM_CBOK) with over 400 pages of commonly accepted practices and our BPM Competency Model which is 13 pages of the detailed skills and competencies at each experience level (https://www.abpmp.org/page/CompetencyModel) which provides BPM Practitioners with the foundational level of knowledge, skills and competencies.

Most of the BPM books that are available assume that one has a baseline understanding of the “what” that comprises BPM. Many of the books tend to address approaches and methodologies on “how” to do BPM. There are some good books out there on methodologies (or techniques) that are usually written by independent consultants – it’s important to note that some of the differences in approach will be the scope of change: major cross functional processes versus functional (siloed) processes. The broader, cross functional scope is what you should look for in BPM books. There are also a few good books on mapping the customer journey, which is only a segment of BPM with respect to creating customer value through process. A suggestion is to read the Amazon reviews on any of these books and make sure the books have at least 80% favorable (4-5 stars) before making a buy decision. For BPM training, there is a small percentage of very thorough BPM training providers that will take you through a complete BPM Life Cycle during a 3-4-day workshop. There are also many niche players for process modeling/analysis/design using BPMN standards – with some of these providers using online learning systems.

There was a great article published by McKinsey last year titled: “The Business Value of Design.” Everyone should read it to understand the fundamental value in designing processes to deliver value and the leadership characteristics associated with process based cultures. There are many other published articles, white papers and webinars that tend to advocate the latest and greatest technologies for BPM. A word of caution – many of the technologies are immature and not widely adopted. Many of these articles (and /or webinars) are marketed by software companies pushing the next “big” thing. Before one follows trends and buzzwords, a simple question should be asked: “Is this technique, software, etc. commonly accepted by the BPM practitioner community such that the practices result in at least a 70% success rate?” If the answer is no, then it’s not quite ready for mass adoption. Another suggestion would be to read Gartner’s Hype Cycle for those technologies to give you an idea of where the technology is on that Hype Cycle. Most companies will start experimenting after the “trough of disillusionment” when all of the “bugs” are worked out and the licensing costs are more in line with the reality of implementations and ROI.

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

It’s probably not a question of what is no longer relevant or practically applicable, it’s more a question of what is used less because something better became available and the existing fell into specialized niches. For example, if you look at process modeling standards, UML and IDEF0 were very common and early modeling tools utilized that standard. Now, all popular modeling tools utilize BPMN 2.0 standards. With the advent of low code and no code software tools, the utilization of BPMN modeling tools might be relegated to those processes that will remain being performed by humans rather than systems or robots.

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Pierre Col

Head of Communications for Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, SAP

Pierre Col has an extensive 30+ years background & expertise in Marketing & Communications and Analyst & Investor Relations for Internet, Telecom & IT companies. Before the acquisition of Contextor by SAP in 2018, he was Chief Marketing Officer of the French-based RPA software vendor.

WWW: Company website
WWW: LI profile

I have to say that, coming from an RPA software vendor, I am a bit biased when it comes about automation. But after Contextor acquisition in November 2018, I am now working for more than one year at SAP, and that helped me broaden my views on process automation. Indeed, created in 1972 by five entrepreneurs who were aiming to automate enterprise processes, SAP is all about automation. and as I spent time last year with my colleagues from SAP Intelligent BPM team to integrate SAP Intelligent RPA in a coherent and comprehensive offer, I think that I can answer from an holistic Intelligent Automation standpoint.

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

I believe that curiosity and mind openness are key. Many technologies appeared or spread during the last years such as RPA, AI with Machine Learning / Deep Learning, chatbots… Those tools are fully complementary to BPM, as they extend BPM capacity to further and better automate business processes with some agility. I would recommend BPM practitioners to understand those technologies in order to be able to leverage them when needed.

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

Of course, you will find a lot of useful books and online resources to learn those skills, and I won’t repeat what others said before.

I would mention here some free MOOCs provided by SAP, to discover Intelligent RPA, to learn how to build your own RPA bots and to automate around S/4HANA ERP.
And as Artificial Intelligence is spreading everywhere, I consider that having explainable and ethical AI capabilities is very important for our future. That is why I also recommend that MOOC, “Creating Trustworthy and Ethical Artificial Intelligence”.

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

I can’t imagine a skill you acquired in the past becoming totally useless, or no longer relevant: it might be less applicable in some contexts, but the skills you have acquired are part of your experience, they shape the way you can consider business problems and imagine new solutions.
Of course, some skills or technologies can be over-hyped and not fully applicable yet in the day-to-day life of the average company. Nevertheless, it is important to keep an eye on it, in order to be able to use it when it starts making sense.

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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
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @swensonkeith

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

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

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

This has been particularly difficult for me to put together this year, because really many things have changed outside of the BPM field, that actually have profound, but as yet unrealized effects on the field.

When we look at BPM from 2003 – 2018 we see a focus on process modeling, and other kinds of modeling. Decision modeling is the latest in this trend. What is a process model? It is after all a depiction of what the people in the organization think the preferred way of handling a business problem is. This has always been negatively affected by the fact that much of this knowledge is tacit, and not consciously known by the workers. So interviews work to a limited extent, but the real process is more difficult to suss out. The next technique was one of Agile trial and continuous improvement: approximate the process as best you can, measure performance, and incrementally improve the process. But all of this is really traditional development: a programmer take the logic and codes it in a process model, in web services, or in glue code.

Today we are in the age of Alpha Go and learning software that is trained, and not programmed. These game-playing computers did well in extremely complex games like Go where the number of rules is small, but the possible combinations very high. The technique is likely to be even more useful when the exact rules are not known, like the rules of a business process. AI should watch the behaviors of the individuals, and be able to draw up rules of engagement of the business processes. Those rules may be completely opaque to the workers, managers, and programmers. That does not matter. What matters is that the rules work. Learning systems are likely to be able to route work to people far more efficiently than any externally applied process logic.

What this really means is that the traditional skill of modeling a process, and programming applications, is no longer relevant. Let me temper that: these will still be used to create BPM applications for another 10 years or so, but the demand for this will drop quickly. Instead, we will find that forward thinking organizations will deploy learning systems to watch the organization at work, to automatically identify processes that are stuck, and to proactively route them forward for completion. The process might be difference every single time, but that does not matter: the goal is efficiency of the organization, not regularity of the process.

I have attempted to explain all this in my book “Beyond the Business Process Model” where I outline not only the trend toward learning systems replacing bespoke BPM applications, but also outline the parameters that would be needed to make it all work. I must warn you: this idea has not been very well received in the industry, and there has really not been much uptake in readership of the book.

I think that process modeling and decision modeling are currently at their maturity. It will take a decade to swap out the current bespoke application approach, to a learning approach. The skills that you will need for that newer technology will be data science and deep learning. We are seeing this same trend in many areas that were traditionally implemented using standard programming techniques. We all need to learn new skills, and I can promise, it will be a fascinating ride.

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Steve Towers

Steve is the original Outside-In Pioneer, Amazon Best Seller, an Operations, BPM and Customer Experience Expert recently named Global Top 30 Guru, CEO BP Group and Loves the Mountains!

BP Group was established 28 years ago to grow the professionalism of Business Process Management through upskilling, methods and technology associated with business processes and customer experience management. Since 2006 we have helped over 100,000 individuals qualify as Certified Process Professionals across 118 countries. In 2018 Steve become a startup investor in The Experience Manager, the worlds first customer experience employee engagement tool.

WWW: https://www.bpgroup.org
WWW: https://www.theexperiencemanager.com
Latest bestseller: Dare!
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @stowers

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

Are your skills growing beyond the technical and becoming aligned with customer success, or are you still playing the tune of times gone by?
The biggest challenge facing BPM professionals in this next decade will be enabling organizations to progressively embrace customer centricity. Without that capability long standing companies will wither and die as the digital tsunami sweeps away redundant business models. Sounds apocalyptic and in many ways it is.
A good basis for understanding the skills needed is provided by the transformation underway in the one of the world’s largest Utility companies. We have distilled six key factors in terms of evolving the process skillset as:
1. Integrating process into every aspect of the business
2. Engaging the organization around successful business and customer outcomes
3. Embracing new (and simplified) techniques to connect the dots across the enterprise
4. Evangelizing the reason process exists is to deliver successful customer outcomes
5. Encouraging everyone in the company to get ‘process’ and its fundamental contribution to their future careers and organizational success
6. Equipping the business for tomorrows unknown challenges and creating the attitude to see around corners, rather than looking in the rear-view mirror for answers to ‘where are we going next?’
We discuss in detail these attributes in greater detail in our new bestselling book Dare!

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

The greatest learnings are nearly always evidential based complemented with innovation. What I mean by this is understanding and modeling the approaches adopted by global leading companies and especially when it comes to applying techniques that deliver immediate and sustained success. Only by consistently delivering business results will BPM remain relevant and accordingly the need is to demonstrate that this current project/program/initiative is moving the needle to deliver triple crown benefits – simultaneously lowering costs, improving service and growing revenues. Is your work doing this?
There are many theoretical books (still) being written on the theme of BPM however look for those more practical works that share case studies and real, hard as nails results. Understand how those people created success and seek to model their attitudes, behaviors and structures into your own work and that of colleagues.
Naturally I recommend the work of the BP Group where we continue to codify the success of leaders and companies and make them accessible for individuals and organizations upskilling themselves for long term success. The codification is now in version 12 of the CEMMethod, accessible through our Certified Process Professional program.

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

Complex and syntax driven tools may have been the thing of yesterday however as the attention spans of customers and leadership teams has decreased to nano seconds that work takes too long. Immediate results become the validation to do more with BPM so keep it simple, direct and immediate.
Essentially industrial age mindsets are no longer relevant. We are not building factories and production lines we are enabling customers to achieve success in every experience they have with our organization. That shift to Outside-In thinking and practice is pervasive in high achieving companies we all recognize as delivering us as customers the best products and services. How many of these direct techniques and approaches have you embraced into your work recently?

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PS. By popular demand (thanks Doug)
I thought you may also enjoy some more market overviews:
a) Broad one by Trend Watching: https://trendwatching.com/quarterly/2019-11/5-trends-2020/
b) Tech oriented by CB Insights (14 Tech Trends To Watch Closely In 2020): https://www.cbinsights.com/research/report/top-tech-trends-2020/
BTW: you may also enjoy their 2019 report “What’s Next In Enterprise IT” which mentions Workflow Automation: https://www.cbinsights.com/research/16-enterprise-it-trends-2019/
c) Last, but not least “Tech Trends 2020” by Deloitte: https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/focus/tech-trends.html

The post BPM Skills in 2020 – Hot or Not (part 3) first appeared on BPM Tips.

BPM Skills in 2020 – Hot or Not (part 2)

Zbigniew — Thu, 30 Jan 2020 20:59:23 +0000

Did you enjoy the part 1 of post about BPM skills in 2020? Check the part 2!

Below you can see answers to the questions regarding BPM skills in 2020 from following experts:
BJ Biernatowski
Paul Holmes-Higgin
Harald Kühn
John Mancini
John Morris & Peter Schooff
Michal Rosik
Tomislav Rozman
Mathias Weske

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 K2, Appian, Pega, and Tibco AMX BPM including large-scale business transformations.

His work has been featured by KW World and he has presented internationally on the topic of work transformation. He served as an advisor to Fortune 500 companies.

BJ’s areas of interest include COEs, Knowledge Work automation and Citizen Development adoption of Low Code Digital Process Automation (DPA) platforms. UW Foster School of Business alumni and a Woodinville, WA resident.

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

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

The answer on the surface seems pretty straightforward if you look at this subject through the lens of driving execution towards measurable results (the proverbial get *it done approach). The choice of the Digital Process Automation (DPA) vendor will ultimately determine your company’s success with process driven transformation. Your behaviors and attitudes should align with your organization’s strategic vision so get to know it first.

In 2020, I’d separate what you need to know and practice into 4 buckets:

1. COEs
Customer journey mapping, process discovery, automation architecture blueprints and mentoring, roadmaps and project artifacts reuse, best practices and change management methodologies. You will need these skills to articulate and plan your path forward. If you are a customer of your company’s COE, learn how to work with this team.

2. AI-DP-RP-A (as in Artificial Intelligence Digital and Robotic Process Automation)
The coalescence of these technologies and vendors’ approach to low code implementation will define the body of knowledge required to participate in projects. In 2020, the AI-DP-RP-A stack is the modern version of iBPMS from a few years ago. Since there is a lot more to learn, courses like Coursera’s Learning How to Learn with Dr. Barbara Oakley and Dr. Terrence Sejnowski will give you a solid footing. The advent of Low Code technologies creates many exciting opportunities that empower individuals like never before in the history of IT. Opportunities to democratize AI, automaton and solution delivery come with significant learning requirements though. If you are aspiring to the role of the Citizen Developer or perhaps even Automation Architect the depth and breadth of knowledge will vary accordingly.

3. Political awareness, influencing and knowing how to be a great team player.
Most successful projects are delivered by small and nimble teams supported by the leadership. Knowing how to play nice, without sacrificing your professional integrity, how to influence without sounding like the know it all and how to identify strong leaders for your programs are all very important skills.

4. The awareness of BPM as a management practice
Most people don’t have the time to go back to school to get their MBA in Business Process Management before their next project. Two vendors deserve accolades for publishing consumable, for dummies books on this subject. IBM ‘s edition of ‘BPM For Dummies’: https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/B4R8JWK0 and K2’s ‘Operational Process Transformation for Dummies’: http://www2.k2.com/l/110682/2016-09-01/34w8jy
For extra credit discovery, I’d recommend checking out Fut Strat publications: http://www.futstrat.com/ or Pepperdine’s Graziadio Business School BPM Certification program: https://bschool.pepperdine.edu/executive-education-certificate-programs/business-process-management/

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

There are a couple of established online resources i.e. bpmtips.com that could be used as the go-to place to start your exploration. DPA and RPA vendors’ online academies can be useful as well, although such training materials usually focus on the implementation without getting into the whys of DPA. Future Strategies (http://www.futstrat.com) is my personal favorite publisher writing about Digital Transformation and DPA in a way that’s both educational and vendor-neutral. The challenge with these materials though is that they don’t apply directly to practitioner’s work and the style of communication can be pretty formal. To overcome this issue and with the help of my work team I developed and taught the DPA 101 introductory course as a way to bridge the theory with practice.
It only took us 4 iterations to get this course right and the amount of time invested into curriculum development was pretty significant.

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

I’d caution against some DPA vendors hype (or even bashing) against the future of the cloud and the demise of software designed by humans. Both the cloud and Citizen Developer delivered solutions will have a crucial role in Digital Transformation. During the last few years, I’ve seen a lot of very innovative projects delivered by Citizen Developers quickly and with very little investment. This trend is going to disrupt revenue streams of DPA vendors dependent on specialized knowledge. In my view, the bold entry of Microsoft into the DPA and RPA markets in 2019 with its PowerAutomate platform confirms the strategic direction of the Citizen Developer driven process automation for the masses.

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Paul Holmes-Higgin

Dr Paul Holmes-Higgin, Chief product Office and co-founder of Flowable. Previously, as co-founder of Alfresco, one of his achievements was to bring Activiti to the fore of the company’s innovation. He has always been focused on software execution with a strong conceptual underpinning, and on closing the gap between the users and builders of software. A long-time Open Source advocate, he believes it still has an important role to play in making innovation more widely available. His PhD and background in AI gives him a deep understanding of the opportunities and pitfalls of Machine Learning. He sees innovation around the standard models of BPM as the best way to bring together his passions for user-centred software and intelligent automation in today’s highly dynamic business and social environment.

WWW: https://flowable.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @paulrhh

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

While I have a strong theoretical background, my real passion is getting smart software that does a real job into the hands of people, so that’s what I’ll focus on here. We’re all very familiar with BPMN and increasingly DMN, but I think 2020 will be the year of CMMN, the Case Management Model and Notation standard. Like all the standards, it’s not perfect, however, it allows us to express a range of problems in a different and more natural way, some of which are hard in BPMN. The executable blend of CMMN with BPMN and CMMN is now available at speed and scale, and global solutions built on it are out there in production. I think it’s also going to allow us to build low-code, model-driven solutions with some creative innovation around it. The other area I think is important for BPM is clearer management of the source and target of data that flows through processes. With GDPR and compliance now being so important to so many organizations, linking Data Models to case and process models is essential for showing where and how information is used.

