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- Money Making Drivers for BPM Part 2
By Jim Sinur | May 6, 2008
In my first blog entry on drivers for BPM, I identified drivers around current process understanding, creating new processes, and process activity around mergers and acquisitions. In this blog entry, I will explore process outsourcing, package implementations, and process standardization.
Get Someone Else to Do the Dull Stuff with Business Process Outsourcing
Business process outsourcing (BPO) activities require enterprises to document their current processes, so they can ensure that the BPO provider will handle their processes properly. The process models will also be crucial in identifying opportunities for crafting service-level agreements (SLAs).
The side benefit to the BPO provider will be having a process road map for accurate servicing of the business process. Everybody wins with an accurate process model done at the appropriate level of detail. If the BPO provider identifies an industry best practice, a process model will be a strong way to communicate the effect on constituency relationships.
No enterprise wants to lose clients because of a bad process fit. This way everybody understands the process and/or has an opportunity to question this explicit process and the governing rules.
Another opportunity revolves around how some BPM players leverage explicit processes and rules. Most organizations outsource commodity processes that do not differentiate them. The implications here are that organizations do not want their unique and profit producing processes and rules available for others to copy and/or leverage with competitors of any kind.
If the originating organization controls the flows and rules so that they are invisible, even the operation of differentiating processes can be run in an outsource mode. I have seen a few organizations take this next step.
Implement Packages Better
There are many examples of the effects of failing to understand the implied business processes contained in the package and the effects of taking those implied processes directly into an organization without understanding their long-term impact on the organization, the constituencies and the employees.
Although a “force fit” may work, the amount of pain and cost is sometimes so high that it takes years for an organization to regain momentum. Understanding the potential “pain points” and corresponding customization necessary to implement packages is a natural application of process modeling. An increasing number of organizations are attempting this process match activity with great success.
There is emerging availability of vertical and horizontal process templates. Patterns and frameworks are becoming available as package alternatives, and they are best evaluated through BPM (which are quicker, less expensive and more standardized than packages). I have found that larger organizations are attracted to these kinds of process templates and patterns because they have many habits that can be molded into a process that is 70% defined and be quite happy filling in the rest of the details.
Even if the packaged alternative is chosen over the BPM-based templates, process patterns and reusable process frameworks, BPM can help surround the standard package system transactions to allow for the customization and extension of standard package function. This surround strategy will allow for the processes to ideally customize applications around organizations and individuals.
This is a definite “win - win” combination that even the package vendors see as an opportunity. The problem with their offerings is that they are likely to be early versions of BPM; not the new forms of BPM (sometimes called BPM 2.0 or Human Interaction Management - HIM).
Get Control of Proliferating Processes by Consolidating to Core Processes
Enterprises often create separate, but similar, business processes to enter new markets for anticipated revenue lifts. This usually includes copying a process at a point in time and enabling the copied process to evolve into something that has a life of its own. Although this lifts the careers of the revenue gleaners who cloned the process, the total cost of ownership (TCO) tends to eat away at overall profitability. It’s hard to reconcile these processes/system variants without some business process representation to help normalize them back into a core process with local variations for product type or region.
Many organizations are trying to standardize on core processes with variations added for local customization. These unique customizations are easier to manage than multiple copies of the core processes that have to be maintained in a duplicity fashion. This is a much more economical way of dealing with customizations for unique countries, legal frameworks and/or constituents.
Bottom Line:
Good business leaders understand that process disciplines can be applied in many directions. The above money makers also leverage the individuality of processes, organizations and constituents.
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Money Making Drivers for BPM Part 1
By Jim Sinur | April 29, 2008
There is a trend toward more emphasis on process activity; even process excellence these days. It’s because business leaders know that there is money to be made in BPM. Because processes are in the critical path of progressive business change, business processes are coming under intense scrutiny.
The need for process understanding and automation will create significant business process management activity. I take heart in the success of recent BPM projects. The numbers that are emerging from BPM projects are more than encouraging, but it will take true justification efforts to spring the cash to invest in BPM up front (See Justifying BPM blog posting).
Here are some things that are driving business process activities today and where it is proven that money can be made.
Determining if Your Processes are Right or Wrong Through Current Process Understanding:
Traditionally, business people will continue to do their work the same way unless they run up against some operational problem and/or exception. Although it’s not common knowledge, most enterprises don’t really understand the depth and breadth of their business processes, if they haven’t had a recent business processing discovery effort.
In fact, there are a lot of shadow processes that are not seen nor understood. This isn’t intentional; however, processes that were designed years ago have been adapted for volume changes, exceptions, managerial regime changes and additional regional activities. Processes tend to become costly and burdensome as a result of process entropy (what non-engineering types call “decay”).
During down economic times, the studying of processes shows opportunities for cost savings that enterprises thirst for during tough times. I believe that this is an ongoing opportunity, but enterprises tend to forget this when new opportunities burgeon in an up economy.
