I recently had the privilege of being interviewed by Zbigniew Misiak for a blog post in BPMTips.com. The post was titled, “BPM Skills in 2020 – Hot or Not”. In this interview series, many business process management experts were interviewed to discuss skills that will be useful for BPM professionals in 2020. Included in this prestigious group were Lloyd Dugan, Sandy Kemsley, and Jim Sinur, among others.

Here’s what I had to say on this topic:

What are the skills, techniques, behaviors, and attitudes that can help BPM practitioners create value for their organizations in 2020?

“The best thing I think BPM practitioners could do would be to embrace digital decisioning. We have been digitizing our businesses for a long time now and have succeeded in digitizing our channels, our data and our processes. But too often we are failing to digitize the decisions that use our digital data, support our digital channels and drive our digital processes straight through most efficiently.

Digital decisioning is a way to deliver smarter, simpler and more dynamic processes while effectively applying predictive analytics, machine learning and AI – not to the process itself, but to the critical decisions on which the process relies. Digital decisioning involves identifying and modeling decisions, automating them in decision services that combine machine learning with business rules, and creating a continuous improvement infrastructure for them. It delivers consistent, easy to manage, precise and data-driven decisioning throughout your business.”

What are the best resources to learn those skills? (e.g. books, articles, courses)

“Clearly, I think my new book Digital Decisioning: Using Decision Management to Deliver Business Impact from AI is one of the best resources for Digital Decisioning out there, but there are also some great papers from John Rymer and Mike Gualtieri at Forrester and some good resources from Gartner too (under their Decision Management topic). My blog and company blog have plenty on this topic too.”

Which skills are no longer relevant or not practically applicable yet (hype)?

“Attempting to apply business rules, predictive analytics or machine learning/AI directly to business processes should count as irrelevant these days. While you can apply these technologies to processes directly, the evidence that they work so much better when applied to automate and manage decision-making explicitly is overwhelming. Applying a decision management approach with the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard and delivering digital decisioning is the future.”

In short, I believe that Digital Decisioning is the best way for enterprises to achieve business value from the application of AI and machine learning. Digital Decisioning ensures your systems act intelligently on your behalf, making precise, consistent, real-time decisions at every touch point. It operationalizes machine learning and artificial intelligence, so you can make the best possible decision, every time. It uses business rules to guarantee the agility, transparency and compliance that established companies and regulated industries demand. Focusing only on decision-making, it supports continuous learning and improvement.