By Dan Lahl, Vice President, Product Marketing, SAP

Customization and Integration of Business Processes Create Better Experiences

Every January when I get my eyes checked I have a positive and personal experience with my eye doctor - even though my doctor is one of thousands in the Kaiser network. She knows my prescription and my preferences. Looking ahead to 2020, I expect it to be the year of "experience." Driven by the enterprise need to strengthen and streamline both internal and external processes, we will see an increased use in intelligent technologies that do everything from creating a better digital workplace to delivering a better customer experience.

Intelligent Business Process Management Integrates Across Platforms 

Process efficiency is a "must-have" in the enterprise environment to create simplified workflows, increased productivity, and overall better experiences. In 2020, we'll see businesses take advantage of technological advancements including robotic process automation (RPA) and conversational artificial intelligence (CAI). By reinvigorating Business Process Management (BPM) of the past to become intelligent with these technologies, businesses will deliver improved experiences and processes for employees, customers and partners. Demand for Intelligent Business Process Management (iBMP - the combination and integration of traditional BPM with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning) will grow as organizations look to integrate across different parts of the business and have visibility on the unified whole, empowering them to reap the benefits of multi-functional enterprise platforms and experience more success.

Flexible Data Management Enables Customizable Process Flow

As businesses increasingly integrate their processes, we'll also see them simultaneously working to identify where they should house this process data. Customization will continue to be key, with businesses seeking increased opportunities to modify their environments depending on their preferred system workflow.  

With this, hybrid cloud is going to become even bigger as organizations increasingly manage an on-prem and cloud world. More companies will ask themselves "How can we survive and thrive by exploiting on-prem systems, while at the same time embracing new cloud environments?" and will look to solutions that help connect systems across cloud and on-prem. Within their flexible hybrid environments, we'll see businesses embed intelligent technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning across applications.

In the past, we've seen the use of horizontal tools that allow organizations to get only one task done at a time and don't create a common workspace or allow for employee engagement and productivity. In 2020, we will see businesses increasingly adopt engagement models and customizable platforms that have capabilities tailored to business application needs to enhance the digital workplace. The days of going from one platform to the next, are gone - we'll see a shift to doing every task in one common place, bringing the customizable experience economy to the workplace. 

Business Processes & Customer Sentiment Converge for Better Experience Management

Implementing intelligent technology in the workplace in 2020 will not only be for added internal process efficiencies, but for customer experience management: an area where organizations will either thrive or die.

As experience management grows even more critical in a crowded landscape, we'll see a greater convergence of customer sentiment with business processes to provide insights users can leverage to change workflows and address problems in real-time. By bringing in backend data customers are providing to show a full view, business users will be able to easily change things as they go and improve customer experiences on demand.

Enhancing both the user and business process components in one environment means organizations will enable common data views and a common user experience. With this, they will strengthen their overall workflows internally and create better external experiences.

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About the Author

Dan Lahl, Vice President of Product Marketing at SAP, has been in high tech for over 30 years, with extensive experience in data management, data warehousing and analytics. While at SAP Dan has led emerging technology initiatives, including Data Integration, Data Grid, In-Memory Database and Mobile BI. Dan is currently focused on growing SAP Cloud Platform business for SAP. Dan has degrees from the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Chicago.