Hi, I’m Sandy Kemsley of column2.com. I’m here for the Trisotech blog with a third in a series of videos on finding and dealing with process pain points. Although, this will be of interest to business analysts who are figuring out the Asis and 2B processes within our organization, I’ll also touch on implementation issues that will be of interest to my more technical listeners.

Now, in the first video I talked about finding where people are using spreadsheets and email as workarounds because this indicates that the existing systems aren’t doing everything that the business needs. In the second part I looked at handoffs, when you trace a business process from start to finish. You start to find the inefficiencies and errors that can happen when work is handed off between people and departments.

Now, I’m going to cover pending processes, in other words what happens when somebody is in the process of working on something and decides that they need to pend it for a later time. Maybe they’re not able to complete the task right at the moment, or they have to step away from their desk so this sounds deceptively simple but after decades in the trenches of process automation, I can assure you that improperly managed pended items are like the Bermuda Triangle for processes.

Now, I’m not talking about automated pens that are automatically released, such as a process that waits for an overnight batch to run before continuing then gets released first thing in the morning. This is about manual pens where someone who’s assigned an activity in a process just isn’t able to do it right then.

Now, there are a number of different reasons why someone needs to manually pen the process.

So first of all, the activity might be time consuming and the worker doesn’t have time to complete it before they leave for the day or step out of the office. In that case it’s a pretty simple hold situation it’s much like a file that you would put aside on your desk and then pick up first thing the following day.

Secondly they might not have the skills required to complete the activity that’s been assigned to them and they need to loop someone else in to help them. If the system that they’re using doesn’t allow them to reassign the work to someone else who does have the skills then they might need to pend it while they wait for the help that they need.

Thirdly, they might not have the information required to complete an activity, and they’re waiting for something to arrive, this could be from a colleague or a customer or a business partner and it could be a document or a phone call. So they’re just they have to set it aside wait for the information to come in and then they can pick up the activity again and complete it.

Now, pens can be handled in a couple of different ways. Sometimes the worker has a list of work assigned to them, in sort of an inbox, like you would have with email and they can just close the activity and it will stay there in their inbox and they’re going to leave it there in their own work queue until they decide to come back to it. Or you might have workers that are working through in more of an assembly line fashion or what we would call Push workflow. So they have to finish one item before they start on the next one. In that case if they’ve got something that they’re actively working on and they’re not able to finish it they have to send it somewhere in order to pend it because otherwise they won’t be able to move on to the next thing that’s in their that’s in their work queue. So either they need to assign it to another worker or they have to put it in a personal hold queue that then they will go back and get later or they put it in some sort of shared queue for items that require followup for anybody possibly on their team.

Now, what we can find is that once items get pended they can have a number of problems with them and in general these fall into two different categories.

First of all, how is the process located and unpend? In other words how does it get released and show back up in somebody’s work queue so that they that they work on it again so there could be a timeout that makes it just pop back into somebody’s queue. The worker might have to search for the process manually and then release it back to their work queue, and if so they have to know when to search at a specific time in order to do that. There might be reminders that are sent to the worker or to someone else to go and search for the item for example, there could be some other information that arrives asynchronously and then that automatically rendez-vous together with the process and causes it to be released back to their workflow, or to their work queue. So there’s a number of different ways that the process might be located and then unpend as part of the natural part of how the work get processed.

Now, the second thing we need to consider, is what happens when that doesn’t happen. What happens if no one searches for and releases a process that’s been pended, or nothing rendez-vous with it, maybe the original worker went on vacation or they quit their job or they just forgot about it, or the item that was supposed to come in and match with it never came in. So is the work automatically released back to them after a certain period of time, so in other words is there a condition but then it times out, maybe somebody who’s supposed to be handling escalations or a manager needs to review the contents of everybody’s pend queues on a regular basis, and again we have the issue what happens if they forget to do that, or do the items just sit there forever or wait until the irate customer calls in to say: “what happened to my transaction?” and then somebody goes searching for it. So, a lot of companies have tried to solve the pen problems by just stating that all work is one and done, there’s no pens you just have to finish the work when you have it in front of you but that’s not always a feasible alternative, as I mentioned the reasons why we could be pending might have to do with information that’s missing or skills that are missing. So there’s always going to be a scenario when somebody can’t finish a task. And if you don’t let them pend it, they’ll find a way! I’ve seen situations where pens were not permitted, but you could send the item to your manager. Now, that policy really quickly changed, because all of a sudden, the managers had like a million things in their workbox that really had nothing to do with them and didn’t require their attention. But the workers just had to get the things off of their plate, so that they could move on to the next item, and that was the only way that they had of moving them on to the next item.

