Top 10 trends for adaptive enterprises

These trends applied back in 2014 — but are still relevant now!

There’s exciting new business and technology trends in that will become increasingly important and pervasive over the next year. These are 10 key trends that can have a lasting — and valuable — effect on every aspect of your business. By understanding and focusing on these trends, your organization gains the opportunity to streamline operations, enhance the customer experience and continuously increase business agility and excellence.

TREND # 1 Innovation with Speed and Agility

One of the most compelling trends for 2014 is the need for innovation across the enterprise. The rapid pace of change is exceeding the capacity of traditional business, as well as structured operational and IT models. Innovation needs to be a strategic priority combined with execution that enables continuous change, while improving and “doing more with less.”

In 2014, organizations must not just embed innovation in their products and services, but make it the “DNA” of the enterprise to make all functions and teams as agile as possible. IT needs to lead the innovation agenda, but approach it holistically. Innovation needs to be pervasive so that it spans IT, business, customer experience especially, and process innovation for differentiation.

TREND # 2 Business Transformation Roles and Empowerment

For innovation to yield concrete and tangible results, it needs a revision of existing organizational roles as well as new roles and cultures. In 2014, we will see more process centric roles, with increased collaboration between data owners and process owners. These roles will empower people to achieve innovation with adaptability.

TREND # 3 Application Rationalization, Simplification and #3 Modernization

In mature organizations, the weight of a mish-mash of heterogeneous systems, platforms, applications, languages, home-grown and point solutions conflicts with change, adaptability and agility. In 2014 , persistent adaptability pressures will compel IT to rationalize application portfolios, simplify with fewer data centers, platforms and applications. Adaptive enterprises will modernize with intelligent business process management (iBPM) providing a business-friendly agility layer that improves IT efficiency and aligns business and IT.

Rationalization and simplification allow IT to get rid of complexities, replication and technology silos. Modernization via a business-friendly agility layer lets business owners become partners in transformation and even “own the change”. This trend will accelerate as business owners gain the power to change policies, procedures and decision strategies. iBPM will become the key enabler for simplification and modernization, aligning strategy, continuous improvement and execution in adaptive enterprises.

TREND # 4 From Internet of Everything to Process 4 of Everything

The Internet of Everything (IoE) is one of the most important technology trends of 2014 and beyond. IoE will involve billions of devices or “Things” connected over the Internet — generating data, sensing, firing and consuming events, and being controlled remotely. IoE will realize its full potential through intelligent processes (Process of Everything) that can coordinate multiple participants (humans, systems and machines/devices) in complex, dynamic processes and cases to achieve business objectives.

Intelligent processes provide the container and the context for intelligent things to collaborate to achieve objectives. In the next couple of decades, semi or even fully automated human robots and avatars will become more pervasive. As this trend matures, humans will increasingly focus on innovation and cognitive work, delegating routine and even some knowledge-assisted work to automated things and processes.

TREND # 5 Intelligence through Analytics and Real-Time Decisioning

The use of intelligent technology will accelerate in 2014 with the goal of making the right decisions. With the explosion of data, organizations rely on analytics to make sense of all this information and decide what to do. Predictive models are minded and discovered from historic data. Big data is also becoming an important source for understanding customer behavior. While these have value, the more exciting trend is the ability to act on the discovered intelligence in real time. Real-time decisioning allows organizations to achieve tangible benefits by unlocking the insights hidden in vast amounts of digital information and capitalize on them within the context of marketing and service interactions, for example.

Adaptive analytics are a significant part of this trend. Adaptive analytics take technology intelligence a large step further, as they provide “self-learning” that can dynamically incorporate new information and insights and automatically apply them to the next applicable situation. This combination of data-driven recommendations from big data with adaptive self-learning is an important 2014 trend, providing significantly more insight for real-time decisioning than previously possible.

TREND # 6 Dynamic Case Management for the Modern Worker

As Millennials (Gen X) and Generation Z become a larger presence in the workforce, the ways in which they work are different. In 2014, dynamic case management represents an important milestone in the evolution of process automation that suits their collaborative and less structured way of working.