The idea of blending and innovating concepts to make something that works applies as much to development methodologies as to the software that’s being built. Ironically, for me it’s not about the process itself, it’s about what the process is achieving: a super-efficient sausage machine churning out poor quality sausages is not what I think we should be about. I see BPM in 2020 as providing the framework that allows businesses to be as agile as the market demands of them. If you’re interested in AI, then Explainable AI (XAI) is where I’d focus.

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

There are a number of internet resources that can help a developer get started with BPM, especially with Open Source – go to flowable.org and download software to run or source code to extend, with a community to help you get going and keep going! For the business practitioners, I think the great work Bruce Silver has done with his Method & Style books makes them essential reading.

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

Skills learned always bring something, so it’s more a question of what’s been learned in the last year that allows us to be smarter. For me, the importance of blockchain remains highly relevant if you’re looking at supply chain problems but is less important in general. Also, that gratuitous application of AI to everything is not relevant. I think in 2019 we also found that RPA isn’t the answer to every problem either. We’ve been refining our understanding and role of these tools in the solution builder’s tool bag.

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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, techniques, behaviours, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

1. Capability Mapping
In modern organisations, business process design is highly influenced by digitization. Digital influences are present in each phase of the business process management lifecycle. To make a specific business process design operational, each organisation needs capabilities which match to the digital requirements of the specific business process design. To keep a process-oriented organisation up-to-date, an overview of the needed capabilities and an active management of these capabilities is essential. Capability Mapping, e.g. such as contained in the enterprise architecture language ArchiMate, provides a useful approach. Each BPM practitioner should have a certain degree of knowledge about Capability Mapping.

2. Business Process Optimisation applying Lean Startup Principles
Many business process optimization approaches use lean management methods, business process excellence methods, simulation and statistics. In the context of process optimisation, it is worth to have a deeper look on the principles of the Lean Startup Movement which have been initially created to grow more successful entrepreneurial businesses. The “Build-Measure-Learn” cycle is about how we can learn more quickly what works and discard what doesn’t. And the related principles can be successfully applied in BPM as well. It is worth a look for each BPM practitioner.

3. Know the potential of AI/ML
The pace of including more and more AI-based (= artificial intelligence) and ML-based (= Machine Learning) components into digitalised business processes is tremendous. RPA and Process Mining are two prominent examples. But there are many more AI-based approaches such as pattern recognition, irregularity detection, predictive alerts, user guidance etc. which a BPM practitioner should be aware of.

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

Capability Modelling (as part of Archimate): https://www.opengroup.org/archimate-forum
Capability Management (as part of EAM): https://uk.boc-group.com/consulting/enterprise-architecture-management/
Eric Ries – The Lean Startup: http://theleanstartup.com/
5 Main Approaches to AI Learning: https://www.dummies.com/software/other-software/5-main-approaches-ai-learning/
OMiLAB – Open Models Initiative: https://www.omilab.org/

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

I repeat what I stated already last year: any knowledge and experiences gathered in the past will influence decisions for the future. Therefore, even if specific skills, techniques or technologies are not really relevant any more, they are important to evaluate and apply new upcoming approaches.

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John Mancini

John Mancini is the Past President of AIIM and President of Content Results, LLC.

He was recently named by TechBeacon as one of “13 RPA Experts You Should Follow” John is a well-known author, keynote speaker, and advisor on information management, digital transformation and intelligent automation. John is a frequent keynote speaker and author of more than 30 eBooks on a variety of information management, SharePoint, and Office 365 topics. He can be found on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook as @jmancini77 and is a regular columnist on CMSWire.com.

Recent keynote topics include:
The Stairway to Digital Transformation
Information Modernization — The Elephant(s) in the Room
Getting Ahead of the Automation Curve
What on Earth do Users Really Want? — Keys to Success in Disruptive Times
Intelligent Automation — Solving the Problem of the Back-Office

WWW: http://www.contentresults.net
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @jmancini77

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

We are in an interesting period of terminology confusion when it comes process management. RPA, low code, no code, case management, intelligent automation and a host of other terms sometimes make “BPM” feel a bit dated. In this cacophony, and with the very real necessity of modernizing, there is a tendency to say there a shift away from BPM and toward…..something. And that “business process management” is…well it’s turning into something else.

My take is that all of the technologies I mentioned are not so much replacements for BPM as they are complements to it. Organizations at scale still need “industrial-strength” BPM. Smart organizations are augmenting BPM capabilities with agile tools to fill in the grey manual spaces of business process and connect the gaps between them.

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

I’m biased. I worked at AIIM for two decades. I still think the AIIM deep-dive courses represent a great foundation layer for process management professionals. And for line of business executives who need to understand the connections between technologies — from a business perspective — there is no better overview of what it means to be an information professional in an age of digital disruption than the AIIM Certified Information Professional program. I’m also a big fan of both the AIIM and ARMA annual conferences — a great place to find fellow travelers in process improvement and information governance. And if you have the budget and a connection to a particular vendor, the vendor-specific conferences I’ve spoken at in the past year have all been terrific and engaging.

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

In my experience, there is usually about an 18 month gap between the latest shiny objects promoted by vendor marketing machines and actual adoption at serious scale by real organizations. So pay attention to the latest announcements and get ready for the next generation of technology, but cut yourselves some slack. Organizations at scale take a bit longer to move on new technologies than you might think, but once they do, watch out. Unless there is a commanding pre-chasm business advantage to be gained, be on the leading edge, not the bleeding edge.

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John Morris & Peter Schooff

John Morris is a business development and sales specialist with almost 30 years’ experience at vendors including IDC, DEC, Oracle, Intalio and Bosch, where he covered business services, financial services, manufacturing, field service, supply chain, and CRM & B2B marketing. John’s business development forte is selling new technology products where there are few or no existing references. He currently serves in a business development leadership role with several technology start-ups.

In support of evangelizing for “an appreciation of the new”, John writes and speaks concerning the intersection of technology, analytics, business analysis and economics. John says there’s “a bright future for channels, because that’s where the trusted domain knowledge is.” And he also wonders “what technology is for, if not to support better, faster decision-making.”

John can be reached at jmorris(at)datadecisioning.com and on Twitter at @JohnHMorris.

Peter has over 20 years’ experience in various executive-level enterprise IT fields. He first developed a deep interest in data as editor for ebizQ, where he covered business intelligence and for which he created the industry-leading ebizQ Forum.

Peter was the Managing Editor at BPM.com for over 5 years, where he oversaw the BPM Forum as well as other content and media initiatives. He was also the Director of Marketing for the email security company Message Partners.

Peter is known worldwide for his views and contributions to BPM, BI, SOA, and Cloud, and was named among the Top 12 Influencers of Case Management through independent market research.

Peter can be reached at pschooff(at)datadecisioning.com and on Twitter at @PSchooff

WWW: http://www.datadecisioning.com
Twitter: @JohnHMorris
Twitter: @PSchooff

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

BPM Sales Skills: Many senior execs see BPM as “just another technology”. It is not. BPM is the technology of the work of business. There is no other technology where, by definition, the concepts of the work of business are first-class citizens of that technology. This is doubly true because business process is about repetition and viable business is all about repetition.

With BPM technology, an organization can achieve its automation goals faster, with less complexity and more agility than with any other technology. Along with supporting technologies such as decision technology and AI, there’s a big opportunity to make BPM technology the strategic focus in the executive suite. Sell that opportunity!

BPM Ops Focus: DevOps! DataOps! Even now AIOps! How about BPMOps! All software development is about “manufacturing artefacts or tools for business automation”. This idea shows up in capability maturity models as the “industrialization phase”. Consider that the evolution of any organization in a dynamic market depends on acquiring new automation tools — and then mastering the use of these new tools. It’s about programmatic tool creation. Think “process”, think a program of regularly delivered process automation tools. Think BPMOps.

AI & Decisioning Leverage: X-ray any business process, whether automated or not, and you’ll find that competitive advantage happens at decision points (i.e. BPM gateways). Often opportunities are missed when gateways are coded casually. A business process where decision logic is realized via BPM process can be very complicated — unnecessarily so in fact. By abstracting out decision rules for deployment in a decision engine, many business processes can be enormously simplified (avoiding dreaded “spaghetti processes”). And this is where AI comes in too.

The real meaning of AI today is machine learning, which is just pattern recognition. This is an ideal technology to deploy at business process decision points. AI is not “generically good for you”, but it is good for you in BPM gateways. The combination of BPM plus decision rules engine, optionally including AI, is a recipe for maximum process throughput and decisions-at-scale.

Business Analysis: Your biggest return on skills is your ability to identify viable business automation opportunities. Within your technology envelope, that means exploring potential new use cases for your particular business, and helping build a business case. That’s the work of business analysis. Technology is a given; and there’s little edge. Business analysis is where differentiation is realized.

New Spotlight On Executives: A strange thing is happening in the executive suite. Executives want operations visibility through dashboards! It’s a revolution. Operations used to be relegated to “the plant” or “shipping”, or operations research (OR) and industrial engineering! It was a black box. But the advent of big data and AI and many more integrative technologies means that the black box is no longer opaque. Competitive wins require that executives take responsibility for “what’s in the black box of production”. Because you can’t make strategy without understanding what you have — all the way down.

What does this mean for BPM? That executives will increasingly be taking responsibility for the inventory of key processes for which they are responsible. That’s what your competition will be doing. It’s a thrilling time!

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

BPM Start-up Business case: Reading Steve Blank about startups is a great resource! He emphasizes talking to your customers all the time! And running experiments. “Have BPM Ops, will travel.”

Domain Knowledge: Business transformation is about “the new”. That’s high risk though—unless you are building on what you already have. Most new initiatives in fact are building or extending existing business models. And that’s good news for BPM practitioners with deep domain knowledge. There are no “generic BPM process wins” – BPM wins are almost always very business-domain specific. So, one’s store of knowledge from experience is very relevant. Why not learn more about the business of your business?

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

BPM Software Skills: Let’s consider “no longer relevant” as “in-place, let’s leave it alone”, while we pursue strategic change.

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Michal Rosik

Product Visionary & CPO, Minit

As Product Visionary for Minit, Michal defines the Research & Development direction for this process mining solution, develops close ties to the academic community in this area and evangelizes process mining benefits to enterprises worldwide. Michal previously lead Microsoft Consulting department in Siemens and was involved in several large enterprise projects as a consultant and project manager. In his free time, he is a passionate trail runner.

WWW: http://www.minit.io
WWW: LI company profile
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @rosik
Twitter: @minit_io

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

For the past 2 years, I’ve been challenging most of the tech abbreviations in the game. I think this is the year of soft skills. So, here is my Process Intelligence Top 3 for 2020:

Courage
Process stakeholders need to be brave enough to implement the changes from process analysis initiatives. There is no ROI in this area unless the loop is closed. Doing complex analytical work, presenting to management, and drawing large figure slides in PowerPoint is just not enough.

RPA has been the fast performer, with automation’s first approach, enterprises have been receiving near-immediate value. But most of them are stuck now. Analysis first approach comes to help, but be prepared, because RPA might not be the correct answer to the traffic jam.

Confidence
To gain courage you need at least a basic level of confidence. And to gain confidence, you need a data-based approach. Only data can cover your back and build a solid foundation to rely on.

Whether it is simulating the changes in a sandbox environment before they are implemented in real life, or whether it is setting up a continuous monitoring pipeline to give you the most current process insights, this transparency level is the only way to overcome your inner challenges.

Interdisciplinarity
Process Mining and Process Intelligence have been a self-standing area of interest. I believe it’s time to open the gate to the world outside. And I mean the world outside of the galaxy, outside of the universe. It has become obvious that many problems and challenges that we are facing, are similar to problems and challenges in completely different scientific areas – biology, chemistry, even social science. We can look at the processes as living organisms, materials, or machines. They are interacting, communicating, solving conflicts. Just like we do.

And vice versa, there are areas where the word “process” does not exist, maybe it is called reaction, mutation, procedure or experiment, but still, I believe we are speaking the same language.

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

Discussions with experienced professionals still remain at the “top of the list”. There is a lot of resources all over the internet on any of the topics – the more hype, the more resources you’ll find. But only experience gives you the right filter on those sources.

In second place, with just a small gap, goes to academic research. Even though it might look complex and sometimes impractical, academic research is becoming the most relevant source of well-compiled and argumentative views on a specific topic. Combined with design-oriented approach, which gives it a little creative touch, academic research stands behind most of the things we, at Minit, do.

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

From both the technological and business point of view I am happy to say that AI and ML have come back to earth and touched the ground again. Process stakeholders have begun to utilize a very practical view on power and usage of those technologies.

Interestingly enough, topics that might be, at first sight, easier to grasp are still hanging in the air. I am talking about DTO in general – it is still so difficult for many organizations and their representatives to take a clear journey from vision and mission, through strategy, down to the processes and their KPIs and in the opposite direction. Back the digital organization with data, so that they can, at any time, see how changing the individual parameters on different levels influences the other parts of the overall picture.

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Tomislav Rozman

Dr. Tomislav Rozman is a founder of consultancy company BICERO Ltd. He is also designing online courses related to BPM, CRM, IT and teaching and mentoring Masters’ students at DOBA Faculty of applied business and social studies Maribor, Slovenia.

He enjoys teaching people about BPM and he has performed projects of implementing BPM in Slovenian companies, public administration organizations and SMEs.

In his free time, he is a runner, guitar & ukulele player and psychology counsellor.

WWW: http://www.bicero.com
WWW: LI profile
WWW: Company LI profile
WWW: Company FB page
WWW: ResearchGate profile
Twitter: @tomirozman

What are the skills, techniques, behaviours, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

I can talk about my experiences with so-called ‘long-tail’ of BPM adoption because I have direct contact with it.

Who are ‘long-tail’ BPM adopters? I work with late adopters such as process approach sceptics, public administration organizations, traditional companies which are far away from IT (e. g. construction), small businesses with out-of-place management practices. This world is very far from AI, RPA and other hype.

Collaborating with mentioned customers, we still deal with the BPM foundations such as:

(imaginary conversations)

Attitudes: Adopt process thinking first. Yes, I know you have silos type of organization which is impossible to change, but that doesn’t prevent you to cooperate. Design your processes with great customer experience in mind. Don’t adapt Cx to your existing processes.

Behaviours: Adopt teamwork. For process participants: Imagine you’re a relay runner. You get the baton, you pass it forward. For process managers: observe ‘the baton path’, optimize it and watch out it doesn’t fall on the ground. Teach your team how to be grounded, emphatic and technologically literate.

Skills: I have found out BPM (in its full incarnation) can be an overkill for SMEs. Even a simple list to describe the steps/inputs, outputs/documents/rules of your process and a spreadsheet to track your processes can be enough for SMEs.

Techniques: BPMN + DMN are a standard. I still miss a proper standard for process architecture design. The overview (process architecture) which shows which processes are managed and which are not is one of the most important things for companies which are starting with BPM approach.

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

I will not repeat my predecessors – there are numerous resources to learn techniques related to BPM.

I’d like to stress out 4 types of learning resources which are worth looking at after you learn the basics of BPM:
1. ‘Process content’ resources, best practices, such as APQC and similar.

2. Standards, which can be a great source for your own process design ideas.

3. Unrelated skills. Learn something from the totally unrelated field (e.g. sustainability) and observe how your attitude towards BPM and your teaching (if you’re a trainer) will change.

4. Mentors. Self-study is fine, but if you want to speed up your BPM-related learning, find a good mentor to teach you ‘tips and tricks’ which are not mentioned in any book.

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

All skills acquired during your career somehow contribute to your current behaviour and performance. The broader the better. Techniques are more transient than skills, e.g. let’s abandoned EPC already. If you’re an evangelist, please spare your customers with the hype until your technology is solving real problems.

