The world and the industry has changed radically in recent years. Of course, evolutions and revolutions have become commonplace in modern economies. This time, however, is different. It is not the products and services that are changing, it is the way in which they are delivered to the customer that is totally different.

The guest lecture is part of the BPM course in Master of Management and the speaker is Jan Mendling, professor at the Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien and thought leader in the area of Business Process Management.

Jan Mendling, Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien

Jan kindly points the audience towards the plain truth in modern business success. Contemporary innovations do not take place at the product level, it is all about the process.

Looking at your daily consumption of food, lifestyle and entertainment, what has changed the most in recent years? Do you think it is the television series that changed? The shoes, the lip gloss, the taxi ride, the overnight stay? Of course they did not. They are still very much the same. It is the way in which we find, purchase and cisume them that has been changed completely by the emergence of online and on-demand services. New-born giants like Netflix, Amazon, Uber and Airbnb did not offer any product or service that had never been seen before. On the contrary, they offered established products and services in a format and in a way that enhanced the customer experience to near-irresistible levels. You may have heard this before, but modern innovation seems to be all about the process.

Setting an exhilarating scene, Jan Mendling meanders through the past, present and future of BPM and guides the audience through evolutions in process-oriented management techniques.

If processes are so critical in encouraging and enabling innovation, why is it then that traditional quality metrics of a process focus on cost, quality and throughput time? Which BPM frameworks are most suitable when pursuing creative process design? How do modelling techniques contribute to your organisational success? And what will be the role of process mining in tomorrow’s organizations?

All in all, we are grateful to Jan Mendling for exposing his thoughts in this presentation and are eagerly looking forward to his next guest lecture. Unless, of course, the educational process will soon evolve beyond the practice of human-conducted lectures. In which case, we will warmly welcome Jan’s digitalized version at Hasselt University.

Thank you very much, Jan!

This article was first published on Research Group Business Informatics @ UHasselt: It’s all about the process.