An Intellyx BrainBlog for iGrafx by Jason English
Customers never appreciate how hard it is to make everything work behind the scenes of each successful touchpoint they have with a brand. Mobile app and SaaS consumers probably imagine business processes as rather lightweight flowcharts dictating the steps of a typical ecommerce website or mobile app.
In reality, most mature companies have a mountain of process complexity tied up in disparate systems and services, unstructured data swamps, paper documents, and interpersonal communications. Like a jumbo jetliner, it’s hard to visualize how so much mass could ever get off the ground.
In aviation the invisible forces of thrust, drag and lift keep an airplane aloft. Fortunately, there are three forces that can, when working in concert, similarly make modern process optimization fly: operational intelligence, process automation, and process design.
Overcoming organizational inertia 
If there’s one criticism of most existing low-code app builders, task management and RPA solutions, it’s that the resulting processes they create are brittle, meaning they tend to fall down on the job once any unexpected changes happen, or heavier demand starts showing up.
When a single change is the cause of process failure, then it is really a symptom of a deeper problem – a very tenuous process journey connecting the enterprise’s systems of record and data communications to the applications used by internal resources and external customers.
Each station of a complex business process has its own set of tools, for instance the finance department may have different ERP systems and process rails in place for invoices, orders, pricing, approvals and transactions. These may interface with sets of tools built on other process frameworks, for instance the fulfillment side of warehouse inventory, logistics, production planning, and supplier sourcing.
Maintaining the continuity of a business process as it crosses so many departmental and vertical-specific tools is difficult, since most of the tools were built for specific tasks, rather than having conceptual foundations in BPM. Each task must be integrated in an ad-hoc way with the next task in a sequence.
Even if process integration tools are used to stitch services together, or RPA and custom scripting are combined to repeat user actions on a screen, whenever changes are introduced there’s still a high failure rate because there’s a lack of context and continuity.
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