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Mathias Weske

Professor Dr. Mathias Weske is chair of the business process technology research group at Hasso Plattner Institute of IT Systems Engineering at the University of Potsdam, Germany. The research group aims at addressing real-world BPM problems with formal approaches and engineering useful prototypes. His research focuses on the engineering of process oriented information systems, decision management, and event handling. In addition to running the BPM Academic Initiative bpmai.org with colleagues from academia and Signavio, the BPT research group has a track record in engineered prototypes with a significant impact on research, including projects like Oryx and jBPT. Dr. Weske is author of the first textbook on business process management and he held the first massive open online course on the topic in 2013. He on the Editorial Board of Springer’s Distributed and Parallel Databases journal and a founding member of the steering committee of the BPM conference series.

WWW: University website
Twitter: @mathias_weske

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

With increasing maturity of our discipline, new application domains being attracted by what BPM has to offer. We see BPM projects in, for instance, logistics, in the food industry, and in health care. By the way, HPI has established a Center for Digital Health to use patient data for better diagnosis and treatment. In all these domains, data and processes meet. And the role of process models shifts. Rather than being blueprints for automation, process models are an instrument to communicate execution data. Reasons include such different things as delay forecasting in logistics, transparency in sustainable food production, and conformance analysis in treatment processes. It is exciting to see the BPM machinery being constantly developed in response to these challenges.

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

The more diverse and challenging novel application scenarios become, the more important a solid foundation in process management is. With the focus on data, database skills become increasingly relevant, too. Any good online course and text book will provide the basis. To catch up with the latest developments, practitioners should consider visiting the top conferences, like BPM 2020 in Seville in September.

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

Don’t think about skills that are not relevant.

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Stay tuned for part 3!

The post BPM Skills in 2020 – Hot or Not (part 2) first appeared on BPM Tips.

BPM Skills in 2020 – Hot or Not (part 1)

Zbigniew — Wed, 08 Jan 2020 22:26:11 +0000

January is often time when we come up with resolutions for a new year. While it is easy to decide that we want to change something, change will not happen unless we start doing something differently.

That’s why, like in the past years, I prepared for you post with suggestion regarding skills which will be useful for process professionals.

You can also check the 2019, 2018, 2017 part 1, 2017 part 2, and 2016 version of this post.

You will notice that there are some small changes in questions this year, but the answers should give you suggestions regarding our main topic i.e.

Which BPM skills will be hot in 2020?

First part of this post contains answers from 10+ BPM experts. You can either read everything or use the navigation below. Enjoy and stay tuned for part 2!

Lloyd Dugan
Marlon Dumas
Alan Fish
Ian Gotts
Sandy Kemsley
Mathias Kirchmer
Holly Lyke-Ho-Gland
Juergen Pitschke
Brian Reale
Adrian Reed
Pedro Robledo
Phil Simpson
Jim Sinur
James Taylor

Now, let’s dive into the answers.

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.

WWW: BPM.com
WWW: LI profile

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

As the discipline of Business Architecture matures, BPM Practitioners will need to improve their understanding of process modeling, because it’s not just boxes and arrows anymore when BPM Projects must show and maintain alignment with the management of business capabilities towards achieving strategic goals. The full spectrum of operational modeling languages (BPMN/CMMN/DMN) must be better understood and used correctly along with related business architecture models. in addition, as RPA and ML ascend and mature past 1st gen technologies, BPM Practitioners must embrace new design patterns as part of their solution set (e.g., not trying to “fix” legacy processes and systems if unattended RPA can be used to automate the automation). Finally, BPM Practitioners need to take what they are doing seriously as a true professional discipline and demonstrate that seriousness to their customers. It is not merely Business Analyst work, and should not be delivered at a 1-800-BPM4YOU level.

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

Academic-wise, I recommend an MBA, but this is not the only way. Find a mentor, and see the job as an apprenticeship on the way to being a master practitioner. Books are good, but they are only a start. Find a community of shared interest, take training in specific skill sets, etc. IT is a profession to invest in, not just a job. (Booyah!).

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

With so-called low-code/no-code platforms becoming more ubiquitous by the day (and App Dev Platform the term du jure instead of BPMS or Case Mgmt Sys Platform), understanding and applying good UX design and screen flow principles are being under-emphasized, so skills are weakening just as RPA needs analysts who understand these things as part of automated process design. Both attended and unattended RPA need BPM Practitioners to help in modeling RPA design flows (which should otherwise be familiar territory to those experienced with using automated functional testing tools).

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Prof. Marlon Dumas

Marlon Dumas is Professor of Information Systems at University of Tartu, Estonia, and co-founder of Apromore Pty Ltd, a company dedicated to developing and delivering open-source process mining solutions. He is currently recipient of an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council with the mission of developing algorithms for automated identification and assessment of business process improvement opportunities from event data. His research in the field of business process management and process mining has led to numerous research publications, several US/EU patents, and a textbook (Fundamentals of Business Process Management) used in over 250 universities worldwide.

WWW: WWW
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What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

Customer experience will continue to be a driving force well into 2020. BPM practitioners will be pressed to remain focused on heightening perceived service quality, delighting the customer, enhancing customer engagement, and driving revenue by converting customer engagement into revenue growth. In this golden age of the customer, we will continue to see increased adoption of techniques and tools to analyze, monitor, and improve customer-facing processes, to unearth issues, bottlenecks, and constraints that affect customer experience, and to drill down into root causes of customer dissatisfaction . Adoption of data analytics, process mining, and AI techniques will continue to gain traction, particularly those that directly allow one to create “wow” moments for the customer and to convert customer engagement into revenue growth, including recommender systems, predictive and prescriptive process analytics, and automated root-cause analysis.

And last but not least: As we deal with customer data, in particular for process mining, BPM practitioners should keep an eye on privacy issues, especially as GDPR enforcement is gaining traction.

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

BPM Practitioners need to further develop their skills in machine learning, particularly project execution. Classic MOOCs and books on machine learning are worth having on one’s digital bookshelf. For example, the book “Machine Learning Yearning” by Andrew Ng is a good starting point.

An easy-to-read introduction into AI for customer experience is “The Age of Intent” by Kanan and Bernoff, although one should read beyond the book’s focus on chatbots. Another book worth the read for BPM Practitioners is “Connected Strategy” by Siggelkow and Terwiesch. There are interesting and useful links to be made between the concept of “connected strategy” and process mining, analytics and AI adoption strategy.

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

The dust has settled on the blockchain front, after the unfortunate mega-hype of the past three years. This is not to say that blockchain is not relevant. It is and will remain relevant within its scope – as a trust-enhancing technology, for example to implement auditability and verifiability requirements in business processes.

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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
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What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

I’m glad that Zbigniew has included “attitudes” in this question, since a shift in attitude is required for successful BPM.

Considered as a decision-making entity, an organisation is much more complex than is assumed by most BPM practices. It is an information ecosystem: a complex network of many decision-makers – individuals, groups and automata – passing information to each other. Ecosystems are notoriously hard to model: they are complex and adaptive.

To address the complexity, the practitioner must recognize that it is not enough to model processes; s/he must model at least processes, case management, decisions and data. This can be done using the OMG “Triple Crown” (BPMN, CMMN and DMN), supported by UML. These detailed models will show how decisions are partitioned over time and between decision-makers, and will identify the key “meta-decisions”: decisions about how decisions should be made.

To address adaptivity, the practitioner must recognize that repeated process reengineering is a costly and unreliable way to achieve ongoing change in an organisation. Successful organisations are those which adopt models of decision-making where adaptivity is achieved through changes to discrete Business Knowledge Models, i.e. through decision management. This requires an initial reengineering effort to identify, automate and expose areas of business knowledge so that these can be updated and optimised over time (e.g. using analytics) without further changes to process.

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

These ideas are described in more depth in a paper I gave to the DecisionCAMP 2019 conference: https://decisioncamp2019.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/dc2019.alanfish-1.pdf. Also read my book Knowledge Automation, any books about the standards BPMN, CMMN and DMN, and the standards themselves.

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

Real skills never become irrelevant.

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Ian Gotts

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

Elements.cloud helps customers clean-up, document and build their app implementations, focused on Salesforce. But valid for any low code app platform, esp as the process mapping is free, for ever, for everyone.
WWW: https://medium.com/@Q9ELEMENTS
WWW: elements.cloud
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What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

We launched OrgConfessions.com where Salesforce users could post their anonymous implementation horror stories. Salesforce is the #1 low-code app platform with 300,000 customers. The confessions are truly horrific and a symptom of low-code apps with citizen developers so it is directly relevant to the BPM community. The root cause analysis of over 600 confessions is insightful as it shows the key skills gaps. The top 4 are:

Business Analysis; process mapping, requirements capture & developing user stories

Project architecture; architecting the right solution and data modeling

Documentation and naming standards; documenting the changes that were made to reduce technical debt and ongoing impact analysis

Change management methodology; following a clearly defined methodology that reduces delivery risk, increases agility and drives business benefits.

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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.

She has also founded and run three companies – a systems integration services company, a software product company, and current consulting company – with responsibility for corporate and financial governance, strategic direction, team hiring and management, and day-to-day technical contributions.

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

WWW: https://column2.com
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What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

There is a strong need to be able to fit what we do in BPM systems (which is often at the level of task management with some functional process KPIs thrown in) with the larger picture of our organization’s business architecture and goals. I wrote recently about the need for goal alignment throughout the organizational hierarchy (https://www.trisotech.com/blog/the-need-for-goal-alignment), tracing from the corporate purpose, to business capabilities (the services provided to customers), to business functions (internal processes), to individual tasks. The KPIs at the lower levels of the organization should always be directly traceable to higher-level KPIs in order to ensure goal alignment at all levels in the organization. Without this alignment, the performance measures at the lower operational levels – particularly those focused on individual rather than team performance such as transaction counts – can end up working against the higher-level corporate business requirements. Equally important, if a corporate-level KPI can’t be traced down to a lower-level operational KPI, there may not be any actual work being done to achieve those corporate goals.

What this means for BPM practitioners is a greater awareness of goals and KPIs within different levels of their business architecture. This doesn’t mean having to become certified in some obscure business architecture methodology, or perform a months-long modeling exercise; rather, just a specification and alignment of KPIs at each level of the hierarchy. Once these have been identified, and the KPIs at each level linked to those in the hierarchy both above and below them, then the most relevant performance metrics for processes and tasks can be extracted for use in BPM models and systems.

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

There are a lot of online resources for goal alignment, but I have presented some fairly simple techniques and an example in the article linked above. Several of the resources that I have seen online are from the standpoint of HR systems and talent management, where the focus is on ensuring that individual KPIs are aligned with higher-level corporate goals; I suggest that a more comprehensive view is required, with KPIs traced in both directions through the hierarchy.

The best way to learn and master the skill of identifying and linking hierarchies of KPIs is to actually do it within your organization. Use some simple charts to collect the KPIs at different levels, then use online collaboration or an in-person workshop to look at traceability between the KPIs. I guarantee that there will be some “a-ha” moments as different people in your organization realize that they’re measuring the wrong thing, or expecting results that can never happen because of how other areas are measured.

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

Some forms of data collection and analysis are becoming obsolete in the face of intelligent technologies such as process mining and AI. For example, it’s not necessary to manually collect information on how a person uses a specific system if the system produces history logs that can be analyzed using processing mining, although it will still add value to see what manual tasks that they perform while using the system.

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Dr. Mathias Kirchmer

Dr. Kirchmer is an experienced practitioner and thought leader in the field of Digital Transformation and Business Process Management (BPM). He co-founded BPM-D, a consulting company focusing on digital process transformation, operational excellence and customer experience by leveraging the discipline of BPM. Before he was Managing Director and Global Lead of BPM at Accenture, and CEO of the Americas and Japan of IDS Scheer, known for its ARIS Process Software.

Dr. Kirchmer has led numerous transformation and process improvement initiatives and has worked with hundreds of clients in technology, financial, health, consumer goods and manufacturing industries. He has published 11 books and over 150 articles. He is affiliated faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and received a research and teaching fellowship from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.
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Twitter: @mtki2006

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

Here are five key skills I see for 2020 in the field of business process management (BPM):

* Digital Transformation – Creating Value through Process: The value of digital transformations is realized through new or significantly improved processes. Hence, BPM is a main enabler for successful digitalization initiatives. This requires the skill of integrated process analysis and design, to align digital technologies, people, and physical products to provide best value in the context of a specific business strategy. Transformation results are sustained through an ongoing Process of Process Management. Therefore the skills to set-up and run such a BPM-Discipline are important.

* BPM 4.0 – Powered by Digital Accelerators: Organizations establish the fourth generation of BPM, powered by digital accelerators, like integrated modelling and simulation tools, process mining, eLearning or digital transformation management tools. The new and enhanced BPM capabilities deliver significant value by simplifying and aligning processes with strategic goals – fast and at minimal risk. Therefore organizations need to build up skills not only in the use of such digital process management tools but in combining them to achieve best outcomes.

* Smart Automation – Business-centric and Agile: Business-outcomes are achieved by combing the appropriate automation components, such as workflow automation, robotic process automation (RPA), optical character recognition (OCR), machine learning (ML) or other artificial intelligence (AI) components, and traditional applications. This is about systematically automating business processes in an end-to-end context, delivering quick results through agile approaches. Digital software-based process reference models help to understand and plan the business impact of the automation and enable a rapid and standardized roll-out of digital processes. This requires skills in those automation technologies as well as in the business-driven combination, including the development and use of digitalization reference models.

* Stakeholder Experience – an Outside-in View through Integrated Journey Planning: An outside-in view on processes to identify the most relevant improvement objectives becomes an important part of transformation initiatives. Journey mapping approaches, integrated with underlying business processes, are enablers. Customer journey planning as well as supplier or employee journey maps are increasingly used to achieve best experience of key stakeholders of an organization. This requires journey mapping skills as well as skills to integrate those maps with underlying processes and improve them appropriately.

* Process Governance – People are Key: The limiting factor for increasing process performance are people – not digital technologies. Process governance provides the necessary guidance and the right degree of freedom for people to realize their full potential. This is necessary to resolve complex exception cases, align people and robots through hybrid workforce management and keep processes on track. Process governance defines the right roles, responsibilities and governance processes. Digitalization and the volatile business environment force organizations to put more emphasis on this topic and build appropriate skills.

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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Holly Lyke-Ho-Gland

Building on more than 10 years of business research and consulting experience, Holly Lyke-Ho-Gland is a principal research lead who conducts and publishes APQC research on process management and improvement, quality, project management, measurement, and benchmarking for APQC’s Process and Performance Management research team. Her research supports APQC members and clients across disciplines and centers on helping professionals and project managers solve business problems with strategy, process and measurement.

Holly regularly partners with other APQC research leads to look at improving the end-to-end business processes in areas such as procure-to-pay or order-to-cash where true improvement rests in the entire process versus one functional department. On a biannual basis, she conducts APQC’s extensive research survey and report on The Value of Benchmarking as well as annual surveys and reports on how organizations adopt and use the Process Classification Framework®.

WWW: https://www.apqc.org
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What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

People skills are essential. Year-over-year the biggest challenges unearthed in our annual priorities survey are people challenges—buy-in, resistance, and culture. While so much relies on technology solutions these days, we can’t lose sight of the fact that everything we do in BPM still has a human element. Hence change skills and engagement remain some of the most relevant skills for practitioners in 2020.
We also conducted a study on the people of process and they identified the following four skills as must develops over the next 18 months:
1. Human-centric Design—techniques like design thinking and ethnography which are founded on the idea that people design products and services and don’t know what the client really wants or needs. Hence organizations can use empathic design methods like observation, interviews, immersion, and guiding concepts to link unknown or intangible needs with the organization’s capabilities and provide optimal customer or end-user value.
2. Innovation—the capacity for innovation is the ability to quickly recognize and address emerging needs and opportunities. Individuals with this competency also have the agility to learn and apply methodologies—like design thinking, systems thinking, and adaptive leadership—for a structured approach to innovation.
3. Technology Fluency—the understanding of new and emerging technologies. This does not mean you have to be able to create them but understand their features and applications as well as their limitations.
4. Data Management—is a blanket term for the management of the entire data lifecycle in an organization, including governance, integrity, and warehousing. This is also the biggest technology challenge that organizations face and it’s of vital importance because as we move to data-driven decision making we must ensure we have accessible, high-quality data to use in analytics and to support technologies like automation and machine learning or AI.

