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

It’s The Age Of The Customer, according to Forrester Research and others who track and shape business trends.

Or is it???

Somebody please tell that to my health insurance company, which has annoyed me greatly this week. I’ve been receiving increasingly threatening letters from them, starting a few weeks ago just before I headed out for a long vacation. I didn’t think too much about it at the time but, a week after returning from vacation, I noticed the letters were now coming from a law firm. Yikes!  I called them.

Turns out, my physical therapy claims for a chronic condition were under scrutiny. Microscopic scrutiny. “Could it have been the result of an automobile accident, and the other driver was at fault?” they asked. Or “Were you injured at work and should be filing for worker’s compensation?” Or was it some other kind of accident with nefarious connections of some sort? The claims subrogration unit was on the case and determined to make another party pay.

Exasperated, I told them that it was for a chronic condition diagnosed several years ago and all the information was on file and up to date, since I regularly see physicians for that condition and had been referred by a physician to physical therapy. Then they asked me to spell out the condition. I had steam coming out of my ears at that point. Why bother to have a file about me if they aren’t going to look at it, make it available to people calling me, and keep it up to date? Could they have worked this into their process before sending threatening letters and calling me?

As a lifelong Yankees fan (which makes me a pariah with many of my Red Sox Country-based Forrester coworkers in Cambridge, Mass.), I’ve been following with amusement the sports media frenzy around the New York Yankees' "not-so-public yet not-so-private" contract negotiations with their star shortstop, Derek Jeter. While I read these news snippets with the intent of escaping the exciting world of data management for just a brief moment, I couldn’t escape for long because both sides of the table bring up reams of data to defend their positions.  

According to the media reports and analysis, the Yankees' ownership is seemingly paying less attention to Jeter’s Hall of Fame-worthy career statistics, including a fantastic 2009 season, and his intrinsic value to the Yankees brand, but instead is focusing on Jeter’s arguably career-low 2010 season on-field performance and advancing age (36 years old is practically Medicare-eligible age in baseball).    

Jeter’s side of the negotiations, on the other hand, point out that Jeter’s value to the Yankees is “immeasurable,” and that one off year shouldn’t be used to define his value to the team. They point out that Jeter, as team captain, is a major leader in the clubhouse and excellent role model for younger players. He’s certainly among the most popular players the Yankees employ and influences boatloads of fans to attend games, watch the Yankees cable network, and provide significant licensing revenue. And of course they point out that Jeter is still an excellent player and 2010 should be viewed as an anomaly, not the norm.

I’m not a baseball analyst (lucky for everyone), and I have no intention in joining the debate on whose point of view is correct or how much Jeter should earn, for how many years, etc. (That’s best discussed over a few beers, not on a blog, right?)

Bill Band and I have just published the latest Forrester Wave on customer relationship management (CRM) customer service solutions. We included 19 vendors in this in-depth market study and evaluated their solutions against 196 criteria. As you can well imagine, it took time and a fine-toothed analytical comb to compile the research and double-check the facts before we scored these sophisticated product suites. 

One of the key findings from this Forrester Wave is that a growing range of CRM vendors have incorporated deep analytics features into their customer service capabilities. Most provide embedded, out-of-the-box business intelligence (BI) features such as reporting, query, online analytical processing, dashboarding, scorecarding, and key performance indicators prebuilt to support their customer service applications. That’s no surprise, because these core BI features enable enterprises everywhere to keep track of how well they’re providing customer service across diverse CRM interaction channels and to identify opportunities to improve satisfaction, retention,  upsell, agent productivity, and other key metrics.