Chapter 1: No one can deny that Business Process Management security issues exist

While Business Process Management (BPM) aims at efficiently creating business value, there is a number of threats that process managers need to consider.

Security hazards such as malware, hacker attacks or data theft pose major threats to the reliable execution of business processes. These may have negative effects on the company value, e.g. on profit, shareholder value or reputation.

This effect largely scales today as we are living in a world where managing the processes and the data flowing in an enterprise is “the key to the kingdom”.

Skepticism of customers about the security of business processes of a company would nullify the potential advantages of BPM, such as the realization of faster or cheaper services. Therefore companies are continuously increasing their resources to protect their business processes against security threats. Companies generally spend a lot of money on security. They seldom do ensure that a security policy is enforced apriori, thus the development process becomes insecure.

Recent ransomware attacks showed the vulnerability of professional e-business environments when hundreds of terabytes of critical data were encrypted during the Petya ransomware spreading, resulting in loses of over 8.7 billion dollars. Additionally, the attacks of hackers may have a major economic impact on companies. Because of the cost of theft, the cost for recovery and for loss of business value and because of the loss of reputation and confidence.

Costs for the recovery of a system after a security breach or for the downtime of it or for a misconfigured value chain due to security problems are insanely huge and have a heavy impact on the cash reserves of a company.

Chapter 2: Identification and classification of security holes 

The definition of security safeguards is often a result of current trends in information security. In addition, decision-makers are often driven by fear when defining security safeguards with an attitude of “just-in-case”. As a consequence security decisions provide only punctual solutions and are made without considering the costs and benefits of introducing these measures.

Process managers have to model and assess business processes to assure they fit the security policy of the company or the value chain. Learn more about a cloud security bucket list.

Their challenge is the elicitation of optimal business processes according to the given business strategy. Generally, process managers are not bpm security experts and neglect the integration of security safeguards to the process models of an organization.

Analyzing, planning and implementing security environments are subject for the security departments or the CSO, because security is an area that demands specialized knowledge.

As a result security departments are rather isolated from other corporate core areas. Therefore integrated methodologies for supporting companies in defining security safeguards over the whole business and development life cycle are also rare. Existing approaches focus on parts of the life cycle, either on ensuring the quality of a BPM system and providing the maximum number of features while taking a heavy toll on security, or enforcing strict security measures and heavily maim all BPM features.

It is obvious that there are key elements in the development life cycle that should be reorientated.

Chapter 3: Changing the way security currently works in the flow of data 

Security should be considered as a business concept that embraces the development process and goes hand in hand with features implementation and not as a process of posterior bug fixing.

Inefficiencies in the way a business handles processes and data flows should be fixed before going into production level. The mentality of “security patches” should be highly avoided and should only be applied if the testing of the solutions, before going live, has failed in certain areas.

Specifically, in a highly privacy sensitive system such as a BPM software, the way data flows into a system and gets edited should be thoroughly tested even in the worst case scenario.

A provider of such a BPM solution (Learn how to choose the best BPM vendor for your business) should be in the position to apply multiple test cases and at the same time monitor and identify vulnerabilities and misconfigures that could leak important application or user data in third parties.

For example, how is user access defined for all the different roles in a system and how may organization occupy?

Questions like these should be identified and consequently answered by the process managers in cooperation with security analysts and should be leading to the development and implementation of security policies in Business Process Management world.

Chapter 4: Epilogue and why Secure Business Process Management (SBPM) should be standardized as a term

It is expected that the market for BPM solutions will rise up to 18.6 billion dollars by the end of 2022.

More and more business data will be processed, classified and then will help create applications that automate the processes of an organization within the boundaries of BPMs.

It is obvious that these data should be handled with extreme care while being created, transmitted, stored and processed. All these phases provide a wide attack surface to aspiring violators and thus should always be treated as security-critical processes even if the result of a violation is a simple encrypted mail hijacking.

SBPM, or (S)ecure Business Process Management should emerge and become a trend in the upcoming years. Policies, technical specifications, user training, secure protocol enforcing and data validation should become the norm when dealing with process management.

The letter “S” in the acronym SBPM should not define another layer of cumbersome enterprise-grade security in Business Process Management yet but rather a mindset of developing a product with integrity, confidentiality, and availability as key aspects.

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Businesses have numerous ways of handling this relationship, but project management is not always the first process that comes to mind. Managing and executing projects can be difficult for businesses, but when properly executed, project management can aid in building clients’ trust in a company. Here are different thoughts and tactics to help project managers and their teams in creating and developing better customer and client connection and finally to build better customer relationships.