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

There are so many options available to fit everyone’s learning style. In the same study we found that people tend to rely predominantly on three resources: formal training programs, certification programs (mainly Lean, Six Sigma, or project management), and online continuing education courses (for “newer” skills and methodologies like UX design, customer journey mapping, and machine learning).

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

Personally, don’t like to think that any skill is irrelevant, just not a fit for the current project. That said in the people of process study the majority of respondents indicated that software development and programming skills were unnecessary for their work. In the early days of automation and AI work there was an initial influx of process professionals looking into developing these skills. However, vendors have taken steps to develop low code or plug-and-play software that requires processes and business rules understanding, rather than in-depth coding.

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Juergen Pitschke

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

Juergen has more than 25 years industrial experience about enterprise modelling and the realization of Business and IT Architectures. He is recognized for his deep knowledge and the systematic use of visual standard notations and of different frameworks für the design of an Enterprise Architecture. His knowledge is often sought in the field of Business Process Management and Decision Management.

His focus are model-based approaches for enterprise design and their practical use. Clients value his abilities to explain concepts, to help teams to adopt and successfully apply such methods, and to guide projects successfully.

He is author of the book “Unternehmensmodellierung für die Praxis”. He translated the Business Process Manifesto, the Decision Management Manifesto, and the RuleSpeak® – approach into German.

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, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

Modelling is an important skill in Business Process Management. This stays valid. But Modelling is not management. As John Zachman always says: “If you can’t describe it, you can’t build it.” It is the base and must be accompanied with many other skills and techniques.
After describing the business processes and business decisions it is not only important to implement and automate. We also need to measure for all kind of views. Measure the performance, in implementing and automation we have to define the priority, we have to classify for risk. The list goes on. Depending on our project charter we classify and manage for very different views.
Accordingly notations showing the relationships between business process management, business decision and very different views are more popular in the customer base. In the same direction tools develop more and more into architecture tools offering features for describing the needed artefacts and features for analyzes, implementation and simulation and so on. Do we still need “pure” BPM tools? Or are the market and the needed skills changing (merging with?) to architecture management?
Classification of business processes, business decisions and other artefacts is important. See my blog post “Classify, Classify, Classify, …” from October. Finding good classifications supports prioritization and other tasks.

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

Roger Tregear, Reimagining Management: Putting Process at the Center of Business Management ISBN 978-0-6480049-0-5
If you didn’t read it before, I suggest you take the chance. Maybe it turns into a classic. Especially the PO and PI circle is appealing. What do we do to improve if our current process seems to be perfect and no further improvement can be seen?
In the field of Business Decision Management you find some updates.
E.g. for the “Business Decision Management Manifesto (see http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/what-is-decision-management/the-decision-management-manifesto/) and the book from James Taylor (“Digital Decisioning” ISBN 978-0-929652-64-1). Both reflect news in the application of Business Decision Management in the light of Artificial Intelligence.
As said before using standard notations is a benefit. I see more often that customers just use an element from an existing notation because it has a nice name and use their own meaning. They define their own notation. Doing so you lose the benefits of the standard notations. Using elements e.g. from TOGAF and Archimate requires some work and learning. For TOGAF/Archimate you find a rich literature from The Open Group®. For the OMG-standard notations you find a rich literature too.

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

I had big hopes for CMMN two years ago. I still think it is important. But it seems it is only used by some tool vendors and users.

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Brian Reale

Brian Reale is a serial entrepreneur. Brian founded a telecommunications company in 2000 called Unete Telecomunicaciones which provided, voice, data, and satellite services in Latin America. Brian sold Unete to a publicly traded US telecom company in 2000. Brian was also the co-founder of Spotless LLC, an entertainment technology company that developed projection mapping technology for major live entertainment industries.

Brian has been involved in the workflow and BPM industry since he co-founded ProcessMaker in 2000. ProcessMaker is a leading open source BPM suite which has just released its 4th generation product – a modern lightweight BPM designed for both human tasks and microservices orchestration. The ProcessMaker BPMS has been recognized with numerous awards and pushes the bounds of BPM with a fundamental belief that process management can be simple, elegant, and easy to use.

Brian graduated magna cum laude from Duke University in 1993 and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in linguistics in Ecuador in 1994.

WWW: https://www.processmaker.com
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Twitter: @processmaker

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

1. ML/AI– Machine learning will grow significantly in 2020. High volume processes can see great returns from AI that is used to automate the decision making process. The objective is to reduce the requirements for humans to be involved in decision making. If a business can clearly see that a purchase request gets approved 99.5% of the time under XY and Z conditions, then it should use ML to automate that decision point. The efficiency gains from such improvements will be significant.

2. RPA – RPA and BPM will begin to consolidate. In fact, it is already happening. This will accelerate. Although technology has gotten more and more specialized, IT budgets have not grown significantly and hence cannot handle so many new tools from a cost perspective. Consolidation can help vendors deliver more value at a lower cost to customers. Customers will not want to continue buying RPA and BPM from separate vendors.

3. Low Code – Everyone will continue to push to position their suite as low code. However, customers are starting to realize that pure low code suites have a lot of drawbacks. Developers are not dead or dying…not in 2020. Pure low code tools will continue to deliver poor UI and system flexibility which will mean Low Code tools that offer an experience both for business analysts and developers will thrive. The operative term will be “Low Code Delivery Model” meaning that Business Analysts don’t deal with code but can assign certain types of work to developers when and if desired.

4. Microservices and event-driven architectures – This will continue to grow in 2020. There is a lot of legacy code and legacy BPM suites in the market. Many have not been renewed and are not based on true event-driven architectures. Customers will begin to demand new architectures that scale and deliver a true micro services experience.

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

The RPA vendors are doing a great job of opening up their learning platforms. They will push traditional BPM, Rules, and other vendors to do the same.

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

As I said last year, RPA will not replace BPM. RPA will continue to generate disillusionment in 2020 because of the hype these toolsets have created. However, consolidation between BPM and RPA has the possibility of delivering true results.

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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. He is a Past President of the UK chapter of the IIBA® and he speaks internationally on topics relating to business analysis and business change. Adrian wrote the 2016 book ‘Be a Great Problem Solver… Now’ and the 2018 book ‘Business Analyst’

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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What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

My background is business analysis, so I suspect I’ll come at this question from a slightly different perspective compared to some of the other contributors. For me, the skills, behaviors and attitudes are largely unchanged; the increasing challenge is to select relevant techniques and adapt our practice to the specific organizational context that we find ourselves in. There was perhaps a time when a lot of what we did could be guided by “standard best practice”. There is still a place for utilizing elements of carefully cultivated “tried and tested” practice, of course, and I’m certainly not advocating re-inventing the wheel. However, more and more I am finding the art is for us as practitioners to adapt our methodology and carefully select our methods and tools and techniques for the situation, to monitor how it is working and then adapt accordingly. Put differently: With a fast-moving world, organizations are needing to adapt how they operate, and our discipline is no different.

This is against the backdrop of the inevitable emergence of “buzzword-heavy” approaches that are so often presented as if they are rigid and “one-size-fits-all” (even if the creators of those approaches protest that that was never the intention!) I suppose there will always be a certain attraction of metaphorical silver bullets that will solve all organizational ills, and I think it’s important that we hold a sensible level of skepticism around these types of claim. The fact that an approach, methodology or pattern worked previously for a completely different company shouldn’t lead us to (automatically) assume it would work for us without analysis and adaptation. In short, understanding context is everything. This reflective (or even reflexive) approach of adapting to what we do will, in my view, become even more important as the pace of environmental and organizational change increases.

In terms of behaviors specifically, I think ethics has (sometimes) been overlooked in our discipline and is (quite rightly) re-emerging at the forefront. We ought to be ensuring that marginalized stakeholders are represented, and understanding not just the “business benefit” of pursuing certain options but also the “stakeholder impact” (positive or negative). Ultimately, we need to design services and processes that work for a whole range of different stakeholders, and balancing needs, wants and expectations often brings in questions about ethics. In my view it’s right that we address these types of concern directly.

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

There are so many resources, certainly courses, and e-learning are excellent ways of keeping up-to-date. It has to be said, also, that conferences are a great way of staying up-to-date with developments; and it’s also really enlightening to look at other professional journals/events/websites. There are so many disciplines aiming to design, change or improve organizations or situations, I can’t help thinking that we can learn more from each other. Some of the best learning points come from conversations or extra-curricular collaboration!

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

So much is down to context, I don’t think there’s a hard and fast rule. I suppose it is for us each as individual practitioners to assess and decide what works for the specific and unique set of circumstances that we find ourselves in!

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Pedro Robledo

BPM Trusted Advisor, Professor and Industry Analyst, BPMteca & UNIR, President of ABPM Spanish Chapter, Spain.

Pedro Robledo is one of the most influential Spanish thought leaders in Process Management using BPM. He has been dedicated to promote industry awareness of Business Process Management in Spain and Latin America for over 21 years. Mr. Robledo is Director of Master’s Degree in Business Process Management for Digital Transformation and Master’s Degree in Strategic Process Management in Universidad Internacional de la Rioja (UNIR). As BPM Advisor, Consultant and Trainer, he helps Organizations in its Enterprise Architecture, BPMN Modeling, BPM and Digital Transformation initiatives. He is a frequent speaker and presenter at international BPM workshops and conferences. Since 2013, he participates as jury of the WfMC Awards for Excellence in BPM and Workflow. Mr. Robledo is currently an active participant in the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Research Group in UNIR. He holds a Bachelor of Computer Science from the Polytechnic University of Madrid. He writes his own blog about BPM and Digital Transformation (http://pedrorobledobpm.blogspot.com.es). And he regularly participates as a speaker on BPM in congresses and seminars at national and international level. He is currently researching on Process Simulation, and the application of Artificial Intelligence (Machine Learning) in Process Management

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What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

Automation will be more present in all businesses as the immense data collections cannot be handled manually in every company. The effect of Digital Transformation and Process Digitalization makes companies think or carry out automation projects. The processes and the quality of the data play a key role both in the digital transformation and in the digitalization of the value chain of an organization. If there are predictable low-value repetitive tasks without human participation, we can think about the automation using RPA (Robotic Process Automation), and the global RPA services market will reach $ 7.7 billion next year and will grow to $ 12 billion in 2023, according to Forrester. In the processes from beginning to end, there will be human participation that makes decisions, so RPA will not be the automation solution, and it should be required to consider BPM technologies. Gartner’s predictions indicate that automation continues to deliver on the promises of improved cost and higher effectiveness for the clients of infrastructure service providers, and by 2020, more than 50% of current manual operational tasks in infrastructure managed services will be replaced by intelligent automation services.

So, focused on Automation, technical BPM professionals will have to get skills on BPM technologies to orchestrate and automate end-to-end process where there are participation of people, machines, systems and apps; RPA to automate repetitive activities that do not require human participation; BRMS to automate business rules that facilitate decision making in workflows; Integration skills (ESB, Microservices…), to connect the tasks of the processes with systems, data and intelligent things; and Intelligent Automation to automate using machine learning algorithms.

Companies cannot forget that the Business Process Management is a management discipline and not a technical project. So, if companies would like to have success in the current digital ecosystem will need to be focused on Process Oriented Company. For that, they will need to create BPM Center of Excellence with people who has BPM Technical Skills in all BPM Life Cycle, and also the following key two competencies: Transformational Skills: BPM Business Case Management, Project Management, Change Organizational Techniques, Process Improvement Methodologies (Lean, SixSigma and Theory of Constraints), Risk Management; and Operational Skills: Process Mining, BPMN/DMN/CMMN Modeling / Analysis /Simulation, Process Government, Operational Intelligence, BPM Methodology and techniques.

In Digital Transformation, the emergent technologies will be required to create new business models, so companies will have to integrate these disruptive technologies (AI, 3D printed, IoT, Blockchain, Edge Computing…) in the value chain, so it means BPM technicians will need skills to integrate them in the current core processes and new ones.

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

The need for BPM professionals worldwide and especially in Spain and Latin America is growing by 18% and more than 66% of the positions demanded in Business Process Management (BPM) are not currently being covered. To help on this, I contribute as director of two online University courses in Spanish for postgraduates in UNIR (Universidad Internacional de la Rioja based in Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador): Master’s Degree in Business Process Management for Digital Transformation, which covers the entire BPM life cycle, focusing not only on the Business part, but with an extensive scope in the BPM Technology part and its key role in the Digital Transformation of an organization; and Master’s Degree in Strategic Process Management which covers the advanced knowledge about the tools and techniques necessary to achieve the excellence of the operations and processes of any organization, contributing both to its growth and its continuous and sustained development. And I have founded ABPMP chapter in Spain in 2019, in order to push the ABPMP’s BPM CBOK to maintain the global standard for BPM practices and certification. And via ABPMP Spain and as BPM freelance Consultant we are providing ad-hoc BPM training by example to help companies in their growth on their business process maturity.

And as I have noted that IT Service Management requires the automation of IT Service Processes using frameworks and standards as COBIT, PRINCE, ITIL, COSO, ISO20000… I have joined to itSMF Spain as Team Leader of ITSM4BPM to best practices, standards and experiences related to applied BPM on service management and IT governance.
In my blog (http://pedrorobledobpm.blogspot.com.es), I have some posts with bibliography by BPM topics.

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

All BPM skills are relevant and they are applicable yet.

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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 Red Hat’s business automation products. 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
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @RedHatNews

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

RPA, RPA and RPA!!

Ok, that’s a little overblown, but Robotic Process Automation has risen to the top of many enterprise IT buyers’ wish lists for 2020, and rightly or wrongly is often seen as an alternative to BPM. Those of us in the business may hotly dispute the value of RPA (just a band-aid, etc.), but the reality is that RPA skills are in high demand, and it certainly will not hurt your career to gain some experience with the leading products. Having said that, it’s worth recognizing that artificial intelligence in all its many forms is continuing to make inroads into business automation projects. BPM technologies are now often augmented with cognitive capabilities, especially of the machine learning variety. My advice: Expand your knowledge of AI so that you can contribute more effectively as your business automates and digitizes more and more of its operations.

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

There are plenty of online resources for learning about RPA. A couple I might suggest would be the RPA groups on LinkedIn (here & here), and the Institute for RPA & AI. There are also lots of meetup groups. If you want to get deeper into machine learning there are many online tutorials, but Google’s ML crash course is a good place to start. If you are a BPM practitioner, find out what your BPM platform vendors are doing with AI, and think about how it could be applied to improve your business outcomes.

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

As I said last year, I wouldn’t ‘unlearn’ anything, but look to augment your BPM skills with an understanding of new technologies so that you can lead the way to more automated digital business.

On the hype side, I note that last year I also recommended learning about Blockchain. Rather than ramping up in 2019 it seems that the noise around Blockchain has quietened down. It’s still a potentially game-changing technology, but perhaps now will take longer to mature than we first thought.

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Jim Sinur

Jim Sinur is an independent thought leader in applying Digital Business Platforms (DBP), Customer Experience/Journeys (CJM), Business Process Management (BPM), Automation (RPA), Low-code and Decision Management at the edge to business outcomes. His research and areas of personal experience focus on intelligent business processes, business modeling, business process management technologies, process collaboration for knowledge workers, process intelligence/optimization, AI applied to business policy/rule management, IoT and leveraging business applications in processes. Jim is also a contributor to Forbes in the area of AI. Jim is also one of the authors of BPM: The Next Wave. His latest book is Digital Transformation. Innovate or Die Slowly. Jim is also a well know digital and traditional artist.

