We are getting to the end of the 5 critical questions to address with your BPM vendor candidates. Gartner notes, “In order to adapt to changing business needs more quickly, there is an even greater focus on making the technologies easier to use so that the citizen developer (business users and business analysts) can author solutions with minimal involvement from IT.” Given this, I propose Question #4: “Will the solution be easy to change or expand over time?”
Every organization has their unique business processes, and whatever BPM solution deployed needs to handle them. But inevitably, processes will evolve over time. In fact, continuous process improvement is a cornerstone of any comprehensive BPM Program, so you should expect some level of ongoing change with any solution you implement. As such, you will want to avoid building anything static or custom-coded to fit a particular current-state process. Custom-coding will always increase the complexity and costs associated with future process changes or product upgrades. Instead, you should focus on BPM products that are easy to implement and readily support future changes or expansion.
Once again, we come back to the importance of low-code configuration capabilities over custom development. Not only will low-code configuration help you launch your BPM solution faster, it will also enable you to make changes more easily moving forward. Solutions built on BPM platforms offering configurable components like web forms, reporting dashboards, UI branding, and workflows will always be easier to update or expand over time than those that have been custom-coded. Ideally, those configurable components should also allow you to build functionality that is modular and re-usable, wherever possible. That way, you can configure something like a dynamic web form or an approval sub process once, share it across multiple processes, and still manage it centrally in one location.
And the more intuitive the platform’s low-code configuration tools are, the more likely process build and maintenance responsibilities can be delegated out to a wider group of citizen developers with minimal training expenditures.
You’re almost ready to get started on your new initiative, with our final question and wrap up coming in a few days. Question #5: “How much experience do you have with similar customer implementations?”