Communication is key

Whether it’s a phone call, email, or in-person meeting, speaking to a client is the first step in building a relationship. However, it’s not always easy to keep calm when deadlines are looming or a project’s goals change drastically. Managers and team members who keep the following in mind can create opportunities for clear and concise communication:

• Maintain a positive attitude – Even if you feel stressed and overwhelmed, don’t let your clients know. Transmitting these issues to them doesn’t build a client’s confidence in your team. Take a minute before sending off an email or making a phone call to think of one good thing that’s happening.
• Acknowledge the client as an individual – Building a relationship with a client means seeing them as a unique person. Your point of contact is a business representative in your working relationship. Taking the time to ask personalized questions lets that individual know you’re interested in them. Constructing trust makes your points of contact feel comfortable about being open and honest, which helps both them and your team.
• Be clear and concise when transferring knowledge – Sending off a project for approval or review is the pinnacle of a team’s hard work. Nothing brings it down faster when there isn’t a clear hand-off to a client. Prior to delivering a project, put together a complete overview to accompany it, and have other team members review it.

As you scale, your traditional phone system may make communication a difficult task. Adopt a virtual phone system to benefit from auto-attendants, interactive voice response systems, call forwarding, and call transfer. These features ensure your customers are speaking to the right person right away, even if your employees are out of the office.

When sharing information with a client, decide if it will exist on the web or inside a cloud app. Have other individuals test access to these applications. Trying out your systems before clients log in aids in reducing frustration or miscommunication when projects are ready for review.

Build rapport

Once a well-established channel of communication is created, project team members should set out to support it. Any of the tactics on this list can help you in constructing additional client trust and forging a solid relationship.

• Exceed expectations – Teams should work to deliver more than expected. Sending off more work than initially discussed can build goodwill between the client and your company. Project managers and team members can achieve this goal by having a clear plan when assigning tasks to team members.
• Be transparent with clients when possible – Explaining or showing a client how the project developed or happened helps them see the full picture. Discuss how your teams solved problems to give your client a chance to understand why the project had its particular outcome. Pulling this information together for a client is easier when the project team reports all their actions to the manager.
• Show results – Brag a little about a successful project or campaign. Share analytical results to showcase the value of your team and what they do for your client. Utilizing digital tools to collect this information makes it quicker to get together.

Work with Your Team

Outside of customer communication, establishing a good team helps give clients what they need and helps you meet project deadlines. Managers need to keep lines of communication open with their point of contact, and they need to do so with their team members as well.

• Explain the goals – Discuss and affirm how you’ll execute the project, and why it will happen that way, with everyone on the team. If everyone’s on the same page, it can reduce problems arising from misunderstanding. When team members need motivation, try to mix up the schedule if possible, or talk about new ways to meet deadlines.
• Compile all client information – Know where your data is, and who has access to it. This information can include logs from calls, emails, and discussions held with clients. That way, adding new team members in the middle of a project or assigning a client to another team won’t result in data loss.

Work with the sales team on information they collected from the onboarding process. Notes and emails gathered during these introductory discussions are useful when going forward on new projects and deliverables.

By organizing all this data in one place, and delegating access to the proper team members, businesses can reduce lost opportunities from misplaced information or data insecurity resulting from too many people having access to sensitive information. Cloud-based systems, like enterprise resource planning software, are technology solutions companies can use to streamline this process.

• Involve team members when possible – Help team members understand why they’re receiving a task or job by involving them in client conversations. They don’t need to sit in on every conversation but including them can benefit everyone by reducing the need to ask or answer questions about why something is happening. If this option isn’t available, create a process for logging client calls and share those logs with people on the team.

When teams incorporate any of the tactics discussed here, they can find building better customer relationships becomes a natural part of project management. Alleviating some of the stress and workload on your sales or customer management teams can produce outsize results. Businesses that continue to evolve their project team’s roles and responsibilities see a return on this investment with happier clients.

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At Comidor, a next generation Business Process Management software vendor, serving public organizations in all steps of their digital transformation journey, we find extremely useful the experience gained from the private sector, with regards to Collaboration, Process Automation, Integrations and complexity of the Architecture of both Software and Hardware systems.

Business Process Management online, means Performance and Transparency.

The need for transition to a digitally working ecosystem within governmental organizations arise, in principal, from the core concepts of

1. Performance maximization
2. Transparency

On the one hand, digital transformation means being able to synchronize the operations of a large scale organization, such as a Ministry or a Municipality, having peers to collaborate with modern task management, file sharing, notifications and all kinds of automation, is the profound concept of a hyper-available to Public needs services offering. Same, as in the Enterprise world, customer-centric culture is applied at the citizen level, with KPI’s that drive performance output, since everything is countable and everyone can be accountable.

While setting an organization at overclocking mode, boosting performance that overcomes bureaucracy via workflows automation, the next step is Transparency maximization. A Business Process Management solution that runs on a  Collaborative platform (cloud or on-premises), assures that decisions can be made by following the right steps, based on facts (data, reports) which are proof of evidence that works are carried on wisely and process run is optimum. Read more about how BPM & QMS add value to an organization.

