Process Observability
Discover the emerging importance of process observability and explore how your business can bridge the business transformation gap and realize continuous value.
What is process observability, and why is it important?
The ability to fully monitor, collaborate on, and improve businesses processes in a data-driven and measurable way is key to successfully transforming your business, continuously improving performance, and creating sustainable value. But with data increasing at an exponential rate, and complexity and market volatility adding to the mix, achieving a successful transformation and realizing continuous value becomes more difficult.
The emerging practice of process observability enables stakeholders and systems to better understand how processes operate, what the expected and actual process outcomes are, and what actions can be derived to improve or change these outcomes. The starting point: having a wide and deep data and system scope, integration, and facilitating collaboration from a single source. It’s also important to have a functional view as well as an operational process view and being able to connect the dots, from process identification, design and documentation, and process change.
Ultimately, business process observability drives improvements in customer experience, employee experience, hyper-automation and enterprise applications.
The latest IDC report on process observability
Process Observability: A collaborative approach to transformation enablement
The latest research on process observability from IDC shows that while “80% of organizations use insights from IT systems and applications to help them identify and drive process changes”, many of them are struggling to grasp process identification, design and documentation, and process change.
“Only 26.2% of respondents have the ability to “deep dive” with process analysis to find the root causes of business process problems.” Furthermore, “87.5% of respondents do not have an effective collaboration environment for process change…”
These are just a few among the many challenges highlighted in the report,, but what’s working well for businesses?
Download the report
Towards a process observability layer
Your company on a page
The base layer in a process observability model is a single, data-driven view of your process landscape. SAP Signavio customers can access this view called Company on a Page.
This page, at a glance gives you insights into hierarchical taxonomy and connections, highlighting operational metrics and process performance, and experience metrics across your processes and customer journeys.
A common language
In order to increase process observability, it’s important to build on shared agreements and understandings. Starting from a common process language, but more importantly a common and continuously used common process language.
This common language, based on a Dictionary, must be adopted across the process landscape.
Collaborative BPM
The best business outcomes are often achieved when organizations assemble BPM teams across different functions, as opposed to relying on a center of excellence driving process management .
This demonstrates the importance of collaborative business process management (BPM) and aligning on shared insights and a single source of truth.
Data driven insights
The process data, key metrics, insights improvement recommendations available to all stakeholders should meet several requirements in order to increase observability.
It should be complete, have contextual meaning, be widely accessible, as timely and accurate as possible and based on not just outcomes, but also carry operational relevance. Equally, being able to integrate multiple data sources and leverage insights is linked to high observability.
Experience touchpoints
There are 2 sides to increasing observability: mining data in your systems, and identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies, on the one side, and getting an outside-in view on the other.
What friction are my processes causing to my customers, and do I have sentiment analysis to back this up? You can only answer these questions by modelling all customer journey touchpoints, as part of building your process observability layer.
For more information
Blog: Process Observability
What is Business Process Observability and why does it matter?
Video: Process Observability Keynote
How to build process observability within your organization.
Blog: Process Observability
Experience-driven process mining: a new perspective on traditional process mining to achieve process observability.
Blog: Large Process Models
Large Process Models: Process Management in the Age of Generative AI.