Even in the best of times, businesses look for ways to become more productive. With recession threatening to cast a long shadow over the entire year, the search for productivity and efficiency is becoming increasingly urgent. In such an environment, an old buzz word – “business process automation” – is destined to be the next big thing.
Business process automation (BPA) has been around for a long time. Much computer software has been written specifically to automate key business processes. Underlying the whole “re-engineering” craze of a decade ago was the implicit assumption that chaotic work environments could be re-implemented using technology. Unfortunately, the significant promise of BPA and re-engineering has gone unfulfilled, largely because the technology side was ungodly expensive. BPA tools came out of the knowledge engineering space and were both costly and difficult to use. Process automation efforts generally required extensive professional service engagements and long implementation timeframes.
As with many trends in the computer industry, the second time around looks more promising. A new approach to BPA is coming from a surprising source – the communications industry. Actually, it’s not so surprising if you think about it. Vendors of high-end communications solutions have been automating key customer-facing processes for years, primarily in corporate contact centres. Sophisticated tools and techniques have been developed for queuing up work (handling customer interactions), assigning it to well-matched resources (agents with specific skills), meeting service levels, and tracking the results. Vendors such as Avaya, Genesys, and my own company, Interactive Intelligence, have recently begun to apply these technologies to more general business processes. As compared to previous BPA tools, these new solutions are easier to use and less expensive. They also do a far better job of incorporating people using concepts such as presence and unified communications that have been applied in the contact centre for years.
In 2009, we’ll see end-to-end process automation tools that enable organisations to visually lay out processes, create the graphical forms that employees will use to perform work, and put the automated processes into production. Work will be queued up and routed to the right people using the battle-tested contact centre technologies.
Additional concepts such as quality monitoring (screen recording), real-time supervision, and workforce optimisation (scheduling) will be borrowed from contact centre technology to provide end-to-end BPA that no longer requires legions of systems integrators or man-years of development. BPA will also be able to incorporate people in ways never possible before because of the degree of integration with various unified communications systems.
BPA will be a hot trend throughout the year because it offers quantifiable return on investment and the technology is finally ready. As organisations look to fight through hard times by doing more with less, BPA will become a compelling option.
Dave Paulding
Interactive Intelligence
I agree with you…but try the shade model like those of Uganda before going pro bowl.
Secondly you need market engineers to help with the burden of heavy lifting…on the level though, your compusoftware company by name ‘interactive intellingence’ will not sale.
You need a better name for your interactive business software. Executives like tight budgets but prefer limos and airplanes…if you catch my drift.
for instance T mobile…no relation to cell phones. Giving Sean John a call is not outside your reach and depending of what you intend on doing…and there is the world best kept secret Philip Emeagwali.