Growth of business process management within South African context

Although the concept of business process management through a corporate lens is not a new one, it is an approach which is continuously fine-tuned and updated to suit the exponential rush of new technologies that are being brought to market each year.

The method of aligning business processes in favour of greater efficiency and organisational effectiveness is persistently being affected by the ebb and flow of international technology tides.

As a result of this, there is an ever present need to re-address what business process management means to the South African business sector as a whole. How are local businesses responding to the pressures of transforming business process management in an increasingly digitised world, and what impact is this having on the maturity of these processes?

While South Africa is at the forefront of African technological innovation, large enterprises are still hesitant to embrace new-age technologies such as cloud-based applications and social networking. Instead, they choose to adopt a singular business process through which internal skills and resources are leveraged as value propositions.

Internationally speaking, large corporations are now moving away from this 'business as an island' approach, and are integrating their skills and processes with clients and customers in order to ensure a more streamlined product flow. This has resulted in a more interconnected way of doing business, where companies have access to each other's resources in related processes.

For example, an insurance sales clerk may log into a national bank's client records via a secure cloud-based application, while conversing with a colleague in the finance department by means of an organisational online chat system. This would serve to eliminate legacy-based methods of communication such as fax and e-mail, which are unreliable and slow, and in turn would improve customer satisfaction due to the speed and ease at which the request was processed.

Advancements such as these speak to a greater message within business process management maturity. Through the implementation of new technologies, companies should also be concerned with advancing employees to a knowledge worker base. In short, this means giving personnel at all levels of the business the ability to make decisions that relate to their job descriptions.

Businesses need to begin implementing case management systems which allow employees to understand the effects of their actions and how their decisions impact other segments of the organisation. This paves the way for increased employee responsibility and can be integrated effectively with the growth and adoption of new technologies within business process management in order to achieve a more streamlined organisational process.

Although there are isolated local examples where business process management is being transformed on a multi-organisational level through the use of technology, and process maturity such as greater employee responsibility is being adopted, the reality is that South Africa as a country is still roughly five years away from the realisation of this goal.

What Ovations is encouraging executives to consider is that business process management is not a static craft, but a fluid strategy which is constantly changing according to available technologies, societal norms and business values.

From a South African perspective, major organisations need to address and understand the changing needs of their customers, clients and workforce before implementing a business process management strategy. Nonetheless, if these requirements are met, local organisations will begin to enjoy the benefits of a truly mature and technologically streamlined business process environment.