Have you ever thought seriously about the future of business processes? If not, it’s time to. With trends coming at us fast and furious — business transformation, the age of the customer, mobility, cloud, social, process outsourcing — processes of the future will look very different from how we work today.

Forrester is in the process (pardon the pun) of looking at business processes in 2020. We’ve interviewed 10 major thought leaders at large global organizations and a number of systems integrators and vendors in the BPM space. Wow, have we learned a lot from these deep thinkers! Many of the trends they identified are already being actively worked on in their companies — so these are not just pipe dreams — and include:

  • A major strategic alignment between business process transformation and customer experience
  • Very little concern about technology issues — because they believe the technology will work well (and this is not what keeps them up at night even now)
  • A major focus on standardizing processes across the globe so that work can easily flow to the lowest-cost labor at any given moment
  • The belief that processes will run in the cloud (private or public) and that businesses will consume processes-as-a-platform
  • A strong conviction that IT will largely vanish into the business
  • The need for access to global talent pools driving some of the need for business process transformation
  • The expectation that being dynamic and turning on a dime will be critically important

These are only highlights — the report will be out soon.

With that in mind, Forrester’s research team serving business process professionals has not one but two upcoming Tweet Jams. On September 7 from 2:30 pm to 3:30 pm ET, we will hold a session on the future of business process and shine a light on what thebusiness process professional’s job will look like in 2020. Participating in that session will be Craig Le Clair (@csleclair), Connie Moore (@cmooreforrester), Paul Hamerman (@paulhamerman), and Clay Richardson (@passion4process).

We will discuss the following topics(and probably more, since the discussion also goes where you lead us):

  • Game-changers: social, mobile, cloud
  • The role of customer experience in BPM
  • Obstacles and barriers on the journey to this vision of business processes in 2020
  • Big process thinking — what is it?
  • The five tenets of big process thinking
  • The role of enterprise suites in a dynamic world
  • The long-term outlook for SAP, Oracle, and other enterprise app companies
  • BPM suites versus enterprise suites
  • Untamed processes—is there any hope?

On September 8 from 11:00 am to 12:00 pm ET, we will tackle customer empowerment, which will play a pivotal role in the evolution of the business process role. Participating in that session will be Bill Band (@waband), Craig Le Clair (@csleclair), Derek Miers (@bpmfocus), and Connie Moore (@cmooreforrester).

We will address the following topics:

  • How can business process professionals contribute to customer empowerment?
  • What approaches can be used to get the business to invest in customer experience?
  • What role does social media play in customer engagement platforms?
  • What is the role of BPM suites in the age of the customer?

So please follow us and join in on the discussion. We’ll be using the hashtag #BPF11. And, if you haven’t done so already, check out our upcoming Business Process Forum, at which we’ll dig deeper into these subjects.