How To Make Your Business Process Management (BPM) Mobile Friendly

In this mobile age, your business processes need to be mobile friendly
In this mobile age, your business processes need to be mobile friendly
Image Credit: Milica Sekulic

So just exactly what is a business process? In a nutshell, it’s how your company does business. Now this might sound rather simple to you, but it turns out that most of the business processes that our firms use to do business are complicated multi-step beasts and are increasingly dependent on the importance of information technology.. The arrival of everyday mobile devices has had a major impact on how firms perform their business processes. As the person with the CIO job, it’s going to be up to you to help map mobile apps into the company’s existing business processes.

Four Things That IT Has To Do To Make Business Processes Mobile

I’ve got some bad news for the person in the CIO position: there is no magic bullet when it comes to making mobile apps work with the company’s business processes. Instead, what your IT department is going to have to do is a number of different things. Here are four of the most important:

  1. Go On A Fieldtrip: Before you can start to make decisions about how to add mobile apps to your company’s business processes, you are going to have to first understand those processes. This won’t be easy: few people in the company will fully understand them. IT staffers are going to have to go outside of the IT department to collect the process information that will be needed.
  2. Think Big: When it comes to mobilizing a company’s business processes, the one thing that you don’t want to do is to think small. Don’t allow a small group of experts to work on this problem in the back corner of an office. Rather, involve as much of the company as possible and make the mobilization of the core business processes everyone’s responsibility.
  3. Change To Match Your Apps: Business processes were never created to be set in stone. Rather, they are designed to be updated and modified as things change. The IT department will be the first to know when the company is rolling out a new mobile app. When this happens, take the time to go back to the business apps that it affects and update them to make use of the new mobile app.
  4. Become Social: In the brave new world that we live in, social media can play a big role in every aspect of a company’s business. The IT department is often at the forefront of how the company interacts with the various social media channels. Using new mobile apps, the information about what your customers want and need that is gained needs to be fed back into the business processes so that it can be used to boost the company’s success.

What All Of This Means For You

It probably would not be an overstatement to say that the ultimate success of a company depends on the quality of its business processes. The arrival of mobile devices and their associated mobile applications changes everything. As CIO, it’s going to be your job to find ways to make sure that these new mobile applications find their way into the company’s existing business processes.

In order to incorporate mobile apps into the company’s business processes, the IT department is going to have to first do some homework. How the existing business processes work is going to have to be understood and this can only be done by working closely with other departments. Updating business processes can impact the entire company and so as CIO you’ll need to make sure that the entire company is involved. As new apps become available, make sure that the affected business processes get updated. Finally, social media offers unique insights into what your customers are looking for so make sure that it gets collected and worked into the business processes.

The very lifeblood of a company is its business processes. As the CIO, it is your job to make sure that these valuable properties are kept up-to-date. The arrival of mobile applications offers a unique opportunity to make your company better. Follow these suggestions and help your company to stay ahead!

– Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Department Leadership Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that updating business processes requires a full-time dedicated IT team?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

How good of a CIO are you? I’m willing to bet that no matter how good you think that you are, you also realize that you could probably be better. We all believe this. However, now we run into the big question: how can a CIO become better? It turns out that the answer is actually fairly simple to understand even if it’s hard to do: you’ve got to do some experimenting.