With customers having a wider choice in just about every field, whether B2B or B2C, the experiences those customers have, or will have, drive your ability to generate revenue, and of course profit. However, sales and marketing professionals aren’t typically the people that deliver your service experiences, ship your products, train customers or schedule resources. In short, they are not the people one typically associates with delivering operational excellence.

Well, perhaps it is a technique known as Customer Journey Mapping (CJM). The technique is widely talked about as THE way to capture and model the way that customers interact with your organization. CJM captures steps that customers take, the interactions (moments of truth) that they have, and further capture the emotions associated with those actions.

CJM is a technique for capturing and questioning journeys, but the map is only as good as the people who create it. It is true that great customer experiences don’t happen by magic. For the most part the CJMs are still being created by the same engineers and engineering thinking that you have always used.

This thinking tends to start with examining “what is,” and then building based on what you have. In other words, the initial work is focused on the “now” or “what has been.” However, as Edward de Bono once said “You can analyse the past, but you need to design the future. That is the difference between suffering the future and enjoying it.” This suggests that rather than thinking first about what or why things are as they are, we might be better to focus more of our efforts on designing the future, suggesting that we need “imagineers,” not engineers.

Whilst an engineer will look to take something such as a taxi booking system and make it easier to book or pay for a taxi, it takes an imagineer to come up with the idea of ride sharing like Uber or Lyft. These imagineers do not start by thinking from your organization’s perspective, or map journeys that start and end within your organizational boundary. They start by imagining new journeys that we had never thought possible, and then set about building or rebuilding their businesses to deliver them.

Imagineers are the true disruptors, and they are perhaps the biggest threat not just to businesses, but potentially to entire industries. If you think of an electric vehicle, you likely think of Tesla, and for hybrid Toyota comes to mind with the Prius. However, most major manufacturers are seeking to make the switch, mostly driven by government regulation.

Beyond this, what you may not know is that DHL is one of the world’s largest manufacturers of electric vehicles, or that the longest range electric bicycle (226 miles) is not made by a bike company but by Delfast, a Ukrainian Courier company.

If you want to look to the future, consider asking arts or other innovative people to start mapping possible customer journeys in your market without preconceptions. Note that those journeys may start and end way beyond your current organizational boundaries.

For example, when taking a flight, your journey doesn’t end at the airport. It ends when you arrive back at your house — hopefully with all of your luggage. When installing cable or broadband in your home, the journey doesn’t end when it is installed or when you pay the first bill. Instead, it ends when you can browse the Internet or watch your preferred TV program. If a hospital is to order a new piece of medical equipment, the journey doesn’t end at installation, but rather after the first successful patient diagnosis, or when you get paid for the first scan performed.

Understanding both the true trigger point and true endpoint, you can better place yourself in the customer’s journey, which identifies threats to your business and opportunities for growth and expansion. One thing you can be sure of in today’s ever more technologically enabled world is that chances are, somebody out there is conceiving of customer journeys that may involve what you currently do.

Business Process Management (BPM) entails how businesses study, identify, change and monitor business processes and modeling to ensure that they run smoothly while improving those processes over time. The data from the BPTrends’ report shows that no North American organization in 2017 had spent more than $10 million on business process work or improvements. In contrast, five European companies had spent from $10 to $50 million, with one organization investing over $50 million. Process management can assist both European and North American companies in their processes when they become GDPR compliant, however the emphasis on processes in Europe explains why those businesses are much more prepared.  

With any organization looking to become GDPR compliant, processes must change to better protect the organization and implement new workflows. New plans must be drawn up for each organization, as well as documented and communicated to internal stakeholders, thus creating new processes.

Much of the focus around the GDPR has been on data and data protection rather than on processes that take place, which are equally as important for companies that are affected by the regulation. Keeping up with the tracking and reporting required to achieve regulatory compliance can cost organizations considerable time and resources. Without an efficient system, it’s no doubt that an organization could easily fail to maintain compliance or efficiently keep up with internal deadlines that may require consent under the GDPR.  

For example, some of these processes might include ways in which an organization deals with a data breach, documents that breach, and securing their systems to prevent future problematic implications. The way a business handles consent and data management in compliance with GDPR is all through their internal processes.  

Well-functioning process management is essential when it comes to avoiding monetary penalties, yet many organizations do not see this as self-evident. A BPM System gives businesses the tools they need for rapid reaction to regulatory change. Compliance management is thus made easier, and complex rule sets are replaced by compliant and functioning processes. A Business Process Management System is able to identify regulatory violations and risks in daily processes, ensure employees are correctly carrying out critical decisions, incorporate compliance changes into processes and ensure seamless traceability of new processes.  

For example, any company that conducts business in the EU or with EU citizens, otherwise known as “data subjects,” must be within compliance. For a company like Cola-Cola that does business internationally, the processes of compiling and storing their company data must be addressed. The GDPR states that any company posing a risk to EU data subjects can be fined up to 4% of their global revenue or $20 million, whichever is greater. If Coca-Cola was to experience a data breach of this information, they could potentially be fined up to $1.1 billion, based on their 2017 revenue of $35.41 billion.  

Process optimization not only prepares these companies for GDPR but provides workflow acceleration and process intelligence. All are critical with successfully implementing new GPDR regulations within an organization. Some basic operations of a BPM system include defining a framework based on legal and standardized requirements; identification, documentation and prioritization of risks; assessing controls with supporting processes and procedures as well as test activities. Implementing these workflow processes to manage risk and controls is of the utmost importance, as it allows for a business to monitor and report while continuously improving.  

Effectively translating strategy into action is the cornerstone of business transformation, and using a BPM system assists in creating positive behaviors and mitigating threats businesses will encounter as the organization embarks on their journey to GDPR compliance through process management.