WWW: https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/people/jimsinur/
WWW: http://www.james-sinur.com/
WWW: http://jimsinur.blogspot.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @JimSinur

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

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 Visualization Capabilities. Process plus big, fast and dark process/data mining is growing to be more important. Decision Models will become more important as the integrate with process models
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 at the edge (often needed for agility, IoT and business strategy). IoT integration is a new emerging theme. This can be taken to the level of digital twins
7) Merging Control on the Edge with Central Control. Decisions and actions at the edge is starting to emerge. This includes process, AI and RPA at the edge

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 only approaches with siloed skill sets. More lateral thinking is and collaborative control is needed today.
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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James Taylor

James is founder and CEO of Decision Management Solutions and a leading expert in decision management and digital decisioning. Experienced working with machine learning, business rules, predictive analytics and AI to improve operational systems. Published author – Digital Decisioning: Using Decision Management to Deliver Business Impact from AI, Real-World Decision Modeling with DMN and others – strategy consultant, writer and speaker.

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

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

The best thing I think BPM practitioners could do would be to embrace digital decisioning. We have been digitizing our businesses for a long time now and have succeeded in digitizing our channels, our data and our processes. But too often we are failing to digitize the decisions that use our digital data, support our digital channels and drive our digital processes straight through most efficiently.
Digital decisioning is a way to deliver smarter, simpler and more dynamic processes while effectively applying predictive analytics, machine learning and AI – not to the process itself, but to the critical decisions on which the process relies. Digital decisioning involves identifying and modeling decisions, automating them in decision services that combine machine learning with business rules, and creating a continuous improvement infrastructure for them. It delivers consistent, easy to manage, precise and data-driven decisioning throughout your business.

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

Obviously I think my new book Digital Decisioning: Using Decision Management to Deliver Business Impact from AI is the best resource for Digital Decisioning but there are also some great papers from John Rymer and Mike Gualtieri at Forrester and some good resources from Gartner too (under their Decision Management topic). My blog and company blog have plenty on this topic too.

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

Attempting to apply business rules, predictive analytics or machine learning/AI directly to business processes should count as irrelevant these days. While you can apply these technologies to processes directly, the evidence that they work so much better when applied to automate and manage decision-making explicitly is overwhelming. Applying a decision management approach with the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard and delivering digital decisioning is the future.

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The post BPM Skills in 2020 – Hot or Not (part 1) first appeared on BPM Tips.

Building Business Capability 2019

Zbigniew — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 20:28:12 +0000

BPM Tips is a proud media partner of Building Business Capability 2019, the official conference of the IIBA.

BBC is a very unique conference since it supports you in a pursuit of business excellence by providing insight into topics such as Digital Innovation, Business Analysis, Business Process Management and Business Architecture, Business Decisions & Rules, as well as Business Strategy and Transformation.

Since this is a 10th anniversary edition expect lots of cool stuff: 5 days, 17 tracks, 28 tutorials, 130 sessions, over 170 speakers (including people you know also from BPM Tips roundup posts and interviews like: Adrian Reed, Alec Sharp, Angela Wick, Denis Gagne, Gladys Lam, Jacob Feldman, James Taylor, Jan Vanthienen, Kupe Kupersmith, Laura Brandenburg, Mathias Kirchmer, Roger Burlton, Roger Tregear and Ronald Ross) and more than 1500 delegates from all over the world!

If you want to attend, code “BPMBBC” will give you 15% discount.
The post Building Business Capability 2019 first appeared on BPM Tips.

Back to school 2019: free online courses for BPM professionals

Zbigniew — Thu, 19 Sep 2019 20:23:37 +0000

Since holidays are over, it’s time for a new edition of this post (You can also read the past editions from 2018, 2017, 2016, and 2015).

Fundamentals of BPM

As you may recall in a last year edition of this post I wrote that 2 great MOOCs by professors Marcello La Rosa, Marlon Dumas, Jan Mendling and Hajo A. Reijers (available on Future Learn and QUT) are no longer available, but this should change in 2019.

While (sadly) there is still no possibility to sign up for those courses in a normal form I have a great news for you!

You can access all the videos via Fundamentals of BPM website:

http://fundamentals-of-bpm.org/mooc/

(you need to look for part “Links to all video materials are available here (Copyright 2015-2017, Queensland University of Technology. All rights reserved).”).

Those links will lead you to PDFs with links to the videos.

UPDATE:
Professor La Rosa kindly allowed me to present content of those PDFs in a form more convenient for you.

Materials from a short introductory MOOC, “Business Process Management: An Introduction to Process Thinking“ (about 1,5 hours!) are available on a following pages:

Business Process Management: An Introduction to Process Thinking – Week 1

Business Process Management: An Introduction to Process Thinking – Week 2

Business Process Management: An Introduction to Process Thinking – Week 3

Stay tuned for similar presentation of materials from a comprehensive MOOC “Fundamentals of Business Process Management”!

Apart from those two awesome courses you can also expand your horizons using other sources. Since there were no significant changes there you can use my previous post.

In the following weeks I will update this post with more information about other interesting courses and materials useful for people interested in BPM.

But before then, I wanted to share additional news with you

BPM Tips is a Media Partner of the Building Business Capability 2019 conference.

If you plan to attend BBC 2019 the following code “BPMBBC” will give you 15% discount.

More info about this coming soon!

The post Back to school 2019: free online courses for BPM professionals first appeared on BPM Tips.

BPM Skills in 2019 – Hot or Not

Zbigniew — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 18:13:27 +0000

Chances are you have big plans for this year. But how to make those plans turn into reality?

Even brightest idea does not transform into results without:

a) Good old-fashioned hard work

b) Knowledge what to do and how to do it.

I cannot help you with point a, but for point b…

As in previous years I prepared for you answers from experts about hot skills for process/automation professionals.

If you want to get more context take a look also at the 2018, 2017 (plus part 2), and 2016 version of this post.

You may also enjoy predictions for 2019 from top influencers at BPM.com.

Which BPM skills will be hot in 2019?

Below you can find answers from 20+ BPM experts. You can either read everything or use the navigation below. Enjoy!

Lloyd Dugan
Marlon Dumas
Ian Gotts
Barbara Hodge
Cristian Ivănuș
Emiel Kelly
Mathias Kirchmer
Harald Kühn
Bob Larrivee
Holly Lyke-Ho-Gland
John Mancini
Connie Moore
Juergen Pitschke
Brian Reale
Adrian Reed
Pedro Robledo
Michal Rosik
Pramod Sachdeva
Suresh Sambandam
Phil Simpson
Jim Sinur
Shik Sundar
Keith Swenson
Miguel Valdés-Faura
Leslie Willcocks

Now, let’s dive into the answers.

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.

WWW: BPM.com
WWW: LI profile

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

Modeling skills remain key, but BPMN is still key as it has new life in describing the procedural/algorithmic business logic being automated as first-gen RPA. (In first-gen RPA, existing applications are re-purposed as more efficient STP processing sequences, avoiding the need for more invasive and disruptive refactoring.) However, BPMN as the dominant modeling language is giving ground to DMN (and a bit to CMMN) as more of the spectrum of structured vs. unstructured business processes are addressed by BPM practitioners. (Integrated modeling with all 3 languages is also gaining ground, as the effort between the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Mayo clinic, and various academic institutions showcases this in health care situations.) Model management skills are emerging as key, in which business processes in an enterprise can have both standard forms and field-level variants, all of which are to be understood together. Grounding in Business Architecture disciplines is also a key skill nowadays, requiring BPM practitioners to know how to create/apply value streams, capability maps, and customer journey maps that cross-reference process models as part of BPM work.

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

Books and training courses are available for all of these skill sets, but supporting tools required some savvy to find. Only a handful of process modeling tools support all 3 standards, and pocess model management is still only enabled by a subset of the process modeling tools out there. BPM aggregator sites as well as vendor sites are rich sources of best practices, available webinars, etc. for learning these skills. Business Architecture skills really require some training, or apprenticing at the side of actual Business Architects.

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

BPM skills are still relevant and practical, but DMN (and, to a lesser extent, CMMN) are increasingly more relevant and practical (especially as use becomes more commonplace). As always, BPM as a discipline requires analytical skill sets at least as much as those required by the automation engines. However, as these engines are increasingly “low coding”, meaning that more and more of the design work is less and less development on technical developer skill sets, the BPM practitioner will be increasingly pulled into automation design work. Work with RPA will drive this extension even further, but more work with the technology needs to occur for critical masses of best practices to accumulate in sufficient quantities to make this skill set practically applicable.

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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.

WWW: WWW
WWW: LI profile
What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

Broad-ranged data science skills have become an essential wrench in the toolbox of process analysts. In the past two years, process mining and predictive process monitoring techniques have proven their value in a wide range of industries. Mastering these techniques is becoming imperative.

Strong competition from lean and highly specialized post-startup companies are a major challenge for traditional players (fintech, insurtech, agritech, etc.). A key advantage of traditional players is their ability to offer integrated and broad-ranged products. Skills in business process integration are likely to become valuable in 2019 and beyond. The need for integration is one of the key drivers behind robotic process automation. Companies need to glue together multiple (legacy) systems and break across silos faster than what can be achieved with full-scale IT integration projects. Skills in design and development of proactive services will be particularly valuable in the coming years.

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

First of all, in these times of rapid change, it is important to get the foundations right. Harmon’s Business Process Change, Franz and Kirchmer’s Value-Driven Business Process Management, vom Brocke and Rosemann’s Handbook of Business Process Management, and (sorry for the self-promotion) the Fundamentals of BPM, are references worth keeping at hand. Davenport’s recent writings on AI and robotic process automation, particularly those based on case studies, are a good complement to keep up with ongoing trends.

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

In the past two years, blockchain technology has been touted as a possible solution to long-standing cross-organizational business process integration problems. However, it appears that the current generation of blockchain technology will take a few more years of refinement to fulfill its promises. Skills in cross-organizational process integration using blockchain might be useful in future, but they will not be broadly applicable in the medium-term.

Big Data and AI have fallen victims of over-hype. Big Data skills are needed, but in relatively specialized settings. AI skills (beyond machine learning skills for predictive analytics) might become useful for process automation in a few years time, but again they will not be broadly applicable in the medium-term. Let’s hope that the over-hyping of AI will not result in a backslash as it did in the late 80s. There is a lot of latent value in the emerging generation of AI technology (e.g. chatbots), but due to its complexity, AI technology needs incremental adoption driven by a long-term vision.

We should never forget that process automation (and this is particularly true of AI-driven automation) is never total nor does it come for free. It comes with exception handling costs, contingency management costs, maintenance costs, integration costs, flexibility loss, etc. The cracks of automation are wider than we think. Those who master the skill of filling these cracks will be in a strong position to deliver value in their companies in the coming 5 years.

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Ian Gotts

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

Elements.cloud helps customers clean-up, document and build their app implementations, focused on Salesforce. But valid for any low code app platform, esp as the process mapping is free, for ever, for everyone.
WWW: https://medium.com/@Q9ELEMENTS
WWW: elements.cloud
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @iangotts

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

Business analysis, critical questioning, challenging status quo (esp at senior level). 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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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.
Barbara uses her extensive industry knowledge and connections to provide a unique perspective on the latest trends and developments across the SS&O landscape. She is the voice of ssonetwork.com, SSON’s online content portal, and she regularly conducts interviews with key industry figures to ensure SSON is a one-stop shop for shared services and outsourcing resources.
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 2019?

The trend this year is toward Centers of Excellence as the key levers of process productivity and process performance. According to SSON’s 2019 industry survey, more than two thirds of shared services have chosen to set up COEs.
In addition, automation is of course a critical strategy and is fast becoming “the way business is being done”. This means that processes are becoming more reliable, cost-effective, and standardized with less deviation.

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

SSON online (www.ssonetwork.com) It is the most trusted online resource for executives tasked with process performance. As such we host webinars, white papers, networking activities at our conferences around the world, and various other opportunities to share best practices across the industry.

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

One trend that is certainly being hyped up, although not without reason, is the appetite for evolved intelligent automation solutions such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. These types of skills [i.e. automation centric] will become significantly more important. Connected to this will be skilled around data analytics that emerged from automation. However, to answer your question more correctly, the traditional functional skills will perhaps become proportionately less important as automation takes over rules-based work, and centers of excellence hone functional and process-based expertise. While additional “process expertise” is therefore taken over by technology, humans can shift their attention to value adding analytics based competencies.

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Cristian Ivănuș

Cristian Ivanus is a BPM Solutions Architect & RPA Practice Lead at NTT DATA Romania.

Cristian is also managing the Romanian ABPMP Chapter.

WWW: LI profile

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

I consider that along the years, BPM practitioners should learn continuously and improve techniques from the real projects. BPM practitioners should be able to understand both business and technical aspects of this management discipline having in mind the actual trends in the global business, so called “digital transformation”.

Digital transformation roadmap of any company should include, in my opinion, a dedicated stage for describing and documenting existing processes in the business followed by clear plans for automation using BPM Software, Robotic Process Automation or other software tools and techniques for improving the quality of the business and getting more value.

In the list of mandatory skills for BPM practitioners I would include:
– Process discovery skills.
Because understanding BPM concepts is not always formalized in many companies, prior to any initiative, people who are part of the process (process owners, process controllers, performers and any other roles involved along the pathway of the process), awareness session should be the entry point in the project. The aim of this session is to create a common understanding of the processes amongst the participants. At the end of this session, people should be able to define the list of the processes of the company organized in three categories (core processes, support processes and management processes).

– Process analysis skills
Process analysis is one of the most important skills that must be demonstrated by BPM practitioners because the quality of the analysis is the key factor for identification of optimization or improvement initiatives. Main tool for analysis is the direct interview with the process participants. Process analyst should have the ability to “extract” from interlocutors appropriate details for modeling the process, because the aim is to create the abstract representation of the process steps and the interfaces between different other processes. Another tool required in the process analysis phase is a modeling tool. Personally, I am using BPMN 2.0 for process modeling because using this standard it is possible to identify and represent process details at the most detailed level.

Apart from the analytical and technical skills, process analyst should have few behavioral skills like patience, ability to listen and empathy. This will create an invisible link between process analysts and process participants.

– Lean and/or Six Sigma skills.
In many cases, lean and/or six sigma skills will help practitioners to identify deep process problems applying specific techniques like: identify waste, apply root cause analysis for process problems, use experimental solution design, measurement and control of the process variations, etc.

These advanced tools should be chosen when traditional improvements techniques are not applicable.

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

There is no a comprehensive list of resources that can be used. There are a lot of excellent books that may be used as a reference for learning or completing the skills. Amongst these books (the list is not exhaustive, of course) I would recommend:
– Business Process Management: Practical Guidelines to Successful Implementations by John Jeston;
– Fundamentals of Business Process Management by Marlon Dumas, Marcello La Rosa, Jan Mendling and Hajo A. Reijers;
– BPMN 2.0 by Thomas Allweyer;
– Business Analysis by James Cadle, Malcom Eva, Keith Hindle & others.

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

I would say that skills are evolving. The complexity of the businesses requires a deep understanding of the methodological framework for providing appropriate solutions for business processes improvements.

Combining business skills with vision about appropriate technology solution that may be applied, will offer any BPM initiative the satisfaction for better and performant processes.

The essential skills enumerated in the previous section requires discipline, rigor and tenacity but offers a huge professional satisfaction when measuring the results of the solutions applied for business improvements.

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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.
Emiel is known from his practical and unorthodox approach to BPM.
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 2019?

Processes (and the management of them) brings a lot of aspects of an organization together. I’ve seen a lot of organizations where a lot of separate initiatives work on the same processes without talking to each other, Think about Lean, Datamanagement, Building new systems, Compliance, etc. Sometimes they are even counterproductive.

To me the most important BPM skill is bring those initiatives together, Make organizations understand that working on the same processes from different inititiatives is the new sub uptimization. It’s like making your car very fast by tuning the engine but forget to adjust the suspension and brakes.

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

Not specific, but any resource that helps you to understand what makes a process perform. And that’s not a picture of blocks and arrows,

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

As a BPM professional you have to worry about processes, not about BPM systems, They’re just a means to implement a process the way you want.