Digital Transformation in the Public Sector: Change and Leadership.

By definition (IEEE), Business Process Management is considered a rather holistic approach, driving cross organization performance by redesigning and optimizing business processes. In the Public Sector, Leadership’s vision, in both developing and developed countries, involves accomplishment of challenging goals such as e-government, open-government, case management and process re-engineering and automation. These refer to transforming the public sector by rationalizing administration and improving the overall quality of services to citizens.

The transformation to a process oriented public sector results to solution in problems associated with efficiency and costs, focusing in the importance of citizen service, convenience and user-friendliness.  In several reported cases, governmental organizations and spin-off agencies report that have implement “new, centrally located, multi-level security systems where all information is quickly obtained without compromising overall security”.

Conclusively, Digital  Transformation in the public sector leads to a modern, dynamic government model, as well as a way of organization and management of all kind of public affairs and transactions with citizens, adding significant value to the procedures and services provided.

For more information about ready available Digital Transformation technology and BPM ennoblement for government, visit our success stories about BPM for Government.

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The most popular elements an integrated BPM platform has to offer are:

•  Modelling and defining of the business rules
•  Business Analytics dashboards that can be turned to reports
•  Linking with other content, such as documents
•  Communication between co-workers and groups

A company’s strategy should line up with the BPM strategy, in a way that with the use of a BPM platform, effective process automation is achieved. Most managers use BPM platform to track the changes and have an overview of how things are going.

While the main idea is to check processes, main aim is to ameliorate your business results and improve your operational excellence. And you will achieve these results by transcribing a process to specific people or group(s) at any time you think you should.

With BPM platform no manual effort is needed from the employees and overall process cycle time is reduced. This leads productivity of the organization into going straight to the top.

Starting with clearly define the business process and tasks related to this process, you can then set the start and end points of it. BPM platform help managers avoid duplicate work and achieve increased efficiency in their goals. All in all, they make better and faster decisions.

Also, knowing who is responsible for multiple tasks of a process and how each process is related with other processes can help ensuring that you get the most of your established BPM platform. Furthermore, you have your people to help you run your processes smoothly.

On top of that, BPM platform gives the flexibility to alter things in a process when new opportunities that arise require changes. Also, the agility of BPM platform supports the adaptability of any new business model.

When documenting the business processes, you make your contribution your business’ future even if you run your business on your own. It may seem the same with writing a checklist, but the information provided and the history tracking will keep you staying up-to-date with everything.

Collaborative spirit has started thoroughly to integrate the last years and is quite important for an organization to have a proper alignment. Direct communication between the associates gives them the option to discuss about possible issues and bring new ideas on the table. Of course, managers are still there to coach the process and have the final word.

So, are you ready for BPM platform?

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Task Management tools  are everywhere and technology’s growth seems unstoppable. The growth is not only coming in terms of accomplishments (incredible new materials, superb energy efficiency, medical miracles, sci-fi patents, miniature engineering, speed-of-light processing software), but also in terms of geographical penetration.

Actually, the whole planet is benefitting from technology, even in places that no one would ever imagine. Long suffering Afghanistan has more than 1 million internet connections and 18 million mobile users in a population of 32 million!(The World Facebook) In one of the poorer and more isolated places of our planet, one out of two is daily paying for technology services. Marconi and Tesla surely rest in peace.

However, technology’s most important penetration is to enter everyone’s daily life by facilitating the fundamental human need for communication. Moving one step further, to elaborate this need into something that brings tangible results: technology facilitates collaboration.

Collaboration adds value on the flat verbal exchange by adding the element of mutual goal. From individuals to friend groups, from project teams to large company departments, everyone is using technology tools to accomplish mutual goals. And technology is quite generous with providing affordable collaboration and productivity measurement solutions, since location and volume of the collaborators is not a problem anymore.

Welcoming BPM platform

Various collaboration tools exist in the global market: simple calendar organizers, fun team-project tools, professional enterprise collaboration systems, CRM Project Management softwares. Some still run only on desktops via the company’s local intranet, while other run on smart mobiles and tablets using the Cloud technology. All of them share the same cornerstone: the tasks from BPM platform.

Despite tasks ‘ importance as a fundamental element in the collaboration process, it is admittedly neglected. Managers prefer grandiose and impressive terms, such as: sales plan execution, project management scheduling, financial consolidation, enterprise social networking etc. On the other hand, employees avoid the word “tasks” for the fear of extra work and responsibilities.

Still, it is the careful-designed task management process (assignment, execution, monitoring and reporting) that will deliver sales volume, successful projects, financial results, efficient collaboration and drive a company to grandeur, while helping the employee to show-off his daily contribution in printed reports.

Especially, in times of global economic turbulence, when the latter is haunted by cost-cutting policies and cost-efficient machines, tasks monitoring within collaboration tools can be claimed salvation.

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