So given that you can’t avoid pens in all scenarios, you need to properly address how and when pended items are are released. Now, the best way to start is to build these pens into your process models and then look at how they impact your process performance depending on how they’re handled. If there’s timeouts can you do a simulation on this or can you use some process mining data and look at what actually occurs, and say what happens if they sit there for 24 hours or when should they be released back to the to the workers. So if you do have some historical data, you can see how long items have normally sit in in pen queues then that’s really helpful for helping those edge cases that might get managed by pens.

Now, if you’re pending for some sort of asynchronous event that’s external to the process, like some missing information or documentation has to come in, might be something internal to your organization or it could be outside with the customer, the best possible solution is to automatically rendez-vous the inbound item with the pended item, so then that rendez-vous is going to release the item back into the work queue and then it’ll pop up for somebody to complete. So this works really well when the item is pended because it’s missing a document from a a customer and then the inbound document is can be matched up to to the pendent item based on a customer number or a transaction number. You see this a lot with onboarding situations where you have to wait for the customer to to upload some proof of ID or some financial information or other documentation.

Now, if you can’t match and rendez-vous automatically, somebody needs to be alerted if an inbound event might match with a pended item, and then search for that item and then release it manually. So you might have an admin who does this with all of the inbound correspondents so they might take every piece of inbound correspondence see where it belongs look through everyone’s pended items and then match up the ones that they think should be matched up and released back to the work queues, or maybe a worker gets a notification that they have inbound correspondence and then they have to search for it. So in either case the item is manually released back to the work queue and more critically it’s not released if nobody searches for it, so that can become a bit of a problem.

Now, you can always have the situation where I mentioned this previously, where items are pended for a period of time, that could be because your process management system doesn’t know how to do a synchronous rendez-vous, and this is the best it can do, or maybe it’s legitimately a timed pen like waiting for an overnight process, or it’s a reminder to call the customer back on a specific date and time to get some information. So when the timer expires, the item is going to come back into the work queue. You probably also need to give the worker the opportunity to go in and find the item that’s sitting there waiting for a timer and say: “release it now, because the customer called me and I need to get access to that item right now, and work on it”. Wo you have to look at all these scenario something is in a timer state, something is just in a pending queue, something is in an exception queue of some sort.

Now, finally you have the case where you’re just relying on workers to remember to review their pen queue on a regular basis and then release items back that are ready to work on. So if you’re allowing this model for pens, you have to be absolutely sure that more than one person is able to access everyone’s pen queues, and that escalation notifications are being sent to multiple people, as the pen time increases. Otherwise, if someone is unable to check their pens or they leave their job unexpectedly, there’s your bur Bermuda Triangle of processes.

Now, I’m going to wrap up this series next time with an episode on how escalations are handled.

That’s all for today. You can find more of my writing and videos on the Trisotech blog or on my own blog at column2.com. See you next time.

Hi, I’m Sandy Kemsley of column2.com. I’m here for the Trisotech blog with the second in a series of videos on finding and dealing with process pain points.

Although this will be of interest to business analysts who are figuring out the Asis and 2B processes within our organization, I’ll also touch on some implementation issues that will be of interest to my more technical listeners.

Now in the previous video, I talked about finding the spread sheets and email in existing business processes in order to locate process pain points. This gives us a starting point for process improvement since having to work around existing systems with ad hoc methods usually means there’s a part of the process that’s not being addressed in a consistent fashion.