Of course it might be interesting to know about techniques like AI, RPA etc, but to me that doesn’t make you a BPM professional but an AI or RPA expert.

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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.
Most recently, Dr. Kirchmer founded BPM-D, a company focused on enabling ongoing digital transformation and strategy execution through the discipline of BPM. Before he was Managing Director and Global Lead of BPM at Accenture, and CEO of the Americas and Japan of IDS Scheer, known for its ARIS Software.
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 2019?

Here are six key skills I see for 2019 and the following years in the field of business process management (BPM):

* Digital Transformation Management: Process management becomes the discipline of digital transformation management, leveraging new technologies as improvement approaches. Hence, BPM practitioners need to prioritize, scope, and execute digital transformation initiatives as well as manage the related value identification and realization. They need to provide the approach to align people, products and processes for the digital world. The BPM-Discipline has to be managed as the value-switch for digital business transformation.
* Focused Agile Process Improvement: The volatile business environment requires a fast adaptive approach to improvements and transformation. However, there is also a big need to set clear direction and focus. The combination of agile principles, like the fast realization of process improvements in different stages, with top down approaches and supporting digital tools, such as process mining or prioritization applications, address those challenges. Integrated customer journey planning becomes a major component of process improvements to ensure an outside-in view and the right degree of standardization. Hence, a new combination of improvement skills is required.
* Value-driven Robotic Process Automation (RPA): RPA continues to close the automation gap of traditional applications to deliver significant efficiency gains and other benefits. However, this requires a thought-through process-led approach that considers up and down-stream effects of (ro)bots and realizes their full potential. BPM practitioners need to provide skills for a systematic approach to realizing value through RPA, leveraging process modelling and repositories, process mining and other process management tools.
* Business Context for Artificial Intelligence (AI): More and more organizations are excited about the potential opportunities of AI and experiment with topics like Machine Learning (ML) or predictive analytics. In the coming months and years a key focus will be on identifying business scenarios to create best value through AI using appropriate data so drive the AI learning process. BPM practitioners need to provide process-led approaches to enable the outcome-driven use of AI.
* Integrated Process and Data Governance: Digital processes are only agile and deliver continued value if they are governed systematically across different departments. The new speed of digital execution accelerates negative effects of bad data quality. Therefore an integrated process and data governance becomes more and more crucial for successful digital processes. Skills do define appropriate governance processes, bodies, collaboration models and their integration into the organizations are very important.
* Hybrid Workforce Management: In the digital enterprise human and digital workforce co-exist. This requires an appropriate management approach to employees who have to resolve more and more often complex exception cases and specific individualized customer requirements. Standard processes are mainly supported through robots – that need to be adjusted and aligned with changing business environments, too. The resulting process-led hybrid workforce management is another key skill process practitioners need to provide.

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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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
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Twitter: @BOC_Group

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

Amongst many others, I see three areas in 2019 where BPM practitioners can create immediate value for their organizations:
1. Compliance
Many organisations need to show compliance to various standards and frameworks, depending on the markets they are acting in and in which type of industry they operate. In compliance initiatives such as data compliance, risk compliance, quality compliance, legal compliance etc., business process descriptions play a central role to provide input for an efficient compliance audit. By re-using existing work, BPM practitioners create immediate value for such initiatives reducing audit efforts and costs.

2. Business Transformation
By extending BPM with aspects from Design Thinking and Storytelling e.g. such as Scenes, BPM practitioners create value for business model decisions and business scenario designs. The same for the transformation of the application and technology architecture e.g. by using BPMN and Archimate in the context of Cyber Physical Systems.

3. Operational Excellence
State-of-the-art technology such as micro-service architectures, API-first approaches, mining and data science techniques allow the easy access to business-relevant runtime data, KPIs, execution frequencies etc. To combine these with business-level process definitions creates value and insight into process performance and gives the foundation for business process improvement e.g. using process simulation.

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

– Open Model Initiative Laboratory (OMiLAB): http://www.omilab.org/
– Storytelling and Storyboards using Scenes: https://experience.sap.com/designservices/approach/scenes
– Archimate Forum: https://www.opengroup.org/archimate-forum
– Microservice Architecture: https://microservices.io/

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.

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Bob Larrivee

Bob Larrivee is the President and Founder of Bob Larrivee Consultancy. With over 34 years in the industry, Bob is a recognized expert in the application of advanced technologies and process improvement to solve business problems and enhance business operations and Technology Jounalist for Document Strategy.

During his career, Bob has developed many training courses, led many projects, and authored hundreds of eBooks, Industry Reports, Blogs, Articles, and Infographics. In addition, Bob has served as host and guest Subject Matter Expert on a wide variety of webinars, Podcasts, Virtual Events, and lectured at in-person seminars and conferences around the globe.

WWW: https://boblarriveeconsulting.com
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Twitter: @BobLarrivee

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

I think that one of the most valuable skills for folks in BPM, is that of being able to accurately map business processes, their information interdependencies, and the actors in a way that aligns to the business, compliance, and customer experience. Once the current state is truly known – most organizations are not fully aware of what is really happening – process improvement and automation can take place. There are many who believe automated process mapping software is the answer but I believe it still takes human insight to answer the question of why things are currently being done in a certain way and identify the potential impact of process change, cultural change, and automation will have on the business and organization.

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Holly Lyke-Ho-Gland

Building on more than 10 years of business research and consulting experience, Holly Lyke-Ho-Gland is a principal research lead who conducts and publishes APQC research on process management and improvement, quality, project management, measurement, and benchmarking for APQC’s Process and Performance Management research team. Her research supports APQC members and clients across disciplines and centers on helping professionals and project managers solve business problems with strategy, process and measurement.

Holly regularly partners with other APQC research leads to look at improving the end-to-end business processes in areas such as procure-to-pay or order-to-cash where true improvement rests in the entire process versus one functional department. On a biannual basis, she conducts APQC’s extensive research survey and report on The Value of Benchmarking as well as annual surveys and reports on how organizations adopt and use the Process Classification Framework®.

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

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

According to both our 2018 and 2019 annual process and performance management priorities surveys BPM practitioners feel that their capabilities need to step up to stay relevant and provide value to their organizations. Namely they need to improve their change management skills and technological savvy:

1. Change management skills—process work, whether it’s tied to broad organizational initiatives or discrete process improvements, requires people change how they execute work. As shepherds of these projects BPM professionals need the tools and techniques necessary to engage people in changes and address resistance.

2. Technology capabilities—given that 75% of organizations are undergoing a digital transformation and BPM teams are tasked with supporting these initiatives, understanding technologies—what they are, what they can do, and just as importantly what they can’t do—is more important than ever before. Often the BPM teams work closely with IT to help identify when an improvement opportunity requires traditional process tools and/or could benefit from things like automation. Hence, BPM professionals need to understand the application of technologies, namely advanced analytics, data management, and process automation.

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

There are several resources available for all these skills and the investment in them depends on the resources and budget you have available. For change management I would recommend seeing if your organization has an Organizational Change Management program or if your HR and Training groups have training available. If not, there are several great books and training programs available depending on the methodology you prefer—Kotter’s 8 Steps and PROSCI/ADKAR are two of my favorite methodologies.

For technology skills, these are much more accessible than they used to be. There are a wide variety of free courses available on all these topics. Many universities and groups like Coursera offer free programs on everything from data management to machine learning. I personally find these types of courses beneficial over books and articles because they are less academic and include lab work where you apply what you learn.

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

I don’t think that any skills are no longer relevant. Even in support of digital and new technology applications organizations still rely on BPM teams for traditional discovery, improvement, and re-engineering of processes. However, in many cases AI is not practically applicable yet. According to this year’s priorities survey only 26% of the organizations plan on investing in AI over the next 18 months. Most organizations are still working on getting their data house in order and building out their analytics capabilities and automation programs.

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John Mancini

John Mancini is the Chief Evangelist and Past President of AIIM. He is a well-known author and speaker on information management and digital transformation. As a frequent keynote speaker, John offers his expertise on Digital Transformation and the struggle to overcome Information Chaos. He blogs under the title Digital Landfill (http://info.aiim.org/digital-landfill), has more than 11,000 Twitter followers, 6,000 LinkedIn followers, and can be found on most social media as @jmancini77. He has published more than 30 e-books, the most recent being:
* Leveraging Deep Learning and Machine Learning Capabilities
* Integrating Content Services into Low Code Applications
* Enhancing Your RPA Implementation with Intelligent Information
* How does the Office 365 Revolution Impact Governance and Process Automation?
* Automating Governance and Compliance
WWW: http://www.aiim.org
WWW: info.aiim.org/digital-landfill
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Twitter: @jmancini77

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

I think the key to creating value for BPM practitioners – both FOR and TO their organizations – is to understand the connections between BPM technologies and other enterprise systems. Some of the “connections” that I feel are particularly valuable:

* An understanding of the role that content and unstructured information plays as the fuel (or the “clog”) for business processes. The management and integration of this content cannot be treated as an afterthought.
* The connections that “big process” technologies like BPM have with tactical process improvement tools like Robotic Process Automation. Some view RPA as a replacement for BPM; I tend to see it as a complement to BPM. Each has their role, and understanding the connections between the two is a skill rising in importance.
* An understanding of the business process itself – and not just the technologies like BPM that help automate it – is increasingly important. As organizations have begun to look at their processes from the outside in rather than from an inside-out technology-centric perspective, it has created the need to view processes more holistically. And that means connections between processes. For example, the uber process of customer acquisition all the way through customer fulfillment is not a single process, but a system that connects multiple processes.

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

When it comes to skills and resources, many know I have a long connection with AIIM, so I have a bias there. But in particular the annual Conference that AIIM does is a great place to explore the connections I mention above and the people charged with making those connections within their organizations. In addition, AIIM’s CIP (Certified Information Professional) is a great place to understand the broader world beyond BPM. At the heart of the CIP is this point – “The value-add for information technology in organizations is rapidly shifting from the technology per se to the stewardship, optimization, and application of the information assets themselves. It has changed how we think about enterprise information and IT – and changed how we think about the kinds of skills needed to adapt to these changes.”

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

I don’t know that I think about particular skills as being irrelevant as I do particular mindsets. And by that I mean a technology-centric mindset rather than a business-centric one. If there has ever been a time in which the business needs to lead when it comes to technology strategy, it’s now.

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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

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

Large-scale business transformation projects invariably require a multidisciplinary team comprising individuals who bring different tools, experiences, perspectives and insights to the table. This creates two immediate challenges for business process professionals that are typically steeped in Lean, Six Sigma and business process modeling:

1. In addition to their own expertise, BPM professionals often need to cross-train in their co-workers’ methodologies and tools so that everyone at least has a cursory knowledge of how the different approaches fit together across multi-faceted project teams.
2. Increasingly, the knowledge, methodologies and tooling that most business process practitioners possess isn’t sufficient—they also need to master new customer-centric skills and new technologies, such as robotic process automation, that continue to emerge.

Figure 1 shows the four broad disciplines/job titles that typically comprise a large business process project: 1) business stakeholder, 2) customer experience, 3) technology and 4) business process[i]. In keeping with the times, the new initiatives being launched may not even be called business process transformation efforts; they may instead be customer experience or digital transformation efforts. Or, just as easily, it could be called something else—say, next-generation customer service or an omnichannel initiative. The point we need to recognize is that while business process skills are still vitally important, a pure business process focus on largely internal processes may no longer be the organization’s top priority.

And that’s okay, because as every Lean practitioner knows, organizations must start with an outside-in customer viewpoint. In many organizations, it’s Chief Customer Officer (or some other CXO title) who drives business process change as part of a larger customer experience or digital experience transformation initiative. Process professionals need to recognize and accept this reality.

So what new skills needed are needed? Business transformation practitioners must double down on new areas, depending on where they report:

* Business stakeholders are increasingly asked to help with digital transformation efforts, which may require learning about voice of the customer and customer journey mapping, in addition to their more traditional role of providing business stakeholder insights. And independent of what tools they need to master, these professionals will be asked to look at transformation from the customer’s perspective rather than concentrating on more traditional internal improvements.

* Customer experience practitioners of all stripes are in high demand as companies develop and implement their digital transformation roadmap. These individuals, who may be part of a small CX group or embedded within business or IT, help develop a firm’s digital transformation strategy by conducting voice of the customer sessions, creating customer journey strategies and completing journey maps. This can be a tall order; organizations may have 200-500+ customer journeys. Interestingly, there are strong parallels between customer journey mapping and business process modeling. Inevitably, these types of tools will increasingly overlap. Put simply, journey maps look at processes from the customer’s vantage while process modeling typically analyzes the “to be” for internal steps. Some organizations already use process modeling tools for journey mapping, which illustrates how the different disciplines are now overlapping from a skills and training perspective. For this reason, customer experience teams must work more closely with process professionals, and vice versa—and they will need to learn each other’s tooling. Additionally, some power-users in the business may need to learn how to create scripts for robotic process automation.

[i] Organizational change management is vitally important in any transformation initiative and these practitioners may report into their own group, or the skill set may be found elsewhere in other groups. Most commonly, IT or HR is where change management professionals report if there is not a separate team. For more on organizational change management, see Organizational Change Management: An (Emerging) Core Competency for Customer Experience Management.

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Juergen Pitschke

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

Juergen has more than 25 years industrial experience about enterprise modelling and the realization of Business and IT Architectures. He is recognized for his deep knowledge and the systematic use of visual standard notations and of different frameworks für the design of an Enterprise Architecture. His knowledge is often sought in the field of Business Process Management and Decision Management.

His focus are model-based approaches for enterprise design and their practical use. Clients value his abilities to explain concepts, to help teams to adopt and successfully apply such methods, and to guide projects successfully.

He is author of the book “Unternehmensmodellierung für die Praxis”. He translated the Business Process Manifesto, the Decision Management Manifesto, and the RuleSpeak® – approach into German.

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 2019?

Modelling is still an essential skill in Business Process Management and other areas. This statement stays valid.

You describe different subjects for very different purposes, goals. You need different notations, not only standard notations for this. The important thing is that the chosen notations fit the purpose.

Important is “Architecture” to bind together the different views. There is a difference between architecture in general and a real “business architecture”.

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

For decision management the best book is still: “Real-world Decision Modeling with DMN” by James Taylor and Jan Purchase.

For Business Process Management “Reimagining Management: Putting Process at the Center of Business Management” by Roger Tregear is still one of my favorites.

As “Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution” by J.W.Ross and D.Robertson is a long time classic and knowledge source.

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

I wouldn’t discuss to long about advantages/disadvantages of single notations or a single approach.

For the question of Architecture the important thing is not certification in one of the approaches, Knowledge is needed in any case (and healthy mind).

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Brian Reale

Brian Reale is a serial entrepreneur. Brian founded a telecommunications company in 2000 called Unete Telecomunicaciones which provided, voice, data, and satellite services in Latin America. Brian sold Unete to a publicly traded US telecom company in 2000. Brian was also the co-founder of Spotless LLC, an entertainment technology company that developed projection mapping technology for major live entertainment industries.

Brian has been involved in thge workflow and BPM industry since he co-founded ProcessMaker in 2000. ProcessMaker is a leading open source BPM suite which has just released its 4th generation product – a modern lightweight BPM designed for both human tasks and microservices orchestration. The ProcessMaker BPMS has been recognized with numerous awards and pushes the bounds of BPM with a fundamental belief that process management can be simple, elegant, and easy to use.

Brian graduated magna cum laude from Duke University in 1993 and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship in linguistics in Ecuador in 1994.

WWW: https://www.processmaker.com
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Twitter: @breale
Twitter: @processmaker

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

1. ML/AI– Machine learning will hit its stride in 2019 and will start to really drive sales for many BPM vendors. Think of AI in much the same way that you would Decision Management, and you will understand why it has the power to represent a big burst of new sales for BPM vendors. ML services from the big vendors like AWS, IBM, and Microsoft are now highly capable. These ML services can add extraordinary and immediate value around processes related to contract management and much more. Wrapping this services in a process context is the best way to deliver the service in a seamless and efficient manner within an organization. BPM professionals just need to understand where to look and what problems to solve with ML/AI.

