What is Operational Responsiveness?

Wikipedia defines it as “a desirable quality of a business process or supporting IT solution, which indicates its ability to respond to changing conditions and customer interactions as they occur. An operationally responsive business process or IT solution is one that reacts quickly and effectively to a wide range of business events as they occur, and is also one that is managed in such a way as to be rapidly and effectively evolved in response to changes in the business environment itself so as to drive both consistency and value of business outcomes.”

I like that definition but Progress Software expands on it by believing that it is the ability of business processes and systems to respond to changing conditions and customer interactions as they occur - enabling business leaders to capitalize on opportunities, drive greater efficiencies, and reduce risk. Operational responsiveness is more than agility and business process engineering optimization, it’s about plugging decision makers into business events and giving them the ability to respond to the unexpected, thereby effecting change directly.

Read what Wikipedia has to say about Responsive Process Management (RPM). You can also follow Dr. John Bates on Twitter.