I read an interesting post by @adam_deane this morning about Mobile BPM just after posting my little article about the Chocolate Factory and it struck me that there are so many great ideas floating around right now but for some reason or another they are all being kept at arms length from joining hands.
We have BPM and CRM; existing disciplines and technologies which are evolving into Social BPM; a way of collaborating on process design and information sharing, Social CRM; extending and enhancing the customer experience through different media channels. We have Social Business Management; a way of involving everyone in the enterprise through open collaboration and removal of silos, Social Enterprise Software, creating business collaboration spaces and open internal enterprise communication. Now add to this virtual/ augmented reality application, mobile enterprise ability (whether driven by a software vertical, hardware or both) and cloud.
What we have here are a set of building blocks to really propel an enterprise into a completely different business model. And yet we are treating all of these concepts as separate entities, in effect, recreating the silos they are intending to pull down by placing them in individual stacks. The work over at FXPAL is a sign of the future enterprise, where these tools are used in harmony and integrate together. Mobile BPM for example should not be seen as just “BPM on your phone” but enabling a truly mobile workforce to exist, the one we keep hearing about that hasn’t really materialised fully. I wrote about what Apperian were doing in the mobile enterprise application field, enabling an enterprise to push applications to it’s workforce when needed. If you can simulate a work environment like FXPAL are doing and interact with it, is there a physical need for workspace in some instances ? Could office work be completely rendered (pun) a thing of the past if you empower employees with tools like an iPad together with a virtual environment and collaborative software ?
Supplant collaborative channels into the mix and customers, supply chain and employees can all engage in ways never seen before.
We have collaboration and we have communication using all of the above methods. And the community is simply everyone who is engaging, there is no longer a need to define individual groups such as ‘Customer’, ‘Client’, ‘External supplier’, ‘Employee’
Must it really remain in the realms of research labs ? Gartner speaks of 20% of businesses losing their IT assets by 2012 to the cloud….how about just moving out of the Office entirely !
Dream bigger.