Today, I’m going to look at another paino in business processes which is failed handoffs as work moves between people and between departments. As I mentioned previously, I tend to analyze an organizations’s processes by walking around and talking to the people who are actually doing the work, not just looking at documentation and process diagrams.

As a starting point, I usually try to follow a business process from beginning to end. And if you’ve been listening in the past. you’ll know I’m a huge proponent of understanding and analyzing your end-to-end processes.

Now let’s say the process is triggered by an inbound paper document from a customer, then I start at the mail room (if it’s triggered by an online order form), and then I’ll start at the order entry (if it’s triggered by an internal timer every day that kicks off an overnight reconcililation process, I start with that). Then, I follow it through to the conclusion of the process, for a customer facing process that could be when the customer receives the goods or services or if their complaint is resolved or whatever it is that they called or emailed or sent in a form about. For purely internal processes, this could be when the account books are reconciled or an internal audit is complete and documented.

Now, following business processes through from beginning to end lets me discover where things can go wrong when handing off work between people and departments. This could be a situation where someone needs, for example, to manually re-enter the customer’s order data into an internal system because there’s no integration with the online ordering system (this happens more often than you think even today) or the information passed from an operational group to an audit group is missing some data that’s required to complete the audit, and the audit group has to request that data from the operational group and then manually integrate it in before they can do their work, or different departments don’t use the same workflow system and we end up back with the spreadsheets and email to communicate work between departments.

Now, handoffs are typically one of the worst spots for inefficiencies and even degradation of quality in processes, and they always have been even in purely manual processes. So whenever work passes from one person to another, there’s an opportunity for information to be missed, or even for tasks to get completely dropped or hidden away somewhere. Think about the last time you called in into your bank or your mobile phone provider and had some sort of service request or a problem, so how many times did you have to repeat the description of your problem to different people and even repeat your personal information so that they could authenticate you multiple times as it got handed off from one person to another? That’s because they do a really bad job of handing off work, namely your call, between people and between departments. And in part, this is why oneandone customer service interactions gained in popularity there were no handoffs or at least a minimal number so there weren’t the opportunities for inefficiencies and dropped task to happen at that handoff point.

So, looking at the entire end-to-end processes in your organization, paying special attention to what happens every time a piece of work is handed off is going to let you find a lot of your process pain points. Now the funny part of looking at handoffs as a process pain points is that many failed handoffs can be directly correlated with local optimization efforts. So in other words, a single department gets enthusiastic about optimizing their own internal processes, without thinking about where they fit in the end-to-end process, and they don’t think about who needs to provide them with inputs, and more importantly they don’t think about who needs to consume their outputs. So this can result in critical business information being locked in their departmental line of business systems where it’s inaccessible to other departments. Even those that need to do some downstream work using that same information, in order to complete the end-to-end process.

The moral of the story, if you don’t have everyone thinking about where they fit in the end to-end business process and worried as much about the metrics for the entire process as they are about their own departmental metrics, then you’re almost certainly going to be experiencing some pain at the handoff points.

That’s all for today. You can find more of my writing and videos on the Trisotech blog or on my own blog at column2.com. See you next time.

Hi, I’m Sandy Kemsley of column2.com. I’m here for the Trisotech blog with a new series of videos on finding and dealing with process pain points. Although this will be of interest to business analysts who are figuring out the As-is and To-be processes within an organization. I’ll also touch on some implementation issues that will be of interest to my more technical listeners.

Quite a bit of my work over the years, has been helping companies with implementing business process improvement and automation within their organization. In this context, I’ve done everything: from the business analyst role of figuring out how the processes work and how they should work, to the architect’s role of designing how systems and processes fit together, to the developers role of how this is actually implemented and rolled out. In this range of activities, that upfront part of determining the problems with the current processes and how to best improve and automate those. is often the trickiest part. It’s as much an art as it is a science, and it requires a combination of business knowledge, technology knowhow, and a process improvement mindset.

