Business process management from 1990s / 2000s in simplest terms is a set of activities (automated or manual) with breaks for events and interactions with external systems / human beings along with notifications / rules / filters / etc. Traditional BPM / Workflows included manual and automated tasks, integrations (mainly offline or asynchronous), notifications, auto-escalations, interactions with human beings.
Come to 2017 and we have plethora of new technologies / products in the ecosystem which we can use along with BPM – some are already in use and some will evolve with time.
- Real time analytics integration with social media and other areas
- IoT integration
- Automation, Machine Learning & Artificial intelligence
- Collaboration
- Omni channel
- Cloud
- Entity modelling and Decision model & Notation instead of BPMN
- Chatbots as entry points
- Low code business process management platform
- Real time analytics – With all of the social media APIs in the market like Twitter / Facebook and so on we can integrate them with BPM as an entry point based on for example for many of the tasks or in other activities in integration. A positive or negative review with specific keywords can for instance trigger a specific part of or the start of workflow. Something similar was done by a bank in India recently where they had twitter based banking
- Internet of Things has a lot of intelligence built into them from beacons, electronics kits, sensors, biometrics and so on. They could act as augmentation to the normal input provided by other systems and BPM users / admins. For instance based on a specific temperature threshold emergency systems could be activated and series of various fire mitigation steps could be activated
- Robotic process automation, machine learning and AI have the capability to automate many of the steps of BPM / Workflows. They could for instance automate the under-writing of various insurance policies based on earlier inputs and rules
- Collaboration and omni channel are buzz words today in marketing and horizontal portals. BPM can potentially now work with multiple channels like smartphones, APPs, SMS, calls, social media, etc. driving more productivity
- Many companies now offer softwares in cloud as SAAS and workflows too for instance can be hosted in say AWS to connect anywhere, anytime and in multiple ways over internet
- Entity modelling and Decision model & Notation are two new ways of modelling your workflows and business processes. They are closer to business and non technical users can use them for modelling the processes
- Chatbots which use Natural language processing to create chats between humans and backend systems could be another potential entry activity for workflows and BPM
- Lastly low code platforms are getting more traction as we move into world of automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning. With decision model & notation and entity based modelling we are already moving in direction of low code platforms
