Botsourcing

Just in time when companies need their next threshold of efficiency and effectiveness, IT industry pundits have coined a new term Botsourcing. Interesting article by Phil Fersht on how 2018 investments intentions by industry are stacked in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vs Outsourcing.

copyright and credits - HfS Research

However, the key question remains is RPA the new outsourcing or it is just that outsourcing and automation are converging now? I personally believe it is the later. We will soon see the large System Integrators combining bots and humans within their bids and coming up with business models where clients will have the option to pay transaction price separate for humans and bots. 

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RPA and it's considerations

Robotics Process Automation (RPA) takes robots out of the humans. Typical knowledge worker employed on a back-office process has a lot of repetitive, routine tasks that   are dreary and uninteresting. RPA is a type of software that mimics the activity of a human being in carrying out a task within a process. It can do repetitive stuff more quickly, accurately, and tirelessly than humans, freeing them to do other tasks requiring human strengths such as emotional intelligence, reasoning, judgment, and interaction with the customer.

There are typically four streams of RPA

• Highly customized software that will work only with certain types of process viz. accounting, finance
• Screen scraping - User might be collecting data, synthesizing it, and putting it into some sort of document on a desktop
• Self-development kit - Where a template is provided and specialist programmers design the robot.
• Enterprise software that can be scaled and is reusable.

RPA is light weight in the sense that

• You don’t need a lot of IT involvement to get it up and running. Business-operations people can learn quite quickly how to configure and apply the robots. 
• It only addresses the presentation layer of information systems. It doesn’t have to address the business logic of the underlying system or the data-access layer.

Important considerations for adopting RPA

• Strategy - You can use automation tactically for cost savings but if you use RPA as a broader strategic tool, you get a lot more out of it. 
• Launch - Get the C-suite involved and appoint a really good project champion and you have to pick the right process. It has to be stable, mature, optimized, rules-based, repetitive, and usually high volume. Start with a controlled experiment on a visible bottleneck or pain point.
• Change management—persuading the organization to change and adopt automation. It is a key issue from the outset. 
• Building a mature enterprise capability for RPA - Long-term users have built centers of excellence over time, usually within business operations, and developed the following skills and capabilities 

• You should have people who assess the feasibility of a proposal from a business unit. 
• Have people who configure a robot, install it, and develop it, and 
• Controllers who switch it on and off and plan its work and how it fits with human work. 
• Have some sort of continuous improvement capability and relationships with IT, governance, and security. 

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Marrying BPM with IoT

Ever thought of using IBM BPM process to fetch the speed of the vehicle running on the road or may be disabling a vehicle remotely if it is stolen. Neil Kolban @IBM created an awesome demonstration putting together Watson IoT platform, IBM Bluemix APIs and open source platforms like Chip, Raspberry PI. He uses Open API to describe the services to call, IBM API Connect and Node Red flow to build this with almost no coding. Finally, makes a rest API calls from a simple IBM BPM process.

Love the mash-up of the technologies and what can be done with no coding experience! Shout out to you Neil for a great demonstration.

Copyright and credits: Neil Kolban

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Digital Transformation powered by BPM

Being a BPM practitioner for over a decade and half,  to me Digital transformation is all about delivering the orchestration of people, systems and devices at a level that could not be achieved by traditional means.

iBPMS (intelligent business process management suites) provides a competitive edge in the race towards digital transformation as it lets you re-engineer processes in days rather than years. It provides ways to re-model business processes, imagining new and better ways of performing operations. Starting 2016, some of the leading BPM suites have broken the barrier of structured work processes by handling more complex, unstructured knowledge-led work requiring deep case visibility.

The result of which is the energy companies in Washington area have started developing the prototypes that involves complex IoT operations. They are planning to automate and regulate the energy consumption and repair by using sensors to send signals to BPM via IoT protocols. Thereby freeing up their ground crew to carry out the costly maintenance and saving them the trip to the problematic energy household meters.

In summary, BPM is powering the digital transformation for companies today for two key reasons:

1. It provides flexibility by wrap around legacy IT environments to deliver digital agility on top of rigid systems.
2. It has broken the barrier of structured work processes there by enabling the businesses to receive, inject and manage huge amount of data, various types of data at a speed higher than ever before.

How in your experience is BPM helping meet digital business goals? Let me know by leaving a comment!.

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Why manage IoT with BPM?