I’m often asked how I go about figuring out that part in improving an organization’s processes. In other words how do I find the organization’s process pain points and determine what changes to make to ease that pain. My answer almost always starts with spreadsheets and email. I tend to analyze an organization’s processes by walking around and talking to people who are actually doing the work, not just looking at documentation for the systems or processes or procedures. And every time I sit down beside an insurance claims manager, a customer service rep or a loans officer, I ask the same question: “show me your spreadsheets and email”.

This might sound a little bit simplistic, but think about it. Business processes are made up mostly of calculations, decisions and workflow. Every company has line of Business Systems that their employees work with. In Insurance there are underwriting Administration and claim systems, in customer service there are CRM systems, in loan there’s loan origination and administration systems. These systems almost always do the calculation part of business processes, and they may also do some of the decision and workflow part but they almost always fall short of what people need them to do in those latter two areas.

So instead, there will be a collection of other methods that happen outside of the line of business system system to do some parts of the work, to track certain activities or hold data that isn’t kept in the main systems. The most common implementation of these are the old office automation standbys: spreadsheets for storing data doing calculations, email for workflow.

Now in many cases, these spreadsheets and emails aren’t documented as part of the standard operating procedure this creates a significant risk for the company. So for example what the audit reports state may not be what is actually happening: calculations that impact business decisions might be made in a spreadsheet where you’re not even really sure who can edit the formula and workflow and oversight are dependent on people knowing who to include on an email chain and there may not be an audit trail of who touched something at any particular point.

So departments could even be performing entirely new processes that were never considered part of their responsibility and just doing it in spreadsheets and email outside of their line of Business Systems and outside of the purview of of a it. Now most likely, line of Business Systems don’t have sufficient flexibility to be able to make the changes required by the business as quickly as they need to be, or there’s going to be a significant amount of coding by IT to make that happen. There could be a new business capability that’s been added and the system just can’t be enhanced to support it, or you could have work patterns: people in the workflow that aren’t supported by the system such as now you need to have case management instead of the sort of oneandone trans action processing in order to handle some new functionality or capability, or work distribution is more complex than just a simple round robin assignment that might be in the line of business system.

So there are all sorts of scenarios where the line of business system just can’t do what you need it to do in terms of either calculation, but more likely, in terms of decisions and in terms of workflow or the processes.

Now, I’ve talked a lot in the past of the video series about model driven development and the need for flexible processes and decisions is where model driven development really saves the day. So if you look at automating your main business process with systems that use graphical process and decision models, it’s going to be a lot easier to make changes and enhancement to those core systems, and avoid the need for spreadsheets and email around them.

Now, finding that spreadsheet and email usage in the core business processes doesn’t necessarily tell you what the new process should look like. It just shines a on where the problems are. So you know in a lot of cases the spreadsheets and emails were kind of added on in an incremental or ad hoc fashion, might not actually be the best way to be doing that process it’s just the way that people have devised along the way. But once you have a spotlight on those areas where the problems exist, then you need to know where to focus your energy and look at how the work is being done now and then what needs to change it in order to do it more effectively.

I’m going to be following on in the next couple of videos looking in particular at some exception cases that can happen within a mainstream line of business processing that most often result in things uh happening in spreadsheets and email. So tune in for the next couple of videos and you’ll be able to see some of the some drill down into some of the areas where this is of particular interest.

That’s all for today. You can find more of my writing and videos on the Trisotech blog or on my own blog at column2.com. See you next time.

Hi, I’m Sandy Kemsley of column2.com. I’m here for the Trisotech blog to continue with last time’s discussion of Artificial Intelligence and BPM. Actually, I’m going to address the larger topic of Process Automation in general, how this impacts businesses and people, and then how AI fits into this.

We see a lot of press. Now, about the dangers of AI: it’s going to take our jobs, it’s going to take over our lives, we’re all going to become slaves to the robots… Okay that’s mostly a bit of an exaggeration but there is a lot of Doom and Gloom around the topic of AI, this isn’t a new phenomena though, it’s not just about AI. If we look at um a promo for a recent book on this topic, so there’s a book called “Blood in the machine”, it says in the promo: “the most urgent story in modern tech begins not in Silicon Valley, but 200 years ago in rural England when workers known as the Luddites rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods”. In short, the alarm currently being raised over AI isn’t a new phenomena.

