Tearing Down the Walls between Process and Information

Process improvement has become a mantra for organizations looking to increase the efficiency of their operations, make their employees more productive and accelerate their ability to respond to evolving business conditions. But how exactly is "process improvement" best accomplished? In terms of technology, many organizations look to business process management (BPM) software as a panacea for fixing rigid, inefficient processes. While BPM products do provide powerful capabilities for defining, automating, orchestrating and optimizing processes, they need to be viewed as one pillar of an overall solution that can transform how organizations operate.

The Building Blocks of All Processes
In order to view the big picture, let’s first look at the building blocks of processes: people, information and systems. Everything taking place in a process requires some combination of these in order for the process to move forward. A brief listing of what each one encompasses is helpful to understand what is needed to effectively drive process improvement.

1. People: Employees, management, partners, vendors, customers.
2. Information: Structured data, unstructured content (documents, images, etc.), semi-structured content (emails, forms, etc.), models, rules/policies.
3. Systems: Application software, infrastructure software, hardware equipment, hardware infrastructure.

These building blocks enable interactions (between people, systems or a combination of the two) to take place in order to handle the various activities that make up a process. At the same time, these interactions require structure and context if we want to actually achieve the desired process improvement objectives of the organization.

In order to examine how people, information and systems are needed, let’s examine a process that every organization deals with: employee hiring and on-boarding. Bringing new employees into an organization involves a complex set of interactions to find suitable prospects and bring the best ones into the organization. In fact, this process is a combination of interrelated processes with many interactions involving people (candidates, HR, hiring decision-makers, external references), systems (enterprise applications, databases, email, infrastructure) and information (candidate data, resumes, employment and other records, legal documents, etc.). Adding to the overall complexity, these interactions are taking place across functional boundaries within the organization, as well as with external sources.

To handle the hiring process effectively, these interactions need to be managed in an organized manner, monitored to ensure progress is being made, and recorded in a way that allows access to the information as it is being compiled throughout the process. Additionally, there are requirements to meet compliance mandates and reduce risk associated with hiring new employees. The question is, can BPM accomplish all of this, or is it part of a larger solution?

BPM Helps Achieve Process Improvement, but...
At this point, let’s consider the objective of all processes, which is to complete a set of related actions in the most efficient and optimal manner possible. In the case of the employee hiring process, the major actions are to: identify a set of prospects for the position; screen the most promising candidates; make a decision on the best candidate(s); extend and negotiate an offer to the top choice(s); complete any remaining pre-hiring activities; initiate facilities and infrastructure setup required for the employee to begin working; complete paperwork and other on-site activities on the employee’s first day; and take the employee through additional training required to make him/her productive as quickly as possible. Obviously, there are many activities that make up each of these actions, but there are a couple points which are applicable to this and most processes within an organization:

• the process requires a lot of human interaction;
• there is a wide range of information needs associated with the process; and
• automation can be implemented to some extent, with a focus on eliminating non-value-add activities in the process.

So where does BPM fit in this scenario? Actually, it can play a vital role by orchestrating the set of processes that make up the actions taking place from the initial decision to hire, through the actual on-boarding of the new employee. BPM allows these processes to be explicitly defined and then "orchestrated" so that the correct actions occur based on the results of each activity. It can also automate many of the systems-based activities that must take place, such as pulling/posting data with various data sources, assigning work, setting work priorities, sending alerts and triggering new actions. In addition, BPM provides capabilities to easily adjust and refine the process over time based on evolving conditions and organizational requirements. But, at the same time, BPM cannot handle many of the information needs that make up the process. For instance, it is not the master source of most data, it does not ensure the long-term retention of information, and it is not involved in many of the ways that information is brought into the process. In fact, there are a host of information management requirements that need to be integrated with BPM in order to handle the needs of the entire process.

ECM Provides Valuable Benefits, Too
What becomes apparent, as we look more closely at the complete needs of the process, is that the actual solution must incorporate a combination of process and information management in order to be truly effective. Enterprise content management (ECM) is a key area of technology which can be combined with BPM to provide the information management needs that processes require. This technology provides the ability to both understand a wide variety of information types, both structured and unstructured, as well as to manage the front-end and back-end requirements associated with this information. Front-end requirements include capture, categorization and ingestion of information coming in through forms, scanning/imaging systems, emails and electronic documents. Back-end requirements include applying information rights management, retention policies and intelligent archiving for future retrieval. All together, ECM provides an essential set of information management capabilities that complement and enhance the capabilities of BPM. Going back to our example of the employee hiring process, let’s look at a couple of areas where ECM adds value to BPM: 

• As people begin to apply for the job, there needs to be an efficient way to classify, validate and categorize the information on each prospective hire; ECM can provide the ability to capture information coming in from a variety of sources and to extract key metadata that will be used at various points throughout the process.
• People involved in the interview process will need the ability to find information on the candidates; ECM provides a centralized repository and the ability for people to easily view, annotate and share information about the prospective hires.
• During the hiring stage, various pieces of information (legal documents, educational transcripts, drug test results, etc.) will need to be evaluated in order to make a final decision; ECM provides the ability to create virtual folders that bring together multiple pieces of information for easy access and retrieval.
• After the hiring is completed, there may be a need for the employer to prove that the hiring process met legal requirements; ECM provides the ability to retain and retrieve information using rules-based archiving policies.

The example that has been described above is illustrative of many (if not most) processes that take place within organizations. In order to solve the overall needs of the process, organizations need to look for comprehensive solutions which bring together process and information management.