True Dynamic Process Management: Visibility and Control in the Day-to-Day Work Environment
The traditional world of business process management (BPM) is changing dramatically. BPM has already progressed from a niche solution automating administrative processes to a strategic business tool being used to standardize mission-critical operations. With the maturation of BPM suites, we are seeing a change in mindset as processes become recognized as business assets and deployments move beyond departmental implementations to enterprisewide solutions. As business executives and IT leaders alike express a renewed interest in optimizing the processes that impact their companies' financial and operational performance, the question on everyone's mind is—where do BPM suites go from here?
Today's business environment—one that places a premium on compressed cycle times, reduced operating costs, improved service levels and the very real threat of penalties associated with compliance violations—is driving business process evolution. Organizational leaders now require unprecedented operational control and enterprisewide visibility into the functions that drive day-to-day performance. BPM suites provide these executives with timely information about key business processes required to set organizational expectations and meet deadlines.
BPM suites are particularly well suited to automate relatively static, repetitive processes such as expense-report entry, validation and payment, new customer enrollment and claims processing.
If all work happened within this structured world, however, there would be little room for BPM suites to evolve. The simple truth is that only a small percentage of work performed by individuals conforms to a structured process.
The majority of work is performed within the unstructured—or dynamic—environment of emails, phone calls, instant messaging and face-to-face meetings. Dynamically modeling the processes within this unstructured world, and providing visibility and control where there has traditionally been none, is the ultimate destiny of BPM. Applications that successfully address this fundamental challenge will provide breakthrough business value on par with the widespread adoption of email.
Today's BPM Value Proposition
Most packaged software applications have been designed to address the functional requirements of a particular discipline, such as human resources, finance, manufacturing or sales. These applications have significant functional depth, but fail to take into account that business processes span multiple disciplines.
In the absence of formalized business processes that span these stovepipe applications, individuals have been forced to find their own way, which can lead to chaos and waste. BPM suites bring order and efficiency to this world by formalizing and streamlining the business processes that span various functional applications. Ultimately BPM suites drive greater control, consistency, visibility, accountability, compliance and speed—core benefits that have been associated with BPM for years.
Beyond these obvious, and certainly worthy, benefits, lurks even greater potential, potential that leading BPM suites vendors are finally beginning to articulate. BPM suites are poised to become the business context backbone from which complementary applications may drive greater individual and organizational performance.
By understanding the business context for what a user is trying to accomplish at any given step in a process, a content management system, for example, can proactively recommend specific documents or graphics that address the user's need. Without this business context, and the ability to proactively inject itself into the process, the content management system is a standalone application that has much less job relevance (and value) to the employee and the organization. Forrester calls this highly productive environment a "contextualized information workplace."
In a report titled "Context Is King In The New World Of Work," Forrester pointed out: "As enterprises better understand the interrelationship between roles, collaboration, content and business processes, the need to provide information within the context of an information worker's daily activities will drive the implementation of information workplaces. When Forrester surveyed 117 North American professionals about the information workplace (IW), 60% said that providing content within the context of the business process is extremely important. The respondents also wanted contextual collaboration, just-in-time e-learning and embedded learning. By moving to contextualized information workplaces, workers will receive information seamlessly, and they no longer have to mentally and manually integrate disparate tools into their work environments."1
Delivering control, visibility, consistency and speed, as well as providing the business context backbone for complementary applications, constitute today's BPM suites' value proposition.
Challenge for Traditional BPM
Despite their current value proposition, BPM suites are severely limited by a fundamental challenge: traditional, structured BPM accounts for only a small portion of all business processes (a.k.a. work) performed within an organization each day.