The Role Of Mobile BPM In An Effective Digital Transformation

In Business Process Management, Change Management, Digital Transformation by IRM UKLeave a Comment

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A growing number of organizations are striving to achieve optimal business performance through digital transformation initiatives. The term “digital transformation” refers to the adoption of digital technologies and the resulting transformation of business operations, processes, competencies, and models. A successful digital transformation enables effective collaboration, operations, and access to business processes, both for internal and external users—something achieved through technologies such as mobility.

Jorge García, Principal Analyst, Business Intelligence and Data Management, Technology Evaluation Centers.

 

In the context of an organization’s business process management (BPM) software, mobility offers plenty of benefits, allowing organizations to not only streamline their processes but also increase portability.

To achieve successful adoption and an effective user experience in mobile BPM, there needs to be a certain level of expertise and effort. Many of the challenges when attempting to incorporate mobility in one’s BPM solution have to do with mundane yet common issues, including:

• How to upgrade or modify processes with new computing approaches and paradigms with the least possible effort
• How to ensure mobile integration complies with the organization’s technical and business requirements
• How to ensure mobile integration complies with the overall technical security and governance of the organization

The incorporation of mobile BPM solutions carries clear benefits for an organization, such as promoting a different mindset within the business, shifting its operations from “static” to “on the go.” It can also boost customer relationship and employee productivity management initiatives and, best of all, enable significant improvement of the efficiency of business workflows.

As BPM solutions become increasingly critical for operational success, mobile BPM capabilities can be key to boosting a company’s operations, minimizing downtimes, facilitating process automation, and enabling employees, associates, and customers to effectively carry out critical tasks. Mobile BPM technologies not only improve operations and productivity, but can also support better strategy and planning scenarios by enabling immediate and direct access to data, regardless of the user’s location. That reduces the delay between data gathering, analysis, planning, and execution.

A mobile BPM solution can provide:

• Smooth integration with the cloud, reducing your company’s investment in IT
• Simple, easy-to-use interfaces that encourage and enable users’ work on daily operations
• Universal access that enables seamless operation on any type of device (e.g., PC, tablet, or smartphone) and from any place at any time, ensuring key users always have access to the data and processes they need

Deploying a mobile BPM solution offers organizations the opportunity to improve and streamline processes, making them portable and fully accessible regardless of the user’s location.

Mobile BPM Deployment: Key Considerations

Now that we know about the important benefits and advantages of mobile BPM solutions, how do we achieve a successful implementation? The following are some key aspects to consider before establishing your mobile BPM strategy and undertaking a full-fledged deployment.

Readiness and Potential

Prior to deploying mobile BPM capabilities, a large number of processes are asynchronous—and not necessarily ready to be synced with the rest of the operation’s software. Identifying key areas where mobility can easily evolve a process with real-time communication capabilities and collaboration (such as notifications, scheduling, or activity streams) can encourage change and increase acceptance of mobile BPM capabilities.

It is a good idea for IT and operations teams to collaboratively explore how mobile capabilities can transform or improve specific processes in order to identify target opportunities and ideal use cases for implementation.

Capacity

Of course, integrating mobile capabilities within BPM can pose a big challenge, especially in terms of determining which pre-existing processes will work within the new mobile paradigm and how mobile integration will guarantee user experience improvement and process efficiency.
While it is a good idea to start small, mobile BPM needs to be part of an enterprise-wide strategy. Your organization needs to measure the impact and feasibility of mobile integration before undertaking an organization-wide deployment.

Integration

In terms of mobile integration with the overall BPM solution, it’s important to think in terms of how mobility can significantly transform and improve the current use of the BPM solution. Incorporating that functionality (collaboration, alerts, media sharing, etc.) is key for each particular type of user or department that works with the BPM. That can help you identify where mobile capabilities will fit nicely and efficiently within the current (or new) business process flow and where they will have the most meaningful impact.

Conclusion

In the ongoing quest for digital transformation, many organizations are already using mobile technologies as a core part of their BPM activities, achieving consistent levels of control over their BPM practices on universal access platforms. However, as IT and business needs evolve, companies should frequently assess and update their BPM.

Achieving mobile BPM integration and efficiency in this digital era will always be challenging. Establishing and maintaining a process for identifying your organization’s next steps regarding mobile tools can be vital for ensuring the sustainability of your digital business operations in this era of digital transformation.

Jorge García is the principal analyst of business intelligence (BI) and data management at Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC). He has more than 20 years of experience in all phases of application development and database and data warehouse (DWH) design, as well as nine years in project management, covering best practices and new technologies in the BI and DWH space.
Prior to joining TEC, García was a senior project manager and senior analyst developing BI, DWH, and data integration applications with Oracle, SAP Business Objects, and data integration. He has also worked on projects related to the implementation of BI solutions for the private sector, including the banking and services sectors. He has had the opportunity to work with some of the most important BI and DWH tools on the market.
García is a member of the Boulder BI Brain Trust.

Copyright Jorge García, Principal Analyst, Business Intelligence and Data Management, Technology Evaluation Centers

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