It happens with pretty much any new technology. In most cases the technology itself is not the problem, it’s the social constructs around how it’s used and the rights of the workers and other people who are impacted by the technology. I’m not any sort of expert in those fields but I’ve always seen fears about Automation in the business process projects that I’ve been involved in. Now, I started in process automation back in the Imaging and workflow day several decades ago, and at that time there were people whose job it was to push carts full of file folders around between different desks, based on handwritten routing slips on the folders, so the routing slips and the mail carts were the workflow of that age and the jobs of the people who filled out those routing slips and pushed those carts around were definitely impacted by the projects that we implemented for Imaging and workflow it took those file folders and made them electronic and it took away most of those carts that traveled around from one desk to another.

Now, after that we had years of “business process re-engineering” which in many cases was just an excuse for companies to downsize their Workforce, but it was also to some degree enabled by business automation. So processes that were previously very manual required a lot of human decision points, were suddenly partially or even fully automated.

Now, the last several years have fine-tuned that process automation by integrating in decision management, this is a huge factor in reducing human decision- making in business processes, so the process and the decision automation just keeps getting more intelligent. Now, we’ve also integrated many other systems through direct calls between systems or robotic process automation which means that there’s a lot less people doing copy and paste or reing of information between different systems that also means that there are many fewer errors due to copy paste and rekeying data, and it takes less time, so the automation gets faster and better too.

Now, does this mean that some of the people involved in those processes have radically um different jobs now, or maybe even had to find a different job altogether? Absolutely! Does it mean that customers are seeing different levels of service and quality both improvements and failures? Of course! And does it mean that companies are succeeding or failing financially based in part on their decisions about when and how to deploy automation? Well yeah! We saw that in excruciating detail during the business disruptions of the pandemic, which I’ve talked about in previous videos.

What I’m trying to to say is that in most cases the automation technology itself isn’t inherently good or bad. It can result in job losses, it can also improve job satisfaction by reducing the boring routine work, it can help customers get what they want faster through self-service, or it can create a frustrating customer experience when something goes wrong that’s not accounted for in the automation. It can make a company more profitable and efficient, it can also backfire and create a customer satisfaction nightmare.

I think we’ve all seen examples of both the positive and negative side of of all of these for the people who work with the technology, for the customers who are impacted by it, and for the companies who bring this new technology in. So this is true for most types of business automation that we deal with today: BPM, systems decision management, process mining, RPA and yes how AI is used with all of these.

I don’t think that people on the customer side of business want to return to the pre-automation days for the most part. You remember the bad old days when a straightforward business transaction like getting car loan or processing a simple Insurance claim, could take weeks or even months. So automation is also what gives us a lot of online self-service for customers so you can now buy office supplies with a couple of clicks, or you can make a stock market trade in your pajamas at home, or you can renew your fishing license on the weekend. All of these things are possible because of automation.

Now, if you look at the business’s side of these transactions, they don’t want to return to the mountains of paper files and the manual processes. They also don’t want to return to having critical business procedures exist primarily as folklore in the heads of people within the company that may or may not stay with the company in in the long term. Now, from a purely practical standpoint, there’s no putting the automation technology to toothpaste back in the tube any more than we’re going to go back to handloom textiles from the pre-Luddite days. Organizations are going to use automation or not use it for their own reasons, and there will be both good and bad things that happen because of that. As consumers, workers, business owners, and citizens we have a say in both the positive and negative impacts of automation.

Now, as I mentioned in my last video, I believe the current doomsaying about AI is a bit over blown. AI isn’t going to completely take over all of our business processes, any more than the previous generations of technology did. AI can increase the complexity of things that can be fully automated, but that’s always being a constantly changing threshold with every new generation of Technology. The same could be said for decision management. The same could be said for business process management in general. These things always make it so that you can automate more and more complex things, the more of these technological components that you bring in.

