Beyond BPM:
How to Bring Better Productivity to Knowledge Work
“The most important, and indeed the truly unique, contribution of management in the 20th century was the fifty-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker.” —Peter F. Drucker, Management Challenges for the 21st Century.
Business Process Management (BPM) is a powerful tool for automating and improving structured, repeatable processes. Tasks that benefit from BPM include manufacturing activities, of course, but also routine back office work, like billing. As the nature of 21st century work evolves, so must the technology solutions we turn to as we drive toward efficiency and productivity. As Drucker predicted, the workforce in developed economies is increasingly made up of knowledge workers – office administrators, social workers, customer service reps, doctors, lawyers, law enforcement, insurance brokers, scientists and so on. Providing these workers with tools that effectively increase productivity has proven more difficult than achieving manufacturing efficiencies. Knowledge workers require flexible, customized tools that take advantage of advanced technology and mobile devices.
Match the Tool to the Task
Enter knowledge worker apps and solutions that focus on managing and optimizing the unstructured processes inherent to work that is based largely on human interaction and complex decision making. This is building traction in the market as companies across disparate industries look to equip their knowledge workers with tools that drive case resolution. Workflows take many forms, most commonly incidents, investigations and service requests. Traditional BPM solutions are static and only deal with highly predictable processes, while today’s organizations need to manage structured, unstructured and unexpected workflows.
It is critical to understand not only the changing dynamics of the modern workforce, but also how the technologies and underlying processes have also changed. Research has shown that most employees are now doing 50 percent of their research on their own time, using their own tools, including personal mobile devices. While half of knowledge workers surveyed in 2013 said their company didn’t even have a BYOD policy in place, only 20 percent reported being totally satisfied with the IT tools they were provided. Clearly, the tools and procedures companies provide to employees are not enough. Many customer-facing processes today are broken, and it’s critical that companies now strike the right balance between knowledge worker apps and traditional BPM.
Knowledge workers require fast, reliable access to the specialized information and documents they use to complete tasks or provide service—and they often need to access it remotely. The convergence of mobile and cloud continues to drive knowledge management (KM) innovation in this direction. Working in the cloud has already become the norm for almost half of survey respondents; another 36 percent are eager for their companies to adopt cloud technologies. To stay competitive, companies need to deploy cloud-based technologies that allow hundreds (or thousands) of mobile devices to connect securely to the same infrastructure, including platforms that help knowledge workers organize tasks and workflow, manage documents and support productive collaboration. Bringing the tools provided into better alignment with the way knowledge workers actually do their jobs will have the synergistic effect of maximizing both the human intelligence potential of the worker and the productivity-boosting potential of the technology.
Customize Tools to the Type of Work
Knowledge work encompasses a mind-bending variety of industries and business interactions. Everything from patient care to police investigations to pipeline maintenance requires highly specialized skills, complex decision making and efficient cross-functional collaboration. The processes handled by these skilled knowledge workers are often unique to their industry and often unstructured and unexpected. BPM focuses on optimizing and automating cut-and-dry, repetitive tasks and increasing efficiency by reducing the number of human operators required. These traditional systems leave little room for compromise or flexibility, and operate on a narrow definition of efficiency. Obviously, this approach is out of sync with complex, mutable, human interaction-driven business operations.
Knowledge worker applications, deployed from a cloud-based platform, can be customized through the use of templates. Application components, such as workflow tracking, document management and claims processing, can be bundled together to suit your company’s specific needs. These solutions are event-driven, goal-driven, data-driven or comprised of a combination of these orientations. Cloud-based platforms make it easier to incorporate third-party applications and databases. Knowledge work applications often use cloud-based platforms (PaaS) to partner with other KM technology providers, building up libraries of full-featured and industry-specific solutions.
Solve for Complexity
In general, today’s business environment places higher demands on the modern knowledge worker. Consider that regulatory issues are more complex and compliance is more critical. As online and mobile services become more sophisticated and seamless, savvy customers develop expectations that are increasingly harder to meet. More and more companies have been adopting cloud case management methodologies and discovering new services they can offer their clients. These solutions for knowledge workers can help reduce expenses, meet new regulatory guidelines, improve operations and enhance internal and external customer service. These methods are specific to the industry at hand and are milestone-driven, mindful of regulatory and governance requirements, customer expectations and a number of other factors relevant to these industries and their challenges.
As the nature of knowledge work continues to grow more complex, our fundamental infrastructure must evolve. Today’s cloud-based knowledge work applications enable better information sharing and provide employees with the flexible tools they need to solve problems and be productive anywhere, anytime. Unfortunately, as business requirements grow in complexity, BPM often creates additional roadblocks and bottlenecks. Confusion can arise from the mismatch between an approach originally intended to minimize human involvement and the highly interactive, human-powered work that underpins our modern service economy.