The impact of digital disruption on process excellence

Analyst firm Gartner calls it the Nexus of Forces – the convergence of social, mobile, cloud and information creating new business models and new ways for companies to interact with and understand their customers. While the Nexus of Forces may sound like something out of an episode of Star Trek – chances are that it's affecting your business or industry right now. But just what does the convergence of these technologies mean to for business processes and our approach to process improvement?

In this Process Perspectives podcast Dennis Parker, Senior Vice President of EMEA at BPM software vendor K2, discusses how digital disruption is creating new opportunities for companies, explores how process professionals can respond to the new realities and comments on why companies are so bad at utilizing their data.

K2 is sponsor of the 2013 report Future of Process Excellence: 4 Trends Redefining Processes in a Digital Age, which looks in greater detail at how the combination of new technologies and changing customer behaviour are driving fundamental changes in the way that organizations approach process excellence. Download a free copy of the report here.

[inlinead]

Questions addressed in this podcast:

• This term Nexus of Forces - or as Forrester research calls it, "Digital Disruption" - is all a bit nebulous and abstract. What does it mean?
• What do you see as the impact of that (i.e. the nexus of forces) on business processes?
• How do you think the process excellence function will need to evolve in order to respond to these impacts?
• In the survey that we conducted for the Future of Process Excellence, over 80% of respondents said that they felt process professionals should play a greater role in IT projects. Yet in practice in almost 40% of organizations, the process teams said that they had little to no involvement with IT. It sounds like there’s a gap between what in theory we think is a good idea and the reality that process excellence teams and IT teams are not working together. Why do you think that gap exists?
• How do you see process excellence teams and IT working together?
• The other side of the increasing prominence of IT in our businesses and the increasing digitalization of pretty much everything, is that businesses are generating more data than ever before. Indeed, there are those who argue that data is the new competitive advantage. Would you agree?
• In the survey, however, a mere 10% of companies reported that they weren’t worried about data challenges in some way or another. Almost 60% of companies felt that they weren’t using data effectively while just behind that survey respondents expressed concerns about the accuracy of data. If data is the new competitive advantage – why are we so bad at using it?