Businesses rely on real-time data to make strategic business decisions. To harvest the latest data and get the best intelligence to guide decision-making requires an agile business process management (BPM) architecture. Businesses need to be able to ingest the latest data and act on that information to remain competitive. 

Different BPM platforms use a variety of methods and functionalities to discover, model, analyze, and optimize business workflows using the latest data. Data related to customer activity, supply chain, revenue projections, operating expenses, and other business operations guide business processes. For any organization to create a successful BPM structure requires current data, speed, predictability, and repeatability.

Traditional BPM systems are designed to address pre-planned, predictable situations. Rapidly changing market conditions demand a swift response, including ways to apply the latest data to transform business processes. Business success requires an adaptive BPM architecture.

What Is Agile BPM Architecture?

Many business process management systems are designed to discover, model, analyze, and optimize workflows and business processes. The BPM architecture provides consistency and repeatability, mapping the specific steps to perform a business task. It streamlines and improves processes by creating definitions to abstract that process. Most BPM systems aren’t designed to operate in real time, and they don’t adapt well to immediate changes.

Agile business processes are more immediate and more fluid. Agile businesses need to adapt quickly to changing business conditions. Agile BPM must be able to react to real-time data. Unlike conventional BPM architectures, agile BPM doesn’t rely on fixed workflows and repeatable actions but can refine and improve processes. Organizations that use an agile approach to their BPM architecture are more flexible and benefit from faster response times to unexpected circumstances, updating business processes as needed. 

Using an agile approach to architecture design makes business transformation an ongoing process. Adopting an agile approach at the organizational level applies iterative steps, allowing the organization to adjust business processes to come that much closer to the target.

Agile development strategies have been part of technology for years. With agile software development, the development team collaborates to continually improve applications. People, teams, processes, and tools working together apply an iterative process to create applications that are continually improved. The process starts with a vision statement that outlines the scope of the problem based on the needs of users and customers. Each team member brings different expertise, and by working together, they create new components that contribute to a better result. The challenge is allocating responsibilities and ensuring the team delivers the right components at the right time.

The same process applies to business process management. The business needs to optimize business processes based on strategic goals, such as better customer order fulfillment. The team responsible for handling customer orders comes together to define the objective, then tasks are allocated that contribute to forming a better workflow. Collaboration across departments requires up-to-the-minute data, so the system must be accessible to all the stakeholders. Requiring fewer tools also makes it easier for everyone to participate. 

Digital Transformation with Agile BPM

Many organizations believe they have agile processes in place, but they don’t have a truly agile architecture. First, business processes need to be mapped and digitized. That’s the only way to adapt architecture quickly to changing needs. This also requires an outside-in perspective, looking at business processes in terms of what markets demand and what customers need, rather than what you are prepared to deliver. 

Digital transformation promotes business agility. When you think about business transformation, you think about the broader requirements of changing business processes to achieve new objectives. Business transformation improves the company’s ability to take on new competitors, improve quality for the customer, and ensure financial success. 

Any business transformation process is looking to get from here, the current state of operations, to there, the desired future state. That transition requires having an idea of the future-state architecture and how it will differ from the current architecture. When creating a new digital BPM architecture, you must start with the existing operating model. You also must review the three major contributors to agile business transformation – the organizational structure (people), the processes and systems (technology), and the corporate culture (an agile mindset).

The Three Elements of Agile BPM

You need three critical success factors to create an effective, agile business process management architecture:

• Collaboration – Agility requires a collaborative culture, including trust, communication, creativity, and commitment. No department or function is exempt. Roles and responsibilities need to be defined. Software and tooling must be in place to enable collaboration, including managing, executing, and monitoring projects. It must be easy for stakeholders to work together toward a common goal.
• Current-state mapping – Before you can get “there,” you need to define “here.” You need a clear and complete picture of current business functionalities and capabilities, including the application landscape, business processes, and a comprehensive data catalog. With a comprehensive current state map, you will have a clear vision of the future state after digital transformation.
• Remain operational with a “just enough” architecture – An agile architecture is fluid and is constantly changing, so you need to strike a balance between immediate needs and future goals. Balancing transformation and governance requires lean designs that deliver “just enough” to stay operational and move closer to the objective. Instead of relying on a top-down process, you must adopt top-down oversight and bottom-up execution. Apply the outside-in perspective to operations to deliver greater customer value.

The Fourth Element: Real-Time Data

You could consider real-time data access as a fourth success factor. You need up-to-date information to power collaboration and for current state mapping. An agile BPM architecture needs to be integrated into the enterprise architecture to get an accurate picture of the current state, using real-time data to map to the future state. An agile BPM architecture relies on the real-time alignment of people, technology, and goals.