We are entering an entirely new phase of BPM – the era of “BPM Everywhere” or BPME.

BPME represents the strategy for leveraging, not simply surviving but fully exploiting the wave of disruption facing every business over the next 5 years and beyond. Without question, one of the single most disruptive events in the last decade was the introduction of the smartphone. Consider for a moment how great of an impact this has had on the relationship between businesses and their customers. Not even the emergence of the Web and Internet-based “digital native” business models can compare with the level of intimacy now available with your customers.

In the era of the Internet of Things where smart homes, appliances, cars, phones, virtually imaginable devices are all connected, BPM must, and will, be everywhere. As Peter Whibley discusses in “The Internet of Things Will Be Invisible,” by 2025 there are expected to be more than 26 billion or more connected devices.

In the chapter “Digital Prescriptive Maintenance: Disrupting Manufacturing through IoT, Big Data, and Dynamic Case Management,” Dr. Setrag Khoshafian introduces the “4 Vs” of “thing” data, specifically “Volume, Velocity, Variety and Value.” From monitors and remote sensors, to appliances and vehicles, to tens of billions of other “things,” connected devices are generating meaningful and informative data that would easily overwhelm any human being, but collectively they present critical context about processes and the state of operations.

“Big Data” has never been so large, nor presented such an acute role within enterprises and the processes that drive them. BPME as well as traditional BPM methods can already be found at the center of this. Its role will grow exponentially. Emergent factors such as process mining (see chapter “Mining the Swarm” by Keith Swenson, et al.) will be critical for uncovering engagement patterns and the need for process management platforms to coordinate interaction and control of smart devices. It is intelligent BPM that is expanding the window of what can be automated, by enabling adaptable automation.

The mobile strategies in far too many organizations seem to be the building of apps that presume that customers will use their smartphones like mini laptops. This avoids the fact that we now have a level of intimacy with our customer we've never had before. As discussed in the chapter “BPM to Go – Supporting Business Processes in a Mobile and Sensing World,” our customers are carrying around a device that offers a range of capabilities unlike any laptop. A smartphone produces volumes of meaningful data about our customers (think about the “4Vs”) and is able to interact with that customer in ways that a laptop never can.

The growing ubiquity of connectivity always within reach combined with new services and capabilities such as mobile banking is a key part of driving constantly-changing expectations. Yet digital disruption is not limited to mobile devices, and is in fact disrupting everywhere BPM is otherwise found, and why BPM everywhere is becoming the new normal.