How Mobile are your Business Processes?
Mobile is the new face of how work gets done for us today. Business operations are no exception to this revolution.
This new communication channel for companies exposes organization's internal processes (that are not optimized for the scope, speed and brevity of the mobile communications) to stretch the scope of process management. It is inevitable to optimize the end points to enable the specific tasks in the process that customers touch to give them the outcomes they desire. A good summary on Mobile and BPM integration strategy was recently given by Forrester Analyst, Clay Richardson.
Given that organizations are gearing up for Mobile BPM, I would like to understand how these two seemingly disparate technologies are complementing each other for innovation. Technological capabilities often redefine the scope of functional entities. We have seen the scope of BPM evolving from optimizing line of business processes, to departmental processes and then to enterprise processes and finally today operating at entire supply chain processes. When technological breakthrough happens in opening alternate communication channels, we need to focus on not just the synchronization among the different channels of communication, but leveraging the full potential of alternate medium of communication.
Mobile revolution has expanded the reach of information and services for humans. For processes to leverage mobile revolution, true potential can be articulated when we take process centric approach in which we explore what all this mobile technology can offer to processes. Do processes need only human input like approvals? What about outside information critical to the success of process? Can mobile provide any of this information or services to the processes? There is a possibility for innovative solutions on this line of thinking. For example, Kofax has developed Mobile Capture software that can use cameras in mobile devices to capture perfect images of documents, automatically extract relevant information from those images and pass it into enterprise applications and repositories. A recent survey by AIIM asserts Mobile Capture's ability to improve the customer experience and accelerate business growth. The survey indicates that nearly half of those surveyed indicated the ability to connect remote staff directly with back-office processes would improve productivity by 33 per cent.
Mobile and BPM being two different worlds each growing with promising possibilities for Business, they need to be complemented each other for innovative solutions. This demands significant upgrades in BPM software to leverage the power of mobile. A classic example to reflect this trend is PNMSoft's recent BPM Suite that comes up HotChange architecture with unparalleled mobile capabilities running on all devices. This new architecture has the ability to write once and run anywhere through the use of a mobile portal for tablets and smartphones with in-memory architecture that allows switching between cloud or on premise storage.
Multiple channels with flexible service delivery options enabled customers to intrude organizational processes and even play defining role in product and service design and delivery. Companies with such sophisticated systems are not seeing customer as being outside. Companies are constantly trying to enable customers to define what they want and how they want by making the whole process very easy for them. This is only going to raise the expectations from both Mobile and BPM capabilities leading to interesting innovations.
What business processes you want to expose to mobile? Do you see any limitations either from BPM or mobile capabilities?
