Process? Just Don’t Make Me Think
There’s an emerging mindset that’s set to transform ‘business process management’, adding significantly to its value and sustainability.
Right now, adoption is the hidden problem. People put a lot of time and energy into working collaboratively with the stakeholders to build great processes. They link them with documents and metrics and systems. They wrap it all within a governance framework and launch it. Everyone is delighted. But come back a year later and it is, too often, in a slow decline. Creating a sustainable platform for continuous process improvement is surprisingly difficult.
Process tool vendors have responded by developing the user interface (UI) for their tools, adding personalization, collaborative features and neat links to other systems, for instance. Which might be a complete solution – if process users spent most of their time using the process tool. But they don’t of course. Most process users are working within a rich and complex information landscape, often using many systems every day. For them, process-related information is just another drop in the informocean.
The new mindset is process UX design. It’s bringing the ideas of web designers – the philosophy of Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think – into the design and delivery of process-related information, recognizing that it may be one small (but vital) part of the user’s world. The objective is to deliver, at the point of need, the right information, in the right context and the right format– in the simplest possible way.
Leaders have always focussed on the voice of the customer; helping the user to find their needle in the haystack with as few clicks as possible.
The difference now is that there’s a growing recognition of the benefits of a more structured approach in developing an optimized UX. And it’s not just about defining typical users and their journeys to and through the content. Gamification and the leveraging of big data to deliver personalized, real-time analytic insights are also driving the development of the process UX.
As Sameer Patel noted recently, the goal is to create a UX that conforms to how *you* want to work:
“The distinction between systems of record, transactions and engagement is over. It’s really one. Going forward, it’s about how we design the experience around each end user’s work patterns.”
The old world of process content being pushed to process users by process mappers on behalf of process owners – all that is gone. The new world is about delivering the right process information, in the right context and format, at the user’s point of need, by:
optimizing the process UX, through smart UIs and intelligent integration with other systems
leveraging gamification, collaboration, analytics and devices (smartphones, tablets and wearables)
prizing simplicity (for the reasons SAP’s Reuven Gorsht summarises neatly here).
… and doing it all in a way that fosters engagement in continuous improvement.
There’s a huge upside to this shift in thinking. ‘Business process management’ becomes far more mainstream, valuable and sustainable. And more fun. It’s about understanding and responding to the entire needs of the process consumer, and within a much wider collaborative framework.
Related Posts
13 Jan 2014 Sustainable Process Excellence? Hire A Showman
24 Sep 2013 The Business Management System App
Leave a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.
