The central role of process in digital transformation was recognized by MIT scholars a decade ago. Similarly, McKinsey emphasized that the actions organizations can take to encourage digital process innovation involves mapping and then streamlining selected end-to-end business processes and gaining a clear view of how information and data are managed across the company.

Yet, the close collaboration of process improvement professionals and the team driving digital transformation is rare. Perhaps that’s due to the perception that process improvement is incremental improvement, while digital transformation calls for re-imaging work?

Perhaps it is due to the perception that business process management software is somehow lacking and that’s why the process discipline has been largely excluded from digital transformation efforts.

In many companies, process improvement involves a slow, steady – even bureaucratic methodology. Yet, success with digital requires that organizations focus on large scale change and reimagine value creation.

While many companies are doing something around customer experience and process management, in most cases not enough is being done to shift management attention from a vertical view of departmental activities to the flow of work that crosses organizational boundaries in creating value for customers.

If process practitioners aspire to play a central role in digital transformation, then there are a few things they need to stop doing and some others they need to start doing.

What to stop doing:

• working on small processes inside departmental boundaries. Such work will not impress digital transformation teams.

• focusing on just the current state or “as is” view of process. That invariably leads to incremental improvement – not redesign.

• focusing just on cost reduction. While that’s important – there’s much more to consider.

• making things more complex than they really are. Stop advocating just one methodology – a certain amount of evangelism is ok – but refrain from overdoing it.

What to start doing:

• measuring performance. Begin with measurement – not with modeling. Gain clarity on current performance such that senior leaders can have the data to set goals on desired future performance. 

• building cross-practice collaboration. Engage with the customer experience team. Engage with the digital team.

• asking thought provoking questions and telling stories about process performance.

• working on end-to-end processes.

If your organization is not working on one of these then you may be tinkering at the margin. 

Ask questions such as:

• Lots of checking. How can that be reduced or automated?

• Are POs missing payment terms, tax status, ship-via, etc.??

• What’s the policy on checking credit?

Tell stories such as:

Story: Most of the time, we don’t have updated customer documents (i.e. tax certificate, end-use, customer profile, etc.) at the time of placing the order – this causes us to manually contact people in sales for the desired customer documents and causes the Sales Order to be put on hold. 

Story: Due to the nature of there being multiple ERP systems (different ERP systems/instances for AUS, AC, ACLA, ACCA, and ACBR) there is duplicate and triplicate entries of the same information for various orders

Story: the Sales Team does not have a sense of urgency when obtaining customer documentation (after an order has been placed). The Sales Team’s commissions are paid when the order is “confirmed” and not when the order has shipped (or when the customer pays). Wow!

Questions:

·      How might we automate screening ideas?

·      How might we automate building the business case?

Story: We don’t do a good job at vetting project ideas to make sure that only the “right” projects get approved. We need more due diligence on customer needs, market analysis, etc.

Story: R&D resources are moved between projects depending on which project is “squeaking the loudest”

Story: Misalignment of departmental objectives (i.e. incentives – reliability, time to market, etc.) Marketing is not involved as early as needed to produce a quality product definition. We don’t have a clear line of customer feedback.

Process practitioners also need to be conversant on key digital technologies including, but not limited to, the following:

• Robotic process automation (RPA)

• Process mining

• BPM suites

• Intelligent process automation (aka Hyperautomation )

• Artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT

In summary, if you aspire to play a central role in digital transformation, promote the following list of empowering and inhibiting actions.

Andrew Spanyi is President of Spanyi International. He is a member of the Board of Advisors at the Association of Business Process Professionals and has been an instructor at the BPM Institute. He is also a member of the Cognitive World Think Tank on enterprise AI.