BrainBlog for iGrafx by Jason English
Process automation has come a long way over the last two or three decades.
We’ve evolved away from a classical definition of business process management (BPM), which largely consisted of rote, single-threaded sequences of steps, interrupted by decisioning activities, where a human domain expert steps in to make a selection or handoff that hopefully keeps the process execution moving forward.
Decisioning in this context is a human act that happens in the midst of an ongoing process, as opposed to a pre-process policy-setting activity, or a post-event analysis and adjustment exercise.
Today, any mid-to-large-sized company will have thousands of complex business processes in flight at any given time, such as order-to-cash, manufacturing and delivery, incident reporting, system upgrades, facility management, and so on. These capabilities now fall under the categorization of DPA (digital process automation) or CPO (continuous process orchestration), depending upon which analyst you talk to in a given month.
DPA and process orchestration software can power BPM to make some of its own intelligent automated decisions, faster than any human, within multiple processes, aided by an exponential increase in scalable compute and storage resources.
With these powerful systems in place serving up automated processes at such high volumes, maybe a human stepping in to decide is an activity that no longer adds value.
Perhaps the art of human decisioning is dying out, much like sculpting. After all, who needs a great artist like Donatello or Rodin to carefully chisel out an emotive character from solid rock, when we have 3D printers?
Putting on siloed process blinders 
We’ve abstracted many of our choices to a higher ‘strategic’ level, by aggregating processes in much larger quantities, then viewing and managing their progress within role-specific dashboards and analytics silos, to support things like ‘goal setting’ and ‘strategic tradeoffs.’
Even if we’ve lost sight of decisioning due to automation, we never stopped making decisions. Humans will still need to react to changes and alerts that pop out of these process silos.
A CRO or sales director may spend all day inside Salesforce or Manhattan software, watching lead deal progress and tracking order fulfillment. A CFO or controller spends all day inside SAP, looking at orders and transactions. And, a CIO or IT leader monitors the development and release pipeline, or an ITSM platform for alerts about the health of all systems in the org’s estate.
Advanced business process automation should fill in most gaps in these processes. Who cares if different teams are looking at their own stovepipe dashboards, if that’s how it has always been?
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
