True Dynamic Process Management: Visibility and Control in the Day-to-Day Work Environment
In reality, most work is executed in an unstructured, dynamic environment of emails, meetings, phone calls and informal conversations. This is a world of noise, in which thousands of emails get lost in a black hole, with no way to prioritize, no visibility for executives and no accountability.
We can all relate to the influx of email we receive on a daily basis, and at times we feel buried by it. According to a report from the Harvard Business School, "While all knowledge workers surveyed used email, 26% felt it was overused in their organizations, 21% felt overwhelmed by it and 15% felt that it actually diminished their productivity."2
In this world of noise, senior management has no visibility into or control over ideas as they are proposed, to plans as they are formulated and to problems as they are solved. Executives gain visibility only after the work is finished and the documents, revenue figures, sales contracts and expenditures have made their way into packaged applications. The result is a reactive, non-agile enterprise that is not driven by the directives of its senior management and cannot improve based upon an understanding of what is or isn't working on a dynamic basis.
John Kiser, CEO of Gray Hat Research Corporation observes, "A substantial portion of any organization's time is spent documenting, rolling-up and communicating what various parts of the organization are doing. The shelf life of this information is ephemeral; it's invariably obsolete by the time it reaches the CEO. Individual attempts to span the information gap are enormously counterproductive. As CEO, I don't need hundreds or thousands of messages providing me interim status. I simply need to know whether accomplishment of an organizational mandate is on track or not—and if not, why and who to call."
The void between process-driven work and email clutter challenges the constraints of today's current BPM solutions and demands new tools, allowing knowledge workers to leverage the structure and automation of a business process management platform with the flexibility of email. This entails a far more comprehensive approach than simply spawning a "shadow" process from a structured process when circumstances necessitate, what some BPM suites vendors today consider dynamic process management.
Dynamic BPM: Transforming Noise into Information
To realize their full potential, BPM suites must transform the noise of unstructured work into organized, actionable information. Specifically, BPM suites of the future must enable the following:
- Management must be able to assign work and delegate tasks on the fly, while maintaining complete visibility over the entire process, rather than losing sight of execution as work is processed through a series of emails;
- Business process models should be built on the fly as actual work is executed, versus a team of consultants analyzing and documenting current processes over a period of months or years;
- Work items should be more optimally assigned in real-time to employees based on current skills, competencies and workload;
- Value-added documents, content objects, just-in-time learning courses and other task-specific materials should be served up to employees proactively as they do their jobs, rather than forcing employees to step away from their work to search through standalone systems for supporting, job-relevant materials;
- Dynamic processes should be archived and analyzed by intelligent algorithms to identify bottlenecks and recommend alternative scenarios;
- Employees should be held more accountable for executing day-to-day work assignments and their appraisals tied more closely to ongoing activities, rather than being assessed retroactively once a year via a manager's recollection of events long passed; and
- Senior executives should have real-time access to corporate performance as the aggregation of individual, team and project performance. They should also be alerted to negative trends and be equipped to take corrective action before problems affect the business, rather than seeing historical performance in the form of quarterly sales figures, customer satisfaction reports and financial statements.
Nowhere is the need for accurate, objective process information more critical than in emerging enterprises. Stephen Vowell, chief technology officer of Mesh Networks, observes: "Emerging businesses do not have the luxury of sophisticated, well-supported organizations which focus on process analysis. Real process—effective process—is created real-time, dynamically, not by a committee vote. I listen. I evaluate. I decide. I delegate. What I need isn't an esoteric set of modeling tools. I need tools that inform me better, that help me listen better, that help me make better decisions, and ultimately track the progress of my delegation, no matter who's involved, where they are or who they work for. That's how you manage my business processes. Anything less is complexity I can't afford."
Meeting the BPM Challenge
BPM is evolving and organizations around the globe are leveraging BPM suites to design, monitor and optimize processes enterprisewide. The traditional static nature of BPM, however, often presents a challenge for companies operating in today's dynamic business environment. Organizations regularly encounter time-sensitive, people-centric projects that are not addressed by structured business processes, yet still require the executive-level visibility, status monitoring and compliance capabilities of a traditional BPM suite.
The BPM practice of the future allows executives to quickly create ad-hoc, yet high-priority work assignments that in turn can be subdivided and forwarded in order to leverage the most knowledgeable human and system assets while continuously being monitored.
Although BPM suites are well positioned to deliver, they must evolve beyond simply enabling structured processes. They must also support the dynamic, unstructured work that drives today's businesses. It will be through this evolution—capturing and codifying information about dynamic work, and then serving as the business context backbone for complementary applications—that BPM suites will be successful in realizing their true potential.
HandySoft Global Corporation is a leading provider of business process management (BPM) solutions. The company is headquartered in Vienna, Virginia, with offices in Australia, Japan, Korea and London. To learn more about the company's solutions, BizFlow™ and OfficeEngine™, visit www.handysoft.com,
1 E. Driver, "Context Is King In The New World Of Work" (Forrester, March 2006)
2 T. Davenport, "Thinking for a Living" (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005).