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New breed of BPM consultants emerging

By Marilyn de Villiers
Johannesburg, 01 Sept 2017

The business process management (BPM) market is changing with legacy BPM programs being replaced with modern programs designed to unleash the potential of digital business automation.

As a result, process teams are increasingly turning to outside BPM service providers for strategic advice on important decisions.

That's according to Forrester Research's Q4 2016 research into BPM service providers. The report, The Forrester Wave: BPM Service Providers, was authored by Christopher Mines and Clay Richardson.

The authors found that business process leaders increasingly see next generation automation technologies as a way to deal with the different types of challenges facing business including improving customer experience and accelerating digital transformation.

However, the extension of BPM to digital business automation - "a discipline focused on driving competitiveness through continuous optimisation of business processes across customers' digital touchpoints" - is a quantum leap for business process leaders.

As adoption of digital process automation grows, organisations are looking for vendors, partners and consultants who can provide capabilities that go beyond traditional BPM to include digital labs, process automation, and user experience (UX) design skills. They are also expected to be able to help process leaders explore and experiment with the new automation technologies without requiring large upfront investments in software or services.

That's because, as the authors point out, some digital automation technologies, such as cognitive computing and the Internet of things, are so new, that business executives often don't recognise their business value. This is then exacerbated by the fact that most process leaders still struggle to scope and deliver cost-effective, small-scale experiments that showcase the full potential of digital business automation. For example, business process leaders are experimenting with autonomous business processes that engage customers and fulfil customer requests with very little human interaction.

The report states that the most difficult part of making the shift to digital automation is not the technology, but rather the new techniques that require a different mindset to that required for traditional BPM approaches.

"The best way to build the design and development skills needed to deliver digital automation is to work alongside a new breed of BPM service providers that already have deep expertise around emerging best practices for digital design and implementation," the authors state.

According to the Forrester report, the new breed of BPM consultants no longer place the major emphasis on process modelling, process analysis and process design. Rather, they make considerable use of user experience designers to build better user interfaces that put the user - customer or employee - at the centre of the business process.

They also facilitate experimentation through design studios and labs and merge customer experience and process improvement methodologies.

In short, the new breed of BPM consultants and consulting engagements lower the risk for companies wanting to assess new automation technologies when process leaders are unsure how the technologies will apply to their company's environment, Forrester concludes.

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