The Future of Business Process Management with prof. dr. Jan Mendling (WU)
The business world is rapidly changing with the emergence of new technologies and digitalization. This also had an irreversible effect on traditional business processes and Business Process Management (BPM). On 28th March 2018 FELU’s students had the opportunity to hear about the latest trends in this area by visiting professor and the co-author of Fundamentals of Business Process Management, dr. Jan Mendling from the Department of Information Systems and Operations at Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU)
“We are dealing with turbulent times. Many of the traditional companies face the challenge that young organizations, start-ups and new companies are very actively pushing towards bringing new business models and new services into the market.”
We can see new services and offerings entering the market – Google’s selfdriving car, Car2go (carsharing service provider), Foodora (food delivery), 3D printing, Adidas making customized shoes, Netflix, Bitcoin and many others. In essence, things they do are still very basic and are from a certain perspective the same as the ones already existing. We are still dealing with transporting people from A to B, having food, getting clothes, watching TV and doing financial payments. What has changed are the business processes in the background providing us with these services.
The main part of the lecture was focused on what the core of Business Process Management is and how this discipline deals with current trends and challenges. Generally, the BPM lifecycle is still the same, but certain puzzle pieces have been getting some new emphases in the last couple of years. This is why the main question of the lecture was, how could the BPM look like in the future.
Usually we think of the BPM as checking if everything is alright, eliminating and fixing errors and trying to make things faster, cheaper, more flexible and with higher quality. And to a certain extend this is too shortsighted and limited. We have to complement this with another perspective: “Better is not to be understood from an inward looking perspective (how the process currently is) but from the perspective of how the process could be.” Dr. Mendling specially emphasized business process redesign and doing processes with CMMN (Case Management Model and Notation) and DMN (Decision Model and Notation) as well as the role of BPM in digitalization of tasks, coordination and process design.
When answering the question of the future of BMP, dr. Mendling said that “the future of BPM is its past: Innovative task restructuring,” and finished a quote from Frey and Osbourne (2017), “The extent of computerization in the twenty-first century will thus partly depend on innovative approaches to task restructuring.”
Iva Drvarič, Efnews
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