Enabling Front-Office Transformation and Customer Experience through Business Process Engineering

The scope of business processes has been traditionally circumscribed to the industrialisation of enterprise operations. Indeed, Business Process Management (BPM) has focused on relatively mature operations, with the goal of improving performance through automation. However, in today’s world of customer-centricity and individualised services, the richest source of economic value-creation comes from enterprise-customer contacts beyond transactions. The need to make sense of a mass of such touch-points makes process a prevalent and emerging concept in the Front- Office of enterprises, including organisational competences such as marketing operations, customer-relationship management, campaign creation and monitoring, brand management, sales and advisory services, multichannel management, service innovation and management life-cycle, among others. While BPM will continue to make important contributions to the factory of enterprises, the engineering of customer-centric business processes defines a new field of multi-disciplinary work focused on serving customers and improving their experiences. This new domain has been dubbed Business Process Engineering (BPE) in the concert of IEEE Business Informatics. This paper addresses the main characteristics of BPE in comparison with traditional BPM, highlights the importance of process in customer experience as a key goal in Front-Office transformation and suggests a number of new research directions. In particular, the domains of process and information remain today disconnected. Business Informatics is about the study of the information process in organisations and thus, reuniting business process and information in enterprises is a central task in a Business Informatics approach to engineering processes. Among other activities, BPE is chartered to close this gap and to create a suitable business architecture for Front-Office where organisational and customer behaviour should guide and benefit from emerging data analytics techniques.