This week I’m at PEX Week in Orlando, which is the conference for business process transformation and operational excellence. And its bookend conference, PEX Week in London, is the place to be in Europe if you are deeply into process excellence or process transformation.

A cursory glimpse at random session titles from the Orlando agenda tells the story of where process excellence practitioners’ heads are parked:

• Delivering Business Change That Is Sustainable, Steadfast and Successful
• Breaking Down Silos and Transforming Your Business and Leadership Culture with Lean Six Sigma
• Beyond Automation: BPM and the Transformation of Enterprise Technology
• Linking Strategy to Operations: Understanding How Strategic Decisions Drive Process Excellence
• Getting Operational and Process Excellence Right with Operating Model Realignment

This is really good stuff for business process practitioners to focus on. But out of sixty-three sessions, I counted only seven that focused specifically on integrating business processes with customer experience or even how to use BPM and Lean to transform the customer experience (my unofficial session count may be off a little).

Interesting. About five years ago, the agenda would have been chocked full of customer service and customer experience presentation titles. What gives? Here’s the situation in my view: the process world had an intense flirtation with customer experience but soon went back to its comfort zone, focusing instead on pursuing excellence in internal operations and often reporting into the COO. Does that mean business process people don’t care about their customers’ experience? Or have they ceded responsibility for customer experience to marketing, sales, customer service and other groups that are more customer facing? Maybe, but that’s not the whole story.

Here’s the reason, in my experience:

• Companies can be classified into many groups: say enterprise vs. SMBs; or domestic vs. global; or by industry sectors.
• When it comes to business process excellence, two factors heavily determine what the process practitioners focus on: whether the company is in a highly regulated industry or is relatively unregulated.
• All businesses are regulated to some extent, but some industries are so heavily regulated that adherence to codes and regulations and constantly improving how to execute regulations trumps just about everything they do. Process excellence, process improvement, operational excellence are super important to regulated industries, to the extent that customer experience sometimes takes the back seat.
• These heavily regulated industries include: pharmaceuticals, utilities, process manufacturers, discrete manufacturers, oil and gas, banking, and insurance. These companies literally must focus on regulations because they can get fined heavily or even fined out of existence if they are found to be egregiously non-compliant.
• Regulated industries have a laser focus on business process management (BPM) as a discipline and the process methodologies that go with it (Six Sigma, Lean, Lean Six Sigma, DMAIC and so forth.) By comparison, unregulated industries aren’t nearly as focused on business process, and have more bandwidth to pursue CEM.^[1]

Just imagine for a minute the way end-to-end processes could or should work at a largely unregulated retailer. Companies in this industry sector must pay nonstop, passionate attention to the customer, all the way from retail sites, websites and mobile support to omnichannel and more. They also need to align their internal processes with customer-facing processes for a seamless, end-to-end value stream that starts with the customer—but most of them haven’t gotten that far or even thought much about it. I’m sure they will eventually understand the importance of linking outside/inside processes, but for the medium term they are still stuck somewhere in the midst of improving the channel experiences and overhauling access to information deemed important by the customer.^[2]

• For example, my colleague, Jill Finger Gibson, who is a principal analyst in Digital Clarity Group’s research organization sent me a note just this week about the low visibility of business process at a conference she was attending. Jill wrote, “I spent the first part of this week at the National Retail Federation Conference, which was ALL about all the great new technologies that can be done to improve customer experience and ZERO about how retailers need to organize and operate internally in order to implement them successfully.”

Or think about how business processes should or could work at a CPG company that markets several well known brands, with all the varieties of products that those brands entail. Digital marketing and digital channels are of paramount concern to these companies. They simply must approach their internal operations, and support their often fickle customers, differently from the way a heavily regulated company does that sells turbines to other regulated businesses.  Heavy manufacturers focus first and foremost on operational excellence and internal transformation for good reason, while giving customer experience a second or third thought (assuming they give it any thought at all).

But . . . the internal focus by regulated companies must and will change over the next five years, as early adopters in the regulated space expand awareness in their sectors and put pressure on the more slowly moving companies. Already, business process practitioners in some regulated companies are discovering the need to improve and connect digital inside to digital outside processes, and are doing something about it. For example:

• TD Bank’s process center of excellence (COE), which has grown from six practitioners to more than one hundred process trained staff, was asked three years ago by senior management to examine and improve all processes which touch the customer. The focus in 2014 was on transforming business processes from end-to-end. So far, they have improved thirty-five end-to-end processes that start with the customer. The COE still has more than seventy processes left to focus on, so they are improving/transforming forty processes this year, focusing on integrating customer experience and the internal operation.
• Thomas Cook was literally forced to improve and transform its customer facing processes because it was failing miserably when compared against its competitors. The travel company consistently came in last when ranked by customers against other travel companies. As a result, the firm decided to tackle operations in the customer service department, by applying Lean and BPM concepts.^[3] As a result, the Lean practitioners got an eye-opener about how internal processes and customer experience should come together.^[4]
• A power utility embarked on a total transformation thoughout the entire company, in response to the emergence of smart grid and the Nest thermometer product (which changed how consumers behaved). Senior-most executives created many teams working in concert across the multi-state company. These teams included a BPM team and a customer experience team. Periodically the two teams checked in with one another, and began to recognize that they were working on two sides of a common goal.

These three companies showcase how regulated/non-regulated companies can push beyond their cultural and experiential boundaries to expand their view of end-to-end value streams.

The bottom line? it can be done. And it will be done in your regulated company–sooner or later.