Mobile BPM

With the explosive growth of the use of mobile devices, it is obvious to question what would be the added value of mobile BPM. The extend to which you can use mobile BPM highly depends on the actual business processes, its process users and the way they interact with processes and each other. The process determines if, and in what kind of way, mobile should support users or customers to do business with each other and to interact with each process. I think three key activities within BPM can be supported effectively by mobile devices: collaboration, process modeling and process execution.
Collaboration
Mobile BPM solutions can create more meaningful and effective collaboration if they deliver business context, information and interactions. BPM software can extend process participation through support for mobile devices. By tapping into social media, social BPM can bring previously unavailable information from sites like Facebook and Twitter into corporate processes in a controlled and actionable way. They provide new insights into customer conversations, sales opportunities, support issues and more. The sum total of this is the creation of a more agile enterprise.
Modeling and changing processes
It will become increasingly important to model processes and change them on the fly on a mobile device. However, limitations of small screens and limited input options are making the modeling complex and time consuming. You need to be able to review changes, but not necessarily perform those changes on the fly. As social BPM is getting more popular, people will be progressively more part of changing processes. Therefore, the importance of process modeling on mobile devices will increase heavily. But this is not the situation of today.
Monitoring process performance
Given the current capabilities of mobile devices, businesses have the opportunity to monitor process performance and capture information in real time on their handset. The ability to monitor the performance of businesses remotely is highly valued among executives. They like to access process performance dashboards to look at key metrics or process improvement opportunities. It is unlikely that complex process analytics are displayed on tablets for now. It will mostly be operational metrics. A lot of BPM software systems already support displaying KPIs and influencing them by events, and allow the user to act on this information on their mobile device. Thus, the way that it extends process participation beyond the brick and mortar locations of the business is a real benefit of mobile BPM. It can involve the business, its partners and customers.

Conclusion
We are using our mobile phones and tablets for a lot of activities: mobile search, purchase, browse, connect, review and information gathering, preparing presentations and listening music. Mobile is becoming a cornerstone in everyday life. For a business, mobile brings the opportunity to make the business process independent from its location. Through the combination of BPM and mobile, the employee does not have to be in his office any more to perform the necessary activities for making Business Process Management successful.

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