Now, where automation technology including AI can can really help and really add value, is when it provides guidance to knowledge workers to help them do the best possible job without replacing those roles. So it’s not just about taking the repetitive low skill jobs and automating them, it’s also about letting lower skilled workers work on more complex jobs because they have some amount of a automated guidance, and they will also learn as they work without risking violating the company policies or procedures. So you can still have people in the processes, you can have some things that are automated, and you can have the people who remain in the process be guided by the technology, AI, decision management, business Process Management, to make sure that they’re doing the right thing at the right time. And given that a lot of Industries have a lack of skilled knowledge workers, letting them be more productive earlier is a good thing for everybody involved.

That’s all for today. You can find more of my writing and videos on the Trisotech blog or on my own blog at column2.com. See you next time.

Hi, I’m Sandy Kemsley of column2.com. I’m here for the Trisotech blog to talk about the latest Hot Topic in BPM: Artificial Intelligence.

Now, I’ve been at a couple of conferences in the last month, and I’ve had a few briefings with vendors and there’s a lot of interest in this intersection between AI and BPM. But what does that mean? What exactly is the intersection? And it’s not just one answer, because there’s several places where AI and Process Management come together.

Now, the dream, or the nightmare in some people’s opinion, is that AI just takes over processes it figures out what the process should be then it automates and executes all the steps in the process. The reality is both less and more than that. So, let’s look at the different use cases for AI in the context of BPM. Let’s start at the beginning with process Discovery and design and there’s quite a bit that AI can do in this area as an assist of Technology. Now, at this point it might not be possible to have an AI completely designed processes without human intervention, but it is possible to have AI act as sort of a co-pilot for authoring process models or finding improvements to them.

There’s a couple different scenarios for this.

First of all, you could have a person just describe the process that they want to have in broad terms, and have generative AI create a first impression of that, or a first version of that process model for them. So, then the human designer can make changes directly or add additional information, the AI could then make refinements to the process model and so on. Now, the challenge with using generative AI in this scenario is that you need to ensure that the training data is relevant to your situation. This might mean that you need to use private AI engines and data sources that are trained on your own internal data or on data that’s specific to your industry in the very least in order to ensure some reasonably good results.

Now, the second process modeling scenario is when there are logs of processes in place, like we would use for process mining, and we’ve talked about process mining in in a previous podcasts. Now, in that case, there are possibilities for having AI look at the log data and then other enterprise and domain data and using process mining using other search-based optimization suggest improvements to the process. So, for example adding parallelism at certain points, or automating certain steps or decisions, or having some activities be required for regulatory or conformance reasons. Again, there needs to be some checks and balances on the training data that’s used for the AI to ensure that you’ve included processes and regulations that pertain to your business.

Now, in both of these cases, there’s the expectation that a person who’s responsible for the overall process operation, like the process owner, might review the models that are created or revised by the AI before they’re put into production. It’s not just an automated thing where the AI creates a model or modifies a model and it’s off and running. Now, we can look at using similar types of a AI and algorithms that you would for process improvement that are based on process mining and other domain knowledge, we can also use those in the scenario where AI acts again as a co-pilot, but for the people that are doing the human activities in a process, so the knowledge workers. Now they can ask complex questions about the case that they’re working on, they can be offered suggestions on the next best action, they can have guard rails put in place so that they don’t make decisions at a particular activity that would violate regulations or policies.

Now, we already see a lot of decision management and machine learning applied in exactly this situation. So, a knowledge worker just needs a little bit of an assist to help them make complex decisions or perform more complex activities. And adding AI to the mix means that we can have even more complex automation and decision-making that can support knowledge workers as they do their job. So, the ultimate goal is to ensure that the knowledge workers are making the best possible decisions at activities within processes, even if the environment is changing maybe regulations are changing, or procedures are changing. And then also to support less skilled knowledge workers so that they can become more familiar with the procedures that are required because they have a trusted expert, namely the AI, by their side coaching them on what they should be doing next.

