Who Thinks About BPM? Not Me. Do You?

What’s the best practice, then, to develop this high level of domain expertise among an IT group that—until recently—was mainly concerned with hubs, switches and servers? “It’s total immersion,” she said. “Once assigned to support a part of the business, they JOIN that part of the business. They physically sit in that group, talk in the hallway, field the requests from that group across multiple projects. Inevitably, these projects cross one another in other departments; there are points of interaction between systems that are needed. And so the individual gradually forms a deeper understanding of their part of the business.”

I changed gears a little here, and tried to steer our conversation toward the marketplace. Is there a vertical industry where strategic cross-pollination is more common? “There are four main industries that constitute the sweet spot for us: public sector; healthcare; energy, oil and gas; and the broader financial services. These are the areas doing a lot of innovative things. For instance, the number of healthcare insurance companies automating their processes is astounding. It seems like there’s a new Blue Cross/Blue Shield doing a process automation plan every month! I had no idea how many Blue Crosses there were! We just won Blue Cross/Blue Shield! Great. Oh, we just won another Blue Cross/Blue Shield again!”

It sounded to me as though a viral effect is at work. “Absolutely,” agreed Karin. “There’s a huge effect from seeing one’s peers achieve such substantial results. Everyone wants in on it! In the Blue Cross example, they are making such dramatic productivity improvements that the neighbors can’t help but see that, and want to do the same.

“We’re also seeing it in state-run social services programs,” Karin continued. “Public demand for greater efficiency from the government is at its peak. That’s because the expectation is so much higher; they see it every day from private companies, so they’ve come to expect it from their government agencies. I now expect that I can go into the DMV, and they can look up my record and know that I am a citizen of the state of California. They shouldn’t have to send a letter to the next town over to verify that.”

The Breadth and Depth of BPM
If it were 1998, I’d have to ask: Isn’t BPM just a fancy word for workflow? No way, insisted Karin. “Workflow is a baseline technology. It’s document-oriented. It’s about moving a document from point A to point B, rather than a full process. It controls how you take a document from draft to final, to approval. It’s more focused on the document than the overall business process,” she explained, more patiently than I deserved.

“Business process management has a deep-enough toolset that you can run the operation of the business. It controls multiple processes, multiple workflows, multiple documents… all being orchestrated at once,” Karin described. It’s a kind of beautiful image, I think.

“A complex operation, like a loan origination, has multiple aspects that BPM can control. Workflow alone wouldn’t be sufficient to meet those needs. You need to map between objects; you need more tracking; you want more insight into the process itself so you can bring in more variables that might improve the process flow. You need to have these reported out in dashboards that measure performance indicators. With BPM, there’s a breadth of functionality and an expectation of scale that comes with BPM that workflow just doesn’t support. The scope of the functionality, the scale of the process and the addition of the reporting and modeling puts BPM in a league all by itself that can’t be described with a term like ‘workflow,’”she concluded.

Wow, Karin is passionate about this stuff. And I understand. The way I often put it is: BPM is a verb; workflow is a noun. “I certainly agree that BPM is an ongoing process,’ said  Karin. “You don’t take it out of a package, plug it in, turn it on and walk out the door. The other big differentiator between BPM and workflow is the level of intelligence in the system. There are sophisticated business rules that can look into the processes, and kick off the next stage in the process, by itself.”

But does this mean that BPM is some sort of artificial intelligence, and that the human element is thus diminished? “Certainly not, and that is increasingly important to what we call ‘case management.’ The differentiator for case management versus BPM is precisely the human judgment that chooses process flows, rather than just a rules engine. Cases such as loan origination, medical records and certain examples of exception handling cannot be predefined from start to finish. Our goal is to automate what we can with BPM tools, but deliver all the information a person needs to make the decision as smoothly, quickly and accurately as possible. It’s really about empowering the people who participate in the business process to be as efficient and as smart as they can be.”

So now it’s time for YOU, dear reader, to be as smart as you can be. Read the articles in the following pages with one eye on the page, and the other on the horizon. It’s not so much what you know, but want you learn that counts.