Dynamic case management, with all its automation capabilities, supports the modern worker’s culture. It provides end-to-end orchestration of tasks for all types of work from structured and pre-determined to collaborative, unstructured and ad-hoc work. The case has a business objective and uses business rules and decisions to intelligently and dynamically decide how to move forward.

Because modern case workers rely on collaboration, social networking is now an important part of the case. Social interactions are used to find new case solutions, complete ad-hoc work, suggest improvements, resolve the case and monitor and analyze the performance of case milestones.

TREND #7 Agile Methodology, Competency and Real-Time Continuous Improvement

Process improvement empowered with execution is essential for the success of enterprise initiatives. Methodologies that capture best practices and enable adaptation are indispensable.While methodologies such as Lean and Six Sigma have been around for some time, what is significant in 2014 is marrying these continuous improvement methodologies with adaptive process automation methodologies.

Centers Of Excellence (CoEs) will become the key enabler of these combined methodologies. The COE uses an adaptive methodology that identifies a best-choice opportunity for process improvement. Starting with “slivers” of improvement, the CoE gradually builds iterations that ultimately incorporate continuous improvement (Real-Time Lean Six Sigma) to optimize the process.

TREND #8 Digitization: Mobility, Social Networking and the Cloud

Increasingly coalesced enterprise technologies involving mobile, social and the cloud are becoming the de-facto strategic building blocks for digitization. In 2014, the maturity of these technologies will pave the way for innovative use within the enterprise.

• Social networking is a natural and essential component for all types of process-enabled exchanges between employees and customers. Intelligent processes leverage social tools, providers and metaphors in all phases of solution lifecycles, while these processes provide context for social networking and collaboration.
• Mobile technology provides instant access to case status, work and collaboration, empowering an emerging mobile workforce to not just stay connected, but complete transactions and work via smart devices.
• With cloud computing, users can access services over the Internet (networks, servers, storage and business applications) conveniently and on demand. This allows organizations to easily build and deploy adaptive enterprise solutions on the cloud.

TREND #9 CRM Driven by Intelligent Processes

A key trend in customer relationship management (CRM) has been the use of analytics — especially predictive and adaptive models. In 2014, CRM will be enabled by intelligent processes that leverage analytic insight in real time. Product and enterprise focus will give way to dynamic, customer-centric recommendations based on customer needs, lifetime value and business objectives. Organizations will be able:

• Eliminate confusing data-driven forms in favor of intuitive processes, decisions and guided interactions.
• Replace commodity services with personalized treatments that consider such factors as the customer, product, reason for the interaction and location when executing the business logic.
• Do away with manual work and exceptions handling using dynamic case management for holistic, end-to-end automation.
• Replace traditional “black box” CRM packages with complete visibility into all the procedures, policies and decisions within the CRM solution in order to simplify change, maintenance and customization.

TREND #10 The Adaptive Enterprise

We conclude with perhaps the most important trend in 2014. Enterprise transformation is not just about technology — it is also about an organizational culture that is focused on continuously adapting its strategies to address two crucial gaps in execution. First is the gap between business objectives and a mish-mash of existing systems that cannot easily execute these objectives. Second is the gap between the voice of the customer and systems that are not flexible enough to respond in order to optimize the customer experience. By leveraging the trends we have discussed, organizations can overcome these gaps to:

• Continuously monitor and optimize measurable business outcomes.
• Allow process owners to transform the business and enable rapid innovation of specialized, contextual and situational solutions.
• Rationalize, simplify and modernize while continuously improving with iterative enhancements.
• Empower the modern workforce with dynamic case management delivered via multiple social, mobile and collaborative channels.
• Streamline work with intelligent processes that eliminate routine, manual work and exception handling.
• Leverage big data recommendations with predictive and adaptive analytics to continuously learn and adapt decisions in intelligent processes.