Now, the last scenario for AI in the context of processes, is to have a completely automated system or even just completely automated activities within a process that used to be performed by a person. So the more times that an activity is performed successfully, there’s data collected about the context the domain knowledge that all that go behind that decision, the more likely it is that AI can be trained to make decisions and do activities of the same complexity and with the same level of quality as a human operator. We also see this with AI chatbots. We’re seeing these a lot now, that where they interact with other parties processes like providing customer service information. Now, previous previously a knowledge worker might have interacted with a customer maybe on a phone or by email, we’re seeing a lot of chatbots in place now for customer service scenarios. Now, a lot of them are pretty simple they don’t really deserve to be called AI. They’re just looking for simple words and providing some stock answers but what generative AI is starting to give us in this scenario, is the ability to respond to more complex questions from a customer and leave the human operators free to handle situations that can’t be automated or rather can’t be automated yet.

Now, currently I don’t think we need to worry about AI completely taking over our business processes. There’s lots of places where AI can act as a co-pilot to assist designers and knowledge workers to do the best job possible. But it doesn’t replace their roles: it just gives them an assist. Now, a lot of Industries don’t have all the skilled people that they need in both of these areas for designers, for knowledge workers or it takes a long time to train them so letting the people who are there be more productive, is a good thing. So, using AI to make the few skilled resources we have more productive is something that’s beneficial to the industry it’s beneficial to customers. Now, as I noted earlier, the ability of AI to make these kinds of quality decisions and perform the types of actions that are currently being done by people, it’s going to be heavily reliant on the training data that’s used for the AI. So, you can’t just use the public chat, like chat GPT, for interacting with your customers. That’s not going to work out all that well. Instead, you do want to be training on some of your own internal data as well as some industry specific data.

Now, where we do start to see people being replaced is where AI, is used to fully automate specific activity, specific decisions, customer interactions within a process. However this is not a new phenomenon. Process automation has been replacing people doing repetitive activities for a long time. So, all that we’re doing by adding AI, is increasing the complexity of the type of activity that can be fully automated. The idea that we’re automating some activities is not new, this has been going on a long time. So, the bar has been creeping up: we went from simple automation to more complex decision management, machine learning and now, we have full AI in its current manifestation. So, we just need to get used to that idea that it’s another step in the spectrum of things that we’re doing by adding intelligence into our business processes.

Now, are you worried about your own job? You could go and check out willrobotstakemyjob.com or just look around at what’s happening in your industry. If you’re adding value through skills and knowledge that you have personally that’s very difficult to replicate, you’re probably going to be able to stay ahead of the curve and you’ll just get a nice new AI assistant who’s going to help you out. If you’re doing the same thing over and over again however, you should probably be planning for when AI gets smart enough to do your job as well as you do.

That’s all for today. You can find more of my writing and videos on the Trisotech blog or on my own blog at column2.com. See you next time.

Hi, I’m Sandy Kemsley of column2.com. I’m here for the Trisotech blog with a new topic now that we’ve finished my series on best practices in business automation application development. Today, I’m going to talk about future proofing your business with process automation technologies such as BPM.

Now, a little over three years ago, everything was business as usual. Organizations were focused on new competitors, new business models, new regulations, but it wasn’t a particularly disruptive time. Then the pandemic happened, and that was disruptive! So, supply chains, customers, business models, everything changed dramatically in some cases.

Now, that’s not news of course not by now, but it’s become obvious that it’s not enough to have shifted to some new way of doing things in a response to a one-time event. Companies have to become more easily adaptable to frequent disruptions, whether they’re technological, societal or environmental, or they’re just not going to exist anymore. In many cases this means modernizing the very technological infrastructure that supports businesses.

So how is your business going to adopt a change? Both the changes that have already happened and the unknown changes in the future? There’s a lot that falls under the umbrella of modernization, and you need to look at whether you’re doing just enough to survive or if you’re taking advantage of this disruption to thrive and actually outgrow your competition.

