We have found, on the Sales Systems website, in beautiful New Zealand, a gorgeous graph of the customer relationship. It shows that its behaviour could be described as a digital shopping cart, like Amazon’s, than to a classical process design, so tidy and predictable.
It would be something like the difference between taking a train versus sailing: in the first case, it is about optimising a perfect environment, while the second is about surfing an ever surprising reality.
Design and management tools can therefore not be the same: where the first needs optimisation, the second needs to react accordingly to the externals, and mainly the customer. In other words, listening… with the systems. The digital customer does not speak to anyone in your company: she has no time.
Now that most of your customers are, or becoming, digital, this technology is essential. It is no less than a new paradigm. It is known as artifact-centric business process model, Adaptative Case Management and Smart Process. It sorts out the complex processes problem that anyone used to design with BPMN knows as a nightmare. Here are the major differences:
For further information, besides what can be found in Google, have a look at the Wikipedia entry (artifact-centric business process model) and to this excellent presentation from Sira Yongchareon in slide-share.