2. RPA – RPA, of course, is overhyped. Still, it is gaining ground. RPA will not destroy BPM (Believe it or not: I heard an RPA vendor stand up at a conference and claim this!). To the contrary, the two are complimentary. If RPA is being implemented in a company, then I know that they will need BPM. It is like seeing companies move to distributed microservices. These are signs that the ecosystem and business process landscape is more complex. Inevitably, this is good for BPM.

3. Interface Design – BPM vendors have done a horrible job with Customer experience. A few are starting to catch on and get better. Let’s face it, BPM has always been a bit old fashioned and stodgy. It is not surprising that it has lagged so far behind with regards to enabling and participating in driving customer experience. As we all know, the further you get away from the customer, the further away you get from the money. The risk is irrelevance. BPM vendors don’t want to be moved to the back office, and in many institutions this is where the CIO is headed. Both BPM vendors and CIOs need to swim upstream to become more relevant. The customer experience is first and foremost. BPM vendors that can truly add efficiency in the application development will thrive. Hint – on the interface side if you want to add value, you had better be low code.

4. Low Code – As everyone pushes to position their suite low code, a few things are going to happen. First, the world is going to be filled with clunky, cumbersome software products. Most of the low code attempts will evolve from bad to worse. Design tools will try to emulate everything that a developer can do in her IDE. As incomplete spec after incomplete spec gets developed, products will trap their users in worse and worse user experiences. Those that thrive will NOT try to sideline developers. They will find an artistic way to offer low code for business admins and a developer experience loved by developers.

5. Rules – Rules will continue to grow in importance. Rules is the gateway drug to AI and ML. They will grow in tandem.

6. Microservices and event-driven architectures – BPM practitioners need to understand that the world is moving to event driven architectures. As complexity and information increases, it makes sense that if BPM wants to continue to be the process glue, it needs to be a good listener. In other words, systems are producing data and events, and other systems will need to listen and handle massive volumes of transactions.

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

Online academies, vendor tutorials, and DIY tinkering are the best ways to learn these new skills. Oh, and, of course, download a modern stack open source bpm like ProcessMaker to test your concepts. As a company that makes an open source BPM, we believe in letting people explore and test and use. This is the best way to develop skills.

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

As I said earlier, RPA will not replace BPM. It does offer a great toolset especially for dealing with some forms of repetitive tasks or missing APIs. However, 50% of RPA claims today are hype in my opinion. Many 2018 RPA buyers will express their dispair and disillusionment in 2019.

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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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What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

I think that if the last few years have taught us anything, it is that we live in an incredibly fast paced world. We’ve seen new consumer technology enter the market that would have seemed like science fiction only five or ten years ago, and there seems to be an increased social acceptance of this type of technology. Ten years ago, who would have thought that we’d be controlling our music, lights and even buying things with a voice assistant? Who would have thought that people would invite companies to listen to what goes on in our living rooms?

This is happening alongside lots of political change. Few experts predicted that Brexit would happen, and with just two months to go, nobody knows what Brexit will actually look like. UK-based organizations will have a relatively short time to adapt to whatever changes are imposed.

In an increasingly complex and fast-moving world, this (in my view) points towards two broad types of skills that we have as practitioners, that will be of increasing value. Firstly, anything that helps us achieve business agility, i.e. the ability for our organizations to sense and respond to opportunities and threats in their environments. This requires us to have strategic awareness of the context our organizations work in. We need to understand the mission and vision of our organizations, and we need to have techniques in our toolbox that enable us to analyze the external business environment. Managing internal processes is undoubtedly valuable, but these processes need to be fit and appropriate for the environments in which they operate! So I think the ability to look upwards, sideways as well as down into the detail of the process will become increasingly useful. Increased focus on strategic analysis become even more crucial than it is today.

Secondly, with the complexity of the environments that we are operating in becoming more complex, I believe elements of systems thinking are of more relevance than ever. It is so easy to make a process change in one area that causes unintended consequences elsewhere, and thinking holistically and systemically can help us to avoid this.

(For an overview of some systems thinking ideas, and their relevance, check out this webinar recording)

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

I think it really depends on the individual. Personally, I learn a great deal by attending conferences and also speaking to others. I also read and listen to a lot of audio books. Training courses are also an extremely valuable way of learning a lot in a short period of time. Additionally, I find it’s great to have a supportive network of colleagues and contacts. As a community we all learn from each other.

However, it is really easy to read a book, go on training, or attend a webinar and then not change our practice. It’s very easy to revert back to doing things the way we have always done them. So, in many ways, the most important thing is to have a plan for putting the new knowledge into practice.

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

I’m always reluctant to write-off skills as no longer relevant, as I think it really depends on context, and I think many of the ‘core skills’ do remain the same over time, albeit there are different pressures and business imperatives.

One thing that I tend to be skeptical of, is where particular technologies or IT systems are sold as the ‘solution’ to organizational problems. Where we have entire projects and programs that end up being about ‘implement system xyz’ rather than ‘achieve these outcomes and benefits’.

So, I think we need to continue to ask ‘what is the business benefit here?’ and ‘what are the business process impacts of the new technology that is proposed?’.

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Pedro Robledo

BPM Trusted Advisor, Professor and Industry Analyst, BPMteca & UNIR, Spain

Pedro Robledo is one of the most influential Spanish thought leaders in Process Management using BPM. He has been dedicated to promote industry awareness of Business Process Management in Spain and Latin America for over 20 years. Mr. Robledo is Director of BPM for Digital Transformation Master in Universidad Internacional de la Rioja (UNIR). As BPM Advisor, Consultant and Trainer, he helps Organizations in its Enterprise Architecture, BPMN Modeling, BPM and Digital Transformation initiatives. He is a frequent speaker and presenter at international BPM workshops and conferences. Since 2013, he participates as jury of the WfMC Awards for Excellence in BPM and Workflow. Mr. Robledo is currently an active participant in the Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Research Group in UNIR. He holds a Bachelor of Computer Science from the Polytechnic University of Madrid. He writes his own blog about BPM and Digital Transformation.

WWW: pedrorobledobpm.blogspot.com.es
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Twitter: @pedrorobledoBPM

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

The digital disruption in all sectors requires the BPM discipline to address the process management of any organization that wants to survive in the digital era. Therefore, there is a real need for training in BPM. The market continues with the need for BPM professionals, and there is not enough professionals ready to join in the current and future projects. Gartner has published that global spending on Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software is estimated to reach $680 million in 2018, an increase of 57 percent year over year, according to the latest research from Gartner, Inc. RPA software spending is on pace to total $2.4 billion in 2022. (https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2018-11-13-gartner-says-worldwide-spending-on-robotic-process-automation-software-to-reach-680-million-in-2018) Many RPA vendors are confusing the market, as they say that RPA can replace BPM, but there are important differences between RPA and BPM, and this is important to create value in any organizations. BPM is a discipline and RPA is software. BPM can use RPA to automate repetitive tasks where there is not human participation, or use bots to help to the human participant in one task. The BPM practitioners need to understand the BPM life cycle and what BPM discipline is and not to be focus only in BPM software or RPA software. Any company will have to define a BPM Office (or BPM CoE if they have years of BPM initiatives) and to include all roles (with internal or external people) required in the BPM Life Cycle to grow in the BPM maturity.

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

The universities are providing BPM training for a few years, due to the current demand for certified training in this discipline and the possibility of employment for the student. The training provided is very varied from certain courses or seminars (included in undergraduate training), specific expert courses on BPM, master’s degrees with own or regulated degree, and some doctorate in BPM exceptionally. The regulated university education through a careful theoretical and practical training covers all the skills that a professional BPM needs. Given that Business Process Management is a field with a great professional output, investment in university training will have an important return for the student. In Albatian’s blog I published a list of universities that offer BPM studies in the world, ordered by type of online or face-to-face degree: https://albatian.com/en/blog-ingles/where-to-learn-bpm-in-the-university/

About books, the most important library of English Books is Future Strategies (http://www.futstrat.com/). 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 BPM topics.

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

All the traditional BPM skills are relevant and they are applicable yet.

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Michal Rosik

Product Visionary & CPO, Minit

As Product Visionary for Minit, Michal defines the Research & Development direction for this process mining solution, develops close ties to the academic community in this area and evangelizes process mining benefits to enterprises worldwide. Michal previously lead Microsoft Consulting department in Siemens and was involved in several large enterprise projects as a consultant and project manager. In his free time, he is a passionate trail runner.

WWW: http://www.minit.io
WWW: LI company profile
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @rosik
Twitter: @minit_io

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

The hype-drink recipe is easy:
1 shot of RPA
1 shot of DMN
3 drops of AI
splash of No Code
zest from ACM (Adaptive Case Management)

Put everything in a shaker with Ice Cubes (or your favorite music) and mix well.
Pour into the enterprise.
Drink wisely, it is a pretty strong mix.

Different skills and techniques have been pushing the boundaries of what enterprises are able to absorb in the last few years. Most of them being on their own and being considered a silver bullet for any problems you might think of. 2019 for me is more than ever about finding the proper mixture, right synergy between them, about finding how those, for most business users, abstract buzzwords might support each other for better utilization. There is a place for all of them, but not everywhere or anywhere.

In Minit we see that process mining cannot stand on its own as well and we strongly feel it is the right technology to help enterprises to absorb and leverage all their investments in techniques mentioned above. We work hard to help in these everyday fights.

And lastly, when you prepare your personal cocktail, do not underestimate the power of presentation. Visual storytelling is an equally important part of the process. So it’s no longer about the pure data, but also about the way how you visualize them – in other words “infographics instead of tables and charts”.

By the way, did I mention Blockchain? There is a reason why I didn’t.

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

Instead of listing books, articles and courses, that everyone is able to easily find on the internet, I would like to focus your attention on different vendors in those technological areas – most of them already provide academies, free e-books or full documentation. Do not fear to go through it, most of them give a very good insight into the technology and its benefits, instead of plain product walkthrough.

Absorb all of it, let it rest and use your creativity and common sense – lately, two most forgotten skills.

If not sure, listen to experienced professionals. Even though they might not be on the current hype wave, try to combine their past long-term experience with the new kids on the block.
History is repeating, isn’t it?

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

Low hanging fruits have been already collected in many hype technologies, but no longer relevant is the overall approach of taking a hype, squeezing it a bit and throwing it immediately away.

If you want to do quality contemporary art, you must know how to draw.
The more experience you have, the more you can leverage everything new.

But if you want me to choose one tech stream, that is not practically applicable yet in the area of process mining in full power, I believe that Data Lakes did not say the last word yet.
And combined with AI, it sounds like a nice fusion.

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Pramod Sachdeva

Pramod Sachdeva is the Founder and Managing Director at Princeton Blue. Pramod has been an evangelist for Intelligent Automation using BPM, Low-code, RPA and AI technologies since he founded Princeton Blue 12 years ago. With over 30 years of business and technology consulting experience, Pramod brings tremendous knowledge to help clients navigate their digital transformation journey towards the ultimate goal of improving customer experience and operational efficiency. Princeton Blue is recognized by leading industry analysts as a thought leader in delivering intelligent automation solutions.

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

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

While Robotic Process Automation (RPA) may be perceived as partially overlapping with Business Process Management (BPM), we find that they are more complimentary than competitive. One thing is clear – the underlying need for business process re-engineering and automation never goes away, so as the technologies evolve, we are given more automation options in our tool belt. Today, we use BPM and RPA together to automate use cases that could not be automated by either technology alone.

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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
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @sureshsambandam

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

One very important skill is being able to finely dissect the difference between processes, projects, and cases. Project management software has become completely mainstream now in terms of search volume, followed by process management and then by case management. However, there are very few practitioners out there who can give a clear definition of each one.

More importantly, there are a lot of people using the wrong software to try to manage these different types of work. BPM practitioners should be able to lead the way in not only helping to manage processes better, but define what is and is not best handled with BPM software.

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

Surprisingly, there are very few resources out there and learning these skills, especially when you add case management into the mix. Most of it is learned by talking with people on the ground and seeing the limitations they find with the first or most recent software tool they tried.

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

AI will come into BPM in a big way in the next five years, but it’s not quite here yet. If you want to be on the extreme front edge, you can start to build skillsets, but they won’t be commercially viable for a few years.

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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
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @RedHatNews

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

From a technology perspective, we are seeing a convergence of BPM, application development and cloud platforms to support a more diverse community of developers and business users. Most traditional BPM systems are moving in this direction – away from pure process management and towards more comprehensive digital automation, combining BPM with emerging technologies like RPA, AI/ML, low-code, etc. I think this has fairly significant implications for BPM practitioners, in that organizations are coming to view “BPM” in broader terms, needing a more diverse set of skills across a wider population of practitioners. In fact I think it’s fair to say that the term “BPM” is falling out of usage.

I think this presents a tremendous opportunity for BPM practitioners to learn skills that can contribute to an orderly adoption of these new technologies. Being able to understand where RPA is appropriate, and where not, for example, is highly valuable. Similarly, those who understand the capabilities and limitations of AI/ML solutions and can guide an organization through their application to business problems will be sought after.

And, of course, there’s Blockchain. 2019 may be the year that we come up with a usable Blockchain-based solution to enhance the integrity of business processes. Now might be the time to start learning about Blockchain!

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

Traditional BPM skills are still relevant, although as I’ve suggested the term “BPM” is falling out of favor. I wouldn’t ‘unlearn’ anything, but look to augment your business architecture and process/decision modeling skills with an understanding of new technologies so that you can lead the way to more automated digital business.

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Jim Sinur

Jim Sinur is an independent thought leader in applying Digital Business Platforms (DBP), Customer Experience/Journeys (CJM), Business Process Management (BPM), Automation (RPA), Low-code and Decision Management at the edge to business outcomes. His research and areas of personal experience focus on intelligent business processes, business modeling, business process management technologies, process collaboration for knowledge workers, process intelligence/optimization, AI applied to business policy/rule management, IoT 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. Jim is also a well know digital and traditional artist.

WWW: http://www.james-sinur.com/
WWW: http://jimsinur.blogspot.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @JimSinur

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

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 process/data mining is growing to be more important.
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 only approaches with siloed skill sets. More lateral thinking is and collaborative control is needed today.
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 leads global sales and partnerships at Pipefy, the Lean Management 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.
WWW: https://www.pipefy.com
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @ShikSundar
Twitter: @Pipefy

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

Lean Management. Organizations need to optimize every step of their value chain. To achieve this, they need to able to reduce waste, increase visibility into processes and performance. In the past, BPM practitioners were focused on the most visible, core, high-volume processes. Today, executive management expects everyone in the organization who is responsible for a process to directly take ownership of it and commit to continuous measurable improvement. It’s important that BPM practitioners understand this and are ready to enable subject-matter experts in the organization to take control of their own processes and apply Lean principles.

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

* Lean introductory short-course on Lynda: https://www.lynda.com/Business-tutorials/Lean/721919/771146-4.html
* Lean Thinking: Banishing Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation book by James P Womack
* Managing Workflow, the Lean Way article by John Shook,

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
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @swensonkeith

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

This biggest problem facing everyone today is the ability to tell truth from fiction. This is a long distance from BPM, however BPM is fairly settled science. We know how to automate business processes. What I still see demand for is support for knowledge workers. The public have begun to appreciate the need for non-automated solutions that support knowledge workers: case management. Not a new topic, but one that is now accepted, and anyone doing BPM today should refine their case management skills.

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

We hold an Adaptive Case Management workshop every year: AdaptiveCM 2019 will be in Vienna Austria this year at the same place with the BPM conference. That is the only place where real research is being done on the cutting edge.

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

SQL and relational database seems less important today: the no-SQL approaches just allow you to dump all the data in whatever format into the database, and then due to the sheer power of computing systems today, worry about the structure of the data later.

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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 2019?

There is a big opportunity for BPM practitioners to lead transformative initiatives in which there is a better integration of robotic workforce and artificial intelligence into the coordination of humans, systems and workflows.