I see three ways that companies have been reacting to disruption:

more than
managing your business processes

So I mentioned BPM, but this is about more than just managing your business processes. There’s a wide variety of technologies that come into play here and that really support future proofing of your business: process and decision automation, intelligent analysis with machine learning and AI, content and capture, customer interactions with intelligent chatbots, and Cloud infrastructure for Access anywhere anytime…

So you have to look at how to bring all of those together, and just understanding how all those fit, is like an entire day’s lecture all in one, but you probably have a bunch of those that you’re using already. Let’s look at a few kind of examples of this support/improve/innovate spectrum that I’ve been talking about though and we’re dealing with instruction and then just what it means for future proofing your business. So, supporting your existing business, a matter of just doing what you can to survive, and hoping that either you can keep up or that things will go back to normal. Now basically you’re doing the same business that you always were, but with maybe a bit of new technology to support some new ways of doing things:

• Your employees might be working from home so you needed some new Cloud technology or Network Technology to help with this.
• You probably also need some new management techniques, in order to stay productive and motivated even though your your Workforce is highly distributed geographically.
• You also need to handle changing customer expectations. So you have to have some amount of digital interactions and if you’re dealing with physical goods you might be looking at new ways of handling delivery.
• Your supply chain processes need to become flexible, this is one of the things that we really saw during the pandemic is there were a lot of broken supply chains, so you want to be able to change suppliers or change other channels in the event of disruption.

But let’s just go a little bit beyond surviving disruption that you might do by sort of mandating together something to support your existing model. The next step to is to look at disruption as an opportunity to thrive. So you want to still be in the same business but embrace new technologies and new ways of doing things. So this really pushes further into looking at customer expectations: adding in self-serve options if you don’t already have them, and then coupling that with intelligent automation of processes and decisions. So, once you’ve added intelligence to your business operations to let them be done mostly without human intervention, now a customer can kick off a transaction through self-service and see a complete almost immediately by intelligent automation, same business – better way to do it, more efficient, faster, more accurate, better customer satisfaction.

Now, this is also going to be helped by having proper business metrics that are oriented towards your business goals. With more automation data is going to be captured directly,, regarding how your operation is working, and then that’s going to feed directly into the metrics. Those metrics then you can use to guide knowledge workers so that they know what they should be doing next. Also to understand how customer satisfaction is and how you can improve it.

So this lets you move past your competition, while keeping your previous business focus. So given that there’s two companies, you and your competitors, who are offering the same products or Services if one does only that survival support that I talked about previously and one does more intelligent improvements focused on customer satisfaction, who do you think is going to win?

Now, the third stage of responding to disruption and adapting to change is innovation. You’ll continue to do process and operational improvements through performance monitoring, data-driven analytics, but also move into completely new business models. So maybe you repackage your products or services and then you sell them to completely different markets, so you might move from commercial to Consumer markets or vice versa or you sell into different geography or different industries because now you have more intelligent processes you have this always-on elastic infrastructure. Here again, you’re just moving past your competition by not only improving your business but actually expanding into new markets, taking on new business models that are supported by this technology-based Innovation.

So it’s the right application of technology that lets you do more types of business and more volume without increasing your employee headcount. Without automation and flexible processes you just couldn’t do that, and without data-driven analytics you wouldn’t have any understanding of the impact that such a change would have on your business or whether you should even try it. So you need to have all of that: you need to have the the data that supports the analytics and you need to have the right type of technology that you’re applying to have more intelligent operations business operations, and this was going to allow you to move from just surviving to thriving to innovation.

Now, a lot of change here. The question that all of you need to be asking yourself now is not is this the new normal but really why weren’t we doing things this way before? There’s just a lot of better ways that we could be doing things and we’re now being pushed to take those things on.

That’s all for today. Next month I’m going to be attending the academic BPM conference in the Netherlands, and there’s always some cool new ideas that come up so watch for my reports from over there!

You can find more of my writing and videos on the Trisotech blog or on my own blog at column2.com. See you next time.