Getting to Situational Business Processes & Applications

The digital business demands the ability to adapt quickly to the point of near real time when it comes to the internet of things (IoT). This will mean that there will have to be several fundamental changes in process / application  operation and creation. This means that the traditional application and process will play a different role and a lot of old thinking will have to be updated or discarded. There are folks that think that processes and applications have to be mapped and rarely change. Well this is just not the case any more. Processes are dynamically adaptable these days and applications are emerging with the similar behavior.

Modern Process Platforms Supports Situational Behavior:

Modern processes / cases have the ability to adapt to conditions that were not anticipated when the process or portions of the process (snippets) were originally designed, It's because the process paths and steps can be altered by changing the goals guided by intelligent monitoring or dynamic collaboration processes where resources determine the next best action. While modern process platforms can still service the older style mapped processes, snippets, steps and services, they now can additionally support emergent behavior thus supporting the notion of situational adaptation.


Modern Smart Applications are Leveraging Modern Process Platforms:

Applications used to have to be configured and reconfigured to adapt to change. While this was better than the traditional bespoke application, it's not good enough for the situational businesses that are emerging today. Consequently new smart process applications are emerging today that are built on a modern process platform or application vendors are slowly transitioning their platforms to include the best features of modern process platforms or digital business platforms. If time is of the essence, buying a smart process application makes sense. If commitment to a stable mega vendor is the goal and you can stall some change, organizations can wait for the evolution.


Situational Creation is Leveraging Static & Dynamic  Composition/Creation:

It turns out that the creation / development methods are changing to match the needs of a situational business. Instead of waiting for either an application vendor to build what your organization needs or waiting for internal IT to deliver the latest version of a needed process or application, there will be a sea change set of approaches emerging. Imagine instead of creating something new, composing from internal and external smart components. When something really needs to be built, imagine leveraging targeted agile projects or SCRUMs to deliver business benefit and function rich steps to reach situational steps. Further imaging intelligent process snippets and code fragments swarming to solve your new situation driven by goals and constraints. These development approaches are already here and getting more popular. 

Net; Net: 

We are fast headed to situational processes and applications in the new digital world.  The question is what approach will your organization take to get there? Will it be a time to market and nimble approach of creating processes or apps on a digital business platform that is situational process / application focused or will it be waiting until the chosen mega vendor can deliver for your organization? I think it will be a hybrid approach in most cases.

SOURCE: Jim Sinur