BPM will be more and more about delivering insights and predictions to process participants (customers or employees), assist improvements specialists with the identification of bottlenecks and process optimisations… and about making sure that processes, applications, robots and systems can reshape and adapt themselves as they run.

Embracement of continuous delivery engineering approach and container related-technologies (such as Docker and Kubernetes) in large organizations will continue to increase with the adoption of microservices, serverless and multi-cloud architectures. BPM practitioners should rely on platforms that allows them to do Iterative and incremental BPM implementations.

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

Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD Advisors (now at IDC) has always good insights on both technologies and the direction of BPM. I also recommend to read Rob Koplowitz of Forrester, Rob Dunie of Gartner, Jim Sinur of Aragon Research and Jason Bloomberg of Intellyx.

Pedro Robledo, Alberto Manuel, Sandy Kemsley and Scott Francis have also been following BPM trends and technology for a long time now.

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

BPM practitioners are already moving away from waterfall development approaches. They are not only embracing iterative and incremental development approaches but also realising that coding will always be involved in any advanced BPM implementation and that code it’s written by developers so that they need to work closely and better with them.

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Prof. Leslie Willcocks

Professor Willcocks has a worldwide reputation for his research and advisory work on IT and business process outsourcing, together with his work on organisational change, management, and global strategy. As well as being a professor in the Information Systems and Innovation Faculty Group, he is a Fellow of the British Computer Society.
For the last 21 years he has been Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Information Technology. He is co-author of 33 books, including most recently The Outsourcing Enterprise: From Cost Management To Collaborative Innovation (Palgrave 2011), China’s Emerging Outsourcing Capabilities (Palgrave, 2010), and The Practice of Outsourcing: From Information Systems to BPO and Offshoring, (Palgrave, 2009) He has published over 190 papers in journals such as Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, MIS Quarterly, MISQ Executive and Journal of Management Studies.
In February 2001 he won the PriceWaterhouseCoopers/Michael Corbett Associates World Outsourcing Achievement Award for his contribution to this field. He is a regular keynote speaker at international practitioner and academic conferences, such as World Outsourcing Summit, European Outsourcing Summit, ICIS and PACIS and is regularly retained as adviser by major corporations and government institutions. Selected clients for executive education programmes include: Standard Chartered Bank, Logica, Stater, ABNAmro Bank, Royal Sun Alliance, Singtel, Commonwealth Bank, Accenture, IBM, Rotterdam Port Harbour Authority, WH Smith, Eli Lilley, and several government institutions in the UK, USA and Australia. He has served as expert witness on congressional committees and senate inquiries on outsourcing in Australia and USA and provided evidence to a number of UK government reports on major public sector IT projects.

WWW: http://www.lse.ac.uk/management/people/lwillcocks.aspx
Twitter: @LSEManagement

What are the skills and techniques that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2019?

One dimension in RPA deployments worth remarking on is the missed opportunities in process redesign. Those experiencing disappointment in RPA and cognitive tools might usefully reflect whether blind faith in a technology solution stopped them from gaining optimal returns from a more reengineering focused approach.

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The post BPM Skills in 2019 – Hot or Not first appeared on BPM Tips.

Back to school 2018: free online courses for BPM professionals

Zbigniew — Fri, 31 Aug 2018 19:59:23 +0000

Since many of you enjoyed 2015, 2016 and 2017 editions of this post I hope this one will be useful for you too

1) Fundamentals of BPM

Normally the list started with awesome MOOCs by professors Marcello La Rosa, Marlon Dumas, Jan Mendling and Hajo Reijers, but sadly this autumn both Future Learn and QUT editions are not available. However, the authors are working towards a new MOOC to be made available next year.

You can also buy the updated version of the book “Fundamentals of BPM”, which is a source of content for the course:
https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783662565087

On a website of the book you can also find slides, video lectures and many other useful resources:
http://fundamentals-of-bpm.org/supplementary-material/lectures/

You can watch the recordings from 2014 on YouTube too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL2LDY1TRcen1SCPmL1BY_yA1DijztcmIh&v=G05JD9RLoUw

Luckily there are additional interesting courses to pick from (plus one more option I mention at the end of the post). Most of them are not about “pure” BPM, but IMO they provide lots of inspiration whether it is Lean, Design Thinking, or even using sketching for visual communication

This time the list is experimentally organised by learning platform.

2) Coursera

If you like to learn on the go you will appreciate nice mobile application Coursera offers. Most of the courses are by default paid ones (with access to all the content, possibility to check yourself and interact fully with others plus get a certificate), but you can always select the free path (called “Audit the course”) and access all the videos plus some of the course content. Courses on Coursera are MOOCs, so they have start and end dates, but you can switch sessions if you are falling behind (you may need it since they all start on the same date…).

2a) “Design Thinking for Innovation” (https://www.coursera.org/learn/uva-darden-design-thinking-innovation)

Course description: “Today innovation is everyone’s business. Whether you are a manager in a global corporation, an entrepreneur starting up, in a government role, or a teacher in an elementary school, everyone is expected to get lean – to do better with less. And that is why we all need design thinking. At every level in every kind of organization, design thinking provides the tools you need to become an innovative thinker and uncover creative opportunities that are there – you’re just not seeing them yet.”
Created by: University of Virginia
Taught by: Jeanne M. Liedtka
Starts: August 30, 2018

2b) “Digital Transformation” (https://www.coursera.org/learn/bcg-uva-darden-digital-transformation)

Course description: “Digital transformation is a hot topic–but what exactly is it and what does it mean for companies? In this course, we talk about digital transformation in two ways. First we discuss the pace of change and the imperative it creates for businesses. Next we provide the context for this transformation and what it takes to win in the digital age. Then we walk through BCG’s proprietary framework, which helps you identify key areas to digitize, including strategy, core processes, and technology.”
Created by: BCG, University of Virginia
Taught by: Michael Lenox, Amane Dannouni, Sonja Rueger, Ching Fong Ong
Starts: August 30, 2018

2c) “Introduction to Operations Management” (https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-operations)

Course description: “Learn to analyze and improve business processes in services or in manufacturing by learning how to increase productivity and deliver higher quality standards. Key concepts include process analysis, bottlenecks, flows rates, and inventory levels, and more. After successfully completing this course, you can apply these skills to a real-world business challenge as part of the Wharton Business Foundations Specialization.”
Created by: University of Pennsylvania
Taught by: Christian Terwiesch
Starts: August 30, 2018

2d) “Process Mining: Data science in Action” (https://www.coursera.org/learn/process-mining)

Course description: “Process mining is the missing link between model-based process analysis and data-oriented analysis techniques. Through concrete data sets and easy to use software the course provides data science knowledge that can be applied directly to analyze and improve processes in a variety of domains.”
Created by: Eindhoven University of Technology
Taught by: Wil van der Aalst
Starts: August 30, 2018

2e) “Six Sigma Principles” (https://www.coursera.org/learn/six-sigma-principles)

Course description: “This course is for you if you are looking to learn more about Six Sigma or refresh your knowledge of the basic components of Six Sigma and Lean. Six Sigma skills are widely sought by employers both nationally and internationally. These skills have been proven to help improve business processes and performance. This course will introduce you to the purpose of Six Sigma and its value to an organization. You will learn about the basic principles of Six Sigma and Lean. Your instructors will introduce you to, and have you apply, some of the tools and metrics that are critical components of Six Sigma. This course will provide you with the basic knowledge of the principles, roles, and responsibilities of Six Sigma and Lean.”
Created by: University System of Georgia
Taught by: Bill Bailey, Gregory Wiles, David Cook, Christina Scherrer
Starts: August 30, 2018

2f) “The hidden value – Lean in manufacturing and services” (https://www.coursera.org/learn/lean-manufacturing-services)

Course description: “Lean is a powerful methodology that enables managers and employees to shift their mindset and helps companies to keep their business sustainable by creating competitive advantage. Today, in an increasingly complex and dynamic world, where companies struggle to maintain competitive advantage, Lean is more important than ever.”
Created by: École des Ponts ParisTech, BCG
Taught by: Aurélie Delemarle, Thomas Frost, Salvatore Cali, Elsa Blume
Starts: August 30, 2018

3) OpenHPI

This is an e-learning platform offered by German Hasso Plattner Institute. It offers a mix of MOOC and on demand courses (i.e. archives of past editions). All courses are available for free. Mobile application is available.

3a) “BPMN Meets DMN: Business Process and Decision Modeling” (https://open.hpi.de/courses/bpm2016)

As you can see from the URL this is a self-paced course based on a MOOC from 2016.
Course description: “This course introduces concepts of business process modeling using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) industry standard. Participants will learn the elements of process models and their precise meaning. Based on a thorough understanding of business process models, the last part of the course covers decision models using the Decision Model and Notation (DMN). Decision models complement process models by representing concrete, operational decisions, both with their structure and their decision logics. The course centers around concepts and language to describe and analyze business processes and decisions. It does not cover methods on how to model, improve, monitor or implement business processes. Still, a deep understanding of business processes and decisions is a useful basis for these activities.”
Taught by: Prof. Dr. Mathias Weske
Starts: Self-paced

3b) “Human-Centered Design: From Synthesis to Creative Ideas” (https://open.hpi.de/courses/ideas2018)

Course description: “Make sense of design research data, learn to frame a problem from a user’s perspective, and generate lots of new ideas: This course will introduce you to the basics of design synthesis and brainstorming techniques.”
Taught by: Karen von Schmieden, Mana Taheri, Lena Mayer
Starts: September 19, 2018

4) OpenSAP

As you may guess from a name this is an e-learning platform with content by SAP. Technology behind it is the same as in the case of OpenHPI, so you also have a mobile application etc.

4a) “Be Visual! Sketching Basics for IT Business” (https://open.sap.com/courses/bvis1-3)

Course description: “Join this free, online openSAP course ‘Be Visual! Sketching Basic for IT Business’ and start learning the very basics of sketching. By applying the practice-oriented tips and tricks in this course, you’ll gain the confidence to present your ideas visually.”
Taught by: Martina Schuh, Johanna Wittig, Jörg Göppert, Ingo Rues, Tatjana Borovikov, Anja Fehlau
Starts: September 11, 2018

5) Courses provided by automation tools providers.

This list is mostly based on my post about RPA tools, but I also added few BPM tool providers with e-learning courses. Usually they are using their own pages or e-learning platforms which don’t have mobile applications, so you will need to use browser to learn. Those courses are normally videos available on-demand.

5a) Appian (https://academy.appian.com)

Over 30 courses available for free with information about BPM.

5b) Automation Anywhere (https://www.automationanywhereuniversity.com/)

Automation Anywhere provides a nice library of 10+ online courses. Some of them are free (over 8 hours of content), others are very reasonably priced.
There is also free introductory course on Udemy by Automation Anywhere.
https://www.udemy.com/beginners-guide-to-rpa-automation-anywhere/

5c) Bizagi (http://elearning.bizagi.com)

Bizagi offers 10+ courses about their tools.

5d) Bonitasoft (https://www.bonitasoft.com/videos)

There are dozens of video tutorials, webinars and other materials.

5e) Camunda (https://camunda.com/learn/videos/)

Camunda offers library of 6 video tutorials. And they have something unique – a hawk

5f) Pegasystems (https://academy.pega.com)

Pega Academy contains 100+ courses in several languages. There are 8 courses (and few exams) related to RPA. Overall free courses have over 5 days of content.

5g) UiPath (https://www.uipath.com/rpa-academy)

UiPath offers 9 courses for various groups of users in several languages. Overall there are 100+ hours of content – all for free.

5h) WorkFusion (https://automationacademy.com/)

There are 6 courses available – some provided by WorkFusion and others by partners. Overall there are 80+ hours of content. All the courses are free.

6) Do you want something more?

As you can see there are lots of free resources about process automation, but this time not so many about the business aspects of BPM.

In this case I can recommend you two options:
a) library of webinars by BOC Group where you can watch on demand over 20 webinars by my colleagues
https://us.boc-group.com/webinars/#c67447

b) let me know what you would like to learn about BPM.

I am currently working on an e-book and a course about process modelling and BPMN and in a few weeks time I would like to open my course to a group of beta-testers
So, if you want to influence direction of the course and access it for free sign up and tell me which other topics do you want to learn.

Sign up for updates about the BPMN book and course
The post Back to school 2018: free online courses for BPM professionals first appeared on BPM Tips.

BPM Skills in 2018 – Hot or Not

Zbigniew — Mon, 15 Jan 2018 20:14:58 +0000

Each year is a chance to make a change for yourself and your organization. But it will be a positive change only if you know what are the right things to focus on, and which ones should be avoided.

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.

His articles have been published by KW World and others. He has advised on topics of BPM adoption at Fortune 500 companies, that include designing one of the largest clinical business rules-driven systems as well as receiving an award for the most diverse application of BPM.

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.

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.

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 is also a Co-Founder, Chief Methodologist, and a Principal Consultant of BPTrends Associates (BPTA), a professional services company providing executive education, training, and consulting services for organizations that are interested in understanding and implementing business process management.

Paul involvement in business process change dates back to the late 60’s when he worked with Geary Rummler, at Praxis Corp., and was responsible for managing the overall development and delivery of the performance improvement projects undertaken by that company. During the 70s and 80s he ran his own company, Harmon Associates, and undertook major process improvement programs at Bank of America, Security Pacific, Wells Fargo, Prudential, and Citibank, to name a few.

During the same period he was a Senior Consultant at Cutter Consortium and edited their Expert System Strategies, CASE, and Business Process Reengineering Strategies newsletters.

Paul is the author of Business Process Change: A Guide for Business Managers and BPM and Six Sigma Professionals (Morgan Kaufman, which issued the heavily revised second edition in 2007). He has authored or co-authored over twelve other books, including the very popular Expert Systems: AI for Business (1983) and is the co-author and editor of the BPTrends Product Reports, a widely read series of reports on BPM software products that are available on the www.bptrends.com site. Paul Harmon also writes two short articles each month on current BPM topics, which are mailed to the members of the BPTrends website.

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.

Barbara uses her extensive industry knowledge and connections to provide a unique perspective on the latest trends and developments across the SS&O landscape. She is the voice of ssonetwork.com, SSON’s online content portal, and she regularly conducts interviews with key industry figures to ensure SSON is a one-stop shop for shared services and outsourcing resources.

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.

Abhijit oversees Automation Anywhere’s product strategy, design and delivery. His rich experience includes leading Autodesk’s transformation to the cloud, directing the team for Oracle’s next generation Innovation Management Cloud initiative, and steering product management and strategy for Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) at Agile Software, where he delivered rapid product and customer experience improvement. Abhijit’s entrepreneurial endeavors consist of multiple M&As including a successful exit for his own startup, ATMA software, which is now part of Oracle.

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.

She has also founded and run three companies – a systems integration services company, a software product company, and current consulting company – with responsibility for corporate and financial governance, strategic direction, team hiring and management, and day-to-day technical contributions.

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.

Most recently, Dr. Kirchmer founded BPM-D, a company focused on enabling ongoing digital transformation and strategy execution through the discipline of BPM. Before he was Managing Director and Global Lead of BPM at Accenture, and CEO of the Americas and Japan of IDS Scheer, known for its ARIS Software.

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.

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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.

Juergen has more than 25 years industrial experience about enterprise modelling and the realization of Business and IT Architectures. He is recognized for his deep knowledge and the systematic use of visual standard notations and of different frameworks für the design of an Enterprise Architecture. His knowledge is often sought in the field of Business Process Management and Decision Management.
His focus are model-based approaches for enterprise design and their practical use. Clients value his abilities to explain concepts, to help teams to adopt and successfully apply such methods, and to guide projects successfully.

He is author of the book “Unternehmensmodellierung für die Praxis”. He translated the Business Process Manifesto, the Decision Management Manifesto, and the RuleSpeak® – approach into German.

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

He also develops relations with the process mining academic community and evangelizes process mining benefits to enterprises worldwide.

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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.

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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.

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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/.

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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 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
WWW: LI profile
Twitter: @jamet123

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.
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