Will the next stage of Business Process Management (BPM) become autonomous?

Companies have been chasing to increase productivity for a long time. To optimize profits, or to keep the ability to run business with fewer resources available. The ways of working within companies and organizations are challenged regularly as the world a company operates in changes, too: Emerging competitors, shifting customer expectations, regulatory compliance needs, or the need for significant change of operations because of costs or unavailability of resources.

At the same time, new technology increasing productivity hits the ground of business reality – like generative artificial intelligence. Or, in a more private life setting, assistant driver features - giving back a bit of mental energy to the driver steering a car.

We see more and more technology supporting people in operating tasks. Firstly, in a more guided manner - like the driving assistant that helps you stay within your lane. Then, technology takes over duties in a more autonomous way of working - a great example is the self-driving car. The pattern of autonomy starts with simple tasks (like the Robovac), then progresses into more critical areas of life (like car/mobility) until… we finally see more valuable use cases in business and private life heavily supported by autonomous technology.

When will this pattern of increasing autonomy hit the realm of Business Process Management (BPM)? And when it hits the ground, will it be a revolution or evolution?

Every journey starts with the first step. Let’s have a look at BPM at its current state-of-the-art first. Autonomy builds upon today's prerequisites: 

1. Pathways: The core idea of business processes.

Business processes are key to an organization: They define how value creation for internal or external customers is performed. If there is no explicit process, people create processes ad hoc once needed. If there is no documentation or map about a process standard, you may end up in a chaos of activities.

Processes are like pathways. Creating them ad hoc – like a process trail - is quite inefficient: If everyone needs to solve repeatable business problems on their own (getting from problem A to solution B or C) companies and organizations waste resources. Thus, business processes are like pathways. They allow an organization to scale. One solution (roads) that fits multiple situations (journeys) and actors (cars with drivers).

Example: If a customer calls your hotline, the call center agent will not randomly ask questions. As the Head of the Call Center, you don’t let your agent decide ad hoc what a customer is asked for to solve the customer's problem. You define the process, document it, collect the necessary knowledge around the process, and let the call center staff know what is expected. You pave the way of working for your employees with process instructions.

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2. Guidelines: Chaos or not?

Imagine a world championship in any sport without rules: How would you make sure that the winner is entitled to be a winner? Competing in a world without guidelines would be very tricky. 

Similarly, roads and pathways do have guard rails and rules that are supposed to regulate what is desired and what is sanctioned behavior. On a street, we see speed limits or guidance on littering. Within companies and organizations, we see policies and requirements we need to comply with. In many situations and industries – especially in regulated ones like healthcare or banking – complying with rules and establishing norms is mission-critical: Companies and organizations must follow the rules and need to report on compliance.

Policies and guidelines are in BPM directly linked to the business processes that are critical to an organization. And the sensors to detect issues in compliance are supposed to be interlinked with the process.

3. Education: Now it’s up to the driver to act on the pathway.

A new driver must learn the rules and practice of driving to pass their driver's test. Similarly, employees in companies and organizations get onboarded on processes, policies, and systems to learn new ways of working.

But in a dynamic world, things change quickly: people must be continuously informed about any new or changed way of working. Plus, people want to make sure that it doesn’t take a lifetime to find out as an individual that things have changed within an organization.

4. Feedback loop: Leverage data to learn and adapt.

Without data on execution performance and deviations from what is expected, it is hard to adjust the course of action. In a car, the driver gets information on the current speed or the progress of the journey using the GPS of the car. In organizations, feedback loops inform leaders and management on indicators about (1) output spent, (2) input provided, and (3) processes that transform input into output.

The car tells you when you are driving too fast. And so do we in organizations implementing preventive actions – e.g., collecting information during process runtime to prevent issues like driving too fast, spending money beyond budget, or not complying with rules.

5. Predictions: We predict the (foreseeable) future and plan with it.

With technology at hand, we plan our future: What is the traffic expected when I leave tomorrow at 8 am departure? When will I arrive at my destination? With technology, we can simulate plans before execution. We can judge alternatives before having spent any time on the journey and make sure that we are prepared. Technology helps us while we are on the go – look: There is a traffic jam 3 kilometers ahead. Do you want to take an alternative?

Great that we can zoom out into the big picture of a company’s target operation model. We get augmented indicators that processes are not executed properly, with process mining-based performance and compliance data blended into process standards as an example. 

Having described all this so far, one of the next stages will be:

6. Autonomous BPM: Autonomous processes and process management hitting the ground. 

The “Tesla” of BPM is just lurking around the corner.

My prediction is simple: Business processes as the outcome of BPM activities will evolve into units that become more and more self-contained and self-regulated. There will be two aspects of process autonomy: 

The process:

A process in the future will be designed and implemented in a way to actively self-regulate: Inform and even prevent violations, e.g. based on Machine Learning (ML)/AI capabilities watching and predicting execution. In some simple areas already a reality (e.g., banking, finance, procurement), but in many areas still a dream. 

Processes nurture a certain style of thinking: process designers always think with the end in mind and define what must be done to achieve a certain outcome. As processes run within certain constraints and do allow for flexibility like running in variants or handling different scenarios (happy path vs. exception handling), processes will be empowered to run within the boundaries of the company GPS: The future process system by BPM being a smarter descendent of previously rather static and inflexible business processes.

The process factory - powered by BPM:

The management of processes will evolve: From (1) manual to (2) manual but tech-guided towards (3) autonomous and (partly) run by tech. BPM activities and tasks will be enriched by technology that allows the BPM driver’s relief. Processes (re)documented automatically by technology are already a reality with Process and Task Mining. Generative AI is entering BPM - acting as a helping hand, a companion, that makes the BPM driver more productive. Many more such examples will hit the ground of BPM within the years to come as technology reaches a new level of productivity.

It’s just logical to expect autonomy to enter the BPM discipline more intensely due to market dynamics and as new technology is entering the game.

Will BPM become fully autonomous replacing the needs of human beings?

Let’s not sketch a dystopia in which machines replace humans. Technology can solve many problems that humans can’t solve or struggle with. It can help to accelerate value creation on a bigger scale, and we have seen this (r)evolution already for many years.

Business process management as we know it might change in the years to come. Especially, if technology now handles tasks that previously were executed by skilled and trained people. However, I bet that there will still be a big need for human judgment, human creativity, and information to be gathered by people to build the process factory of tomorrow's autonomous processes and process management.