Goal Driven Processes: The Future Target of BPM

As organizations mature in their use of BPM, they will find the need to more directly and automatically tie process activity and outcomes to corporate performance. The first steps in BPM are around process efficiency and effectiveness. The next steps revolve around continuous improvement and require a significant amount of watching to keep the improvements coming. Goal driven, the next step, directly ties the process behaviour and activity to the desired goals of the process. Imagine processes that flex and define themselves according to goals. It’s kind of like dynamic sets of plays to score a goal in football.

Goal Driven by Outcomes:

The technologies are converging towards being able to tie process activity and resource behaviour to corporate performance as it dynamic redefines itself as a mix of weighted and potentially conflicting goals. As process become smarter and/or linked to decision related platforms, this will become a reality for many organizations going forward. Right now it is the leading organizations, but over time this will become the norm.

Goal Driven by Policies/Rules:

Even if there might not be a direct tie to corporate performance with auto-tuning, the next best thing, would have to be policy/rule driven processes where the process can change behavior as policies and rule change. This is certainly happening today and I expect much more of this kind of activity in the next few years.

Goal Driven by Constraints:

As BPM expand into social and unstructured processes necessary to help knowledge workers, there will be unfettered and evolving best practices and processes. It will be important to set boundaries as these processes evolve. This is where constraints can be set to keep unsuspecting knowledge workers out of activity that may spell issues for their respective organizations as they collaborate. 

Over course, there will be combinations of the above guided by emerging patterns and management guidance, but it is clear that BPM has adaptability that will need to be guided. The guidance will come in the form of goals. We will have arrived at high levels of BPM maturity as more organizations grow into innovate use of goal driven processes.

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