Digital Business (DBiz)

This question matters – now more than ever

Companies face daily new opportunities and threats in our fast changing digital world. Organizations have to establish a management discipline to integrate agile innovation into their business and realize the full potential of digital technologies and the power of the internet. The Discipline of Business Process Management (BPM) addresses this need. Correctly set up, it establishes an agile and focused innovation capability in an organization. The BPM-Discipline produces innovation in form of new impactful processes and organizes the way other innovations are developed and rolled out. It is  crucial for getting best value from digital transformations [1].

An increasing numbers of companies are becoming keenly interested in process mining. For example, the main track of the recent “International Conference on Process Mining (ICPM 2020)” had almost 2000 registered participants. While it was a virtual event due to Covid 19 – that level of participation is impressive nevertheless.

Why the rapidly growing interest in process mining? Unlike process modeling workshops, where the model is largely based on people’s perception of how work is done, process mining is data based. It extracts insights from processes by the means of analyzing the event data generated in IT systems. The potential benefits of process mining are principally related to process discovery and conformance checking. In other words, process mining compares data from the event log step-by-step with the process documentation or model to find discrepancies.

Digital transformation was always a 5 year plan that could be put off because it was so painful. But COVID has forced organizations to make dramatic, transformational changes in 5 months or 5 weeks. And the pace of change has not let up as organizations are evolving to stay relevant in very uncertain times.

Never has it been more important that the executives and managers have accurate dashboards and reports to be able to drive business decisions. But are they looking out of the windshield of the car or out of the back window?

Put another way, are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that they are using to make their decisions leading indicators or lagging indicators? Lagging indicators vs. leading indicators

Some examples of lagging and leading indicators:

Business process management (BPM) has been quietly undergoing resurgence as organizations gradually recognize the central role of process in digital transformation. Some industry observers have argued that process is sizzling, while others have pointed out that for BPM to achieve a renaissance it will require greater scale, flexibility, and collaboration than what was previously the norm.

In one of my earlier articles on Disruption, Innovation and the Art of Business Architecture, I made the case that the concept of entropy is highly applicable in explaining the evolution of business organizations.

Generally speaking, entropy is the measure of disorder in a closed system, and it is a concept borrowed from thermodynamics - the branch of physics that deals with the relationship between heat, work, temperature, and energy in a system.

EDITOR’S NOTE: DBizInstitute.org has released it first research report "Digital Business Adoption: Examining the drivers for digital business success around the world". Access this members-only report by logging in (existing members) or join DBizInstitute.org today.

2019 is going to be a very different year than the past few years. 2017 was a "pedal to the metal" year where almost all were making forward momentum with digital. 2018 started strong, but there was a shift to "steady speed" over acceleration. Many economic experts are now predicting a slight dip in growth which means businesses will be hovering their foot above the brake pedal just in case the turmoil in the markets takes a sharp turn.  What does this mean for business investment in Digital? This blog will be my best shot at predicting the likely trends.