Bridging the Gap People and Process with Content in Context

"How can I approve this customer's commercial loan application? I can't even find all the documents and email communications related to the initial request..."

This scenario is increasingly common and stems from the fact that organizations deploying business process management (BPM) solutions fail to include enterprise content management (ECM) offerings in their strategic planning. The increasing complexity of processes demands that a collaborative work environment provide the foundational support for the BPM strategy. With a virtual collaborative workspace providing contextual information for every step in a business process, users can make informed decisions faster. Organizations can improve responsiveness to customers—both internally and externally—while increasing efficiencies across all projects. By bringing BPM, ECM and collaborative document management (CDM) together, enterprises lay the foundation for a highly collaborative, process-oriented environment in which the management of the project or product lifecycle provides greater transparency in customer interactions.

BPM typically involves processes that orchestrate a combination of system-to-system, people-to-people and people-to-system interactions and can range from managing high-volume transactions to collaborative team-oriented business processes. By providing contextual content, all three types of processes can be executed with full visibility and knowledge.

High-Volume Transactional Processes

When discussing BPM, what often comes to mind is the automation of high-volume transactional processes around claims, mortgage loans, auto loans or the opening of retail bank accounts. The focus of BPM has primarily been on process orchestration rather than the organization, accessibility, categorization and presentation of relevant content (documents, emails, other business assets) necessary to provide the full context for the given workflow activity step.

High-volume transactional processes often exhibit one or more of the following characteristics:

• Repetitive transactions governed by well-defined escalation rules, sometimes numbering several thousand per day; 
• Processes that often interface with various back-end systems for data extraction, insertion and validation;
• Documents that are added to the system via automated batch methods, such as scanning or faxing;
• Documents (such as scanned documents, faxes, and electronic forms) that are often static in nature and require little document editing or version tracking;
• The focus is primarily on workflow standardization, task distribution, job queue management and operator resource scheduling and optimization;
• Workflow tasks that include the review of one or more documents; and
• Documents and process audit logs that are archived into a repository after the process is completed.

These traditional processes provide employees only with information related to a specific task with a set of documents attached to that individual step in the process. As the number of documents needing to be referenced increases, such as with the opening of a corporate account for commercial or wholesale banking, simply attaching them to a workflow task is an inadequate means of providing total visibility.

As an example, the person reviewing and approving a customer request may have a need to review all previous communications associated with the transaction. These may include emails, all customer-related documents and account history, among other things. Such a detailed process requires seamless integration with an enterprise content management system in order to ensure that all relevant content related to the request is visible and accessible to anyone handling the request.

Retrieving information from a giant archiving system is only marginally helpful if the information is disorganized and uncategorized. This situation is one of many that clearly illustrates the compelling business need for collaborative document management. CDM is an important pillar of a complete ECM strategy, and bridges the gap between people and processes while delivering contextual information through the concept of "workspaces." With workspaces, information can be organized based on business requirements to mimic information compartments for specific customers, products, projects, engagements, deals and contracts. Capturing all documents, emails and media assets related to a specific business requirement within a single, accessible workspace unifies and simplifies the process and delivery of information to the right people in the right context. The following diagram illustrates how a commercial bank organizes customer information in a virtual "credit file" while processing a commercial lending request.

In a typical BPM environment, a completed process triggers the archiving of related documents without regard for the context in which the original information was used. For instance, the loss of contextual information results in a commercial bank relationship manager being unable to leverage an opportunity to up-sell new products and services based on a customer's information around a prior loan process or account-opening process because the manager does not have access to all the account request information related to this particular customer. Similarly, there is no easy way for a compliance group or internal audit committee to track the sequence of activities, communications and decisions made that led to the approval of a set of risky commercial loans if they do not have access to all the information presented to them in the right context, as shown in the diagram. This can only be achieved efficiently if an ECM system with collaborative document management is seamlessly integrated with a BPM solution.

Collaborative Business Processes

"How do I manage the lifecycle of all the information related to a project—not just the review and approval of a set of documents?"

Business processes, such as the one outlined above, often become complex exercises involving numerous people, tasks and decisions. Such complexity demands real-time access to relevant content, the ability to quickly and easily collaborate with various team members and a preserved audit trail of each step involved in the decision-making process. Examples of highly