The ultimate goal of business process management is to connect people with the right automated systems and processes to measure effectiveness and to keep up to date. BPM adds value to the IoT by connecting smart objects. This, in turn, expands their integration and orchestration. With more and more devices being connected and IoT use increasing, there is a greater possibility for chaos from rapidly multiplying individual interfaces. Smart devices send information from a connected device through an API to activate a response. The responses can be orchestrated through a complete process, invoking subsequent responses like, for example, opening a car door or allowing access for certain files in a systematic way. Incorporating BPM allows for many things within the IoT to be managed properly and seamlessly, together.

 

As the number of connected devices increases day by day, there exists more room for miscommunication among devices, or for no communication at all. This represents the possibility of a huge missed opportunity to deliver more and better service using connected devices. Managing smart devices with BPM allows easy maintenance of their orchestration (when APIs change, for example). It also allows a layer of tracking that allows you to easily bring in KPIs to track operations and devices and make the right decisions on how best to operate your swarm of objects.

 

As society continues to innovate, it is essential to take IoT to the next level and incorporate BPM to direct the flow of massive amounts information these devices collect and share. BPM will turn the Internet of Things into the Internet of Things That Serve Us Well.

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OpenTable has a business case for BPM

Like many others, I mostly use OpenTable to book a restaurant reservation. It provides the convenience of booking most restaurants that accept online reservations from the comfort of my home or office in just few clicks and also gives me double the points on my credit card. A convenient reservation experience till this point.

The overall process goes for a toss when you get a call from an unrecognized number few hours before the scheduled appointment and it hits your voice mail. It turns out that restaurant was calling to confirm your reservation. The host leaves a voice message leaving a different number than from where he called. For guests it is potentially an additional task of jotting down the call back number and then calling to confirm the booking. However at times this small break in the process could mean unutilized table and therefore opportunity lost for the restaurant.

A simpler change in the overall process can not only increase the probability of restaurant getting my business but also provide a great customer experience. Since I booked my reservation online, OpenTable can generate a simple email  (or text) asking me to click the link and confirm. This minor process change  will help restaurants save hours of phone calls to guests, can give higher response rate as compared to phone calls and voice mails. For me, it gives a better experience and streamlines the overall reservation process. Even OpenTable can use this additional confirmation opportunity to take the guests to their website.

Is this not a Win Win for all the 3 parties? Your comments please!

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What can BPM deliver?

BPM’s role as a management paradigm allows organizations to apply process innovation wherever applicable. Automating and improving processes can have a variety of results, including better governance, improved transparency and more operational efficiency. BPM can also empower workers by eliminating inefficient or mundane process from their day.

The technological side of BPM comes in handy when trying to achieve these goals. As the engine that drives process innovation, BPM software can give organizations the ability to automate processes and create a more social business process environment. Effective BPM strategies can accomplish a great deal within a business, and the right software solution can help companies put those strategies into action.

The main benefits of Business Process Management are: 

• Sustainability: Business Processes can be continually improved to adapt to changing organization environments and continue to deliver results.
• Efficiency: The visibility of business processes allows concentration on inefficiencies as well as the opportunity to “re-use” common activities across the organization.
• Measurable: All processes can be measured end-to-end and compared to expected results.
• Integration: Technology solutions can be better integrated as processes provide a level of abstraction over complex systems, providing a framework for better design of integrated technical solutions.
• Focus: All levels of an organization are focused on activities that deliver the right results for Customer and Stakeholders

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IBM BPM 7.5 – There is something for everyone!

IBM integrated their WebSphere BPM offerings and released a new product - IBM Business Process Manager (BPM) 7.5 late last week and. Here I was sitting with one of my BPM clients at lunch table earlier this week browsing the lunch menu, my client suddenly asked – What is this new product from IBM for business process management? Will I have to migrate to new BPM and how will my existing entitlements change post this upgrade?

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notes to self - Sunday, January 24, 2010

1. An Audience With....John Everhard | Theo Priestley-- John Everhard of Pega systems thinks many companies stepped-back from software investments in 2008 in the US and took the time to plan significant transformations as preparation for an economic up-turn which has started during 2009. It seems the UK and Europe are 9 - 12 months behind the US cycle and Pega is seeing the results of similar planning exercises in the guise of RFI’s and RFP’s in recent months.


2. Gartner Reveals Five Business Process Management Predictions for 2010 and Beyond | Gartner Newsroom-- Gartner, Inc. has revealed its key predictions for business process management (BPM). Analysts have identified five predictions on the advancement of BPM, a management discipline that treats processes as assets that directly contribute to organizational performance.

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