How Smarter Processes Lead to Smarter Decisions
Every day, executives and other members of the global corporate workforce make uninformed decisions that result in revenue losses, exposure to risks, and impact the customer experience. It's not intentional as everyone wants to do a good job.
Very often, poor decisions result from not having all the right information, an inability to connect business users together, and an absence of proper guidance at the time a decision needs to be made. After all, people can only rely on the information they have to make the best decision.
For decades, businesses have invested heavily in core enterprise systems focused on automating functional areas like order processing and payroll. These transactional applications certainly serve a key role in boosting efficiency. However, to succeed in the era of where organizations are focused on delivering the best personalized customer experience, businesses are turning to a new generation of applications that tackle less predictable and inherently collaborative processes.
This new wave of applications can overcome the inherent limitations of core transactional systems by integrating business process management (BPM), analytics, collaboration, content management, capture and dynamic customer communications. By combining these technology areas, a new generation of smarter process applications are being developed that can deliver timely, accurate and contextual information.
As a result, these applications can connect with an organization's systems of records—enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM) and other systems—creating a 360-degree view of the information needed to make informed decisions.
Beyond Automation
The traditional role of technology has been to automate transactions—to remove human interaction and do what computers do best: process data.
For example, BPM and other software applications have traditionally focused on streamlining workflows. This enables system-to-system communication and reduces labor.
According to Forrester Research Inc., "Smart process applications are a new and emerging category of applications designed to help CIOs and their firms improve the effectiveness of human-centric business activities."
Today's smart process applications help make dynamic collaborative processes more efficient and intelligent, particularly those involving high volumes of data and a combination of business rules and human judgment. The objective is to simplify activities that are people-intensive. It helps increase the productivity of people engaged in highly collaborative processes or activities that are loosely structured and subject to change, by providing the precise information needed to make sound and timely decisions.
No longer should users have to toggle between applications to find what they are looking for.
Smart process applications generally perform the following functions:
- Analyze information and align with the business context;
- Capture relevant documents and data across all channels, and connect them to processes;
- Integrate all pertinent information to create contextual awareness;
- Support collaboration and social work patterns among users; and
- Manage and execute the activities through BPM.
Perhaps the most significant of these are functions that combine critical human intelligence with core operational analytics, allowing processes to become truly "smart."
Deeper Insights
Smart process applications provide deeper-level insights by correlating relevant information with a business activity. This often involves drawing information from a variety of sources, which can include both structured and unstructured content. Moreover, predictive analytics alerts users to historical information that can help drive better decisions in the future.
What makes smart applications unique is that they do not necessarily eliminate the human factor. On the contrary, they empower people to play a critical role that technology cannot: rendering qualitative judgment and decisions.