How Business Process Management Helps You Get Your Digital Transformation Right

Digital transformation is not just a switch you turn on with the right amount of investment. There are ways to do it correctly and ways to do it incorrectly. If you invest in digital infrastructure but don’t know how to best utilise the many tools it offers, then you haven’t transformed, you’ve just built a facade.

Business Process Management (BPM) is a management discipline that focuses on innovating and adapting business processes to address the ever-changing processes involved in business operations. This is what is needed to make the most of your digital investment.

BPM provides the practices and tools to document and continuously review, modify, and improve processes. Designing business processes to optimise the performance of business processes is at the heart of well-executed BPM.

“When digital transformation is done right, it’s like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, but when done wrong, all you have is a really fast caterpillar.” – George Westerman, MIT Sloan Initiative on the Digital Economy

How can you avoid ending up with a faster caterpillar? Spend time to discover and model your business processes. Then design them to serve customers most effectively with maximum resource efficiency; both can be achieved with BPM techniques and the right digital infrastructure.

“Success in digital transformation requires bringing together and coordinating a far greater range of effort than most leaders appreciate. A poor showing in any one of four inter-related domains — technology, data, process, or organizational change capability — can scuttle an otherwise well-conceived transformation.” – Thomas Davenport, Harvard Business Review on Digital Transformation

Winton Myers

I am a senior consultant at Viewpoint, and I specialize in Business Analysis, Business Process Management; Business Process Modelling and Redesign, and Operations Management. I have also written multiple courses in my areas of specialisation.