Build Better Processes Faster for Fun and Profit:
During the mid-1990s, business process “gurus” asserted that enterprises needed to break their established processes and start over. They believed that creating new processes was the primary reason to perform modeling exercises.
Although these gurus, who were active during the business process reengineering (BPR) era, almost killed business modeling as viable activity, designing new business models is still a major activity. This is especially true for new products and services. During up economic cycles, this is a common way of understanding and simulating the kinds of processes that need to be put into place to support progressive new offerings.
There are numerous areas of opportunity that are available to the business leaders. The first place to look is manual activities that are ripe for improvement. These activities could include collaborative knowledge work where best practices emerge or just for standardization for more consistent results. One does not have to look far to find process opportunities, but I would recommend going after a “hot button” area where you could solve a significant point of pain for an organization.
If you do not view yourself as a risk taker, then there are tons of small manual processes that are available for discovery and some form of automation.
Leverage Processes in Mergers and Acquisitions:
Mergers and acquisitions are common during all economic cycles and are great opportunities to normalize and standardize processes across combined organizational entities immediately or in the future. Some dominant acquirers insist on using proven business processes; however, modeling the acquired entity’s processes will be crucial in building a transition plan.
Other acquirers look to pick the best-of-breed business processes, and comparing business models is a proven technique for success. Some acquiring enterprises exhibit different behaviors on a case-by-case basis, but understanding the explicit or implied processes goes a long way in M&A activities. BPM-driven SOA can play an important role here in the resulting processes by publishing a SOA interface into legacy applications and processes.
Bottom Line:
Good business leaders understand that it is wise to invest during down times, so that when they get busy again, they will not have the opportunity to focus resources anywhere, but supporting the business operationally. BPM is as good as any investment that I have seen to invest in going forward.
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Justifying BPM Efforts
By Jim Sinur | April 23, 2008
It’s not easy to justify any kind of capital budget item, especially in light of some of the recent economic challenges. However, BPM is rich with opportunity and documenting benefits is easier than anything else I have had to justify in my career.
It is not my intention to provide you with a formula, but to list opportunities that you can turn into a business case. In fact, the kind of benefits might change depending on your driver(s). If you are trying to do more with less, hard benefits will appeal. If you are looking for better client retention, the softer benefits will appeal.
Hard Benefits:
Benefits in this category are easier to convert into real economic numbers. Time and cost savings can be calculated without a lot of effort unless you want real time and motion studies.
With a little imagination, one can calculate the probability and frequency of a compliance event linked with probable costs. Once this is calculated, one can take a fraction of the financial impact and make the case for BPM. This category can even put a smile on the face of your dower accounting types.
- Cost Savings
- Reduced Elapsed Time
- Resource Optimization
- Automation of Human Tasks
- Manage End to End Processes
- Fewer Errors
- Ensure Compliance
- Smart Processes
- Goal Driven Processes
- Adjudicate Conflicting Goals
- Business Scenario Driven Processes
- Business Dynamics Guided
- Leveraged Labor Pools
Soft Benefits:
This is the mushy side of your justification effort. Equating this list of benefits to hard costs requires a special person. What is the value of a reputation? What is shared knowledge worth?
It takes a visionary business professional to convince top management of the economic value of any item on this list. Most folks will come up with enough on the hard benefits side and add these benefits for flavor to add some spice to your business case. Feel free to leverage these going forward.
- Higher Customer Satisfaction
- Visible Processes
- Shared Knowledge
- Identify Overlapping Processes
- Higher Employee Satisfaction
- Rule Driven
- Constituent Differentiation
- Departmental Harmony
- Lower Risk of Lawsuits
- Real Time Agile Business Behavior
- Policy Driven
- Competitive Advantage
- Process Focused Culture
- Company Image
Rule of Thumb for BPM Budgets:
Any justification requires the cost side of the equation, so I would like to provide some guidance for you. I promised that I was not going to provide you with any kind of formula, but I think I might be able to get closer to something that seems to fit logic on the cost side.
Start with the cost of the software (hopefully you have not sliced this cost to a ridiculously low level to invalidate this approach). Take this amount and multiply it by a factor of 2 for simple efforts and up to 4 for large scoped processes (for pilots this can be lower). This will give you the outside services costs. Double this amount for the amount of internal labor you are likely to expend.
Fortunately there is no cash flow with internal resources beyond the sunk costs you are already absorbing with salaries and benefits. You can adjust this up or down depending on complexity factors, such as difficult people to work with and technology pioneering. This is where your judgment comes into play.
Bottom Line:
Justifying BPM efforts is an art; not a science, but there are many opportunities on the benefit side of your home grown equation. Hopefully I have given you some fodder for your justification efforts. Additional reading for you is available in a few of my previous blog postings (Process is Free) & (BPM Yields Steady Returns in Good times and Bad).
Topics: BPM | 3 Comments »
What is the Difference between PPM and BPM?
By Jim Sinur | April 18, 2008
PPM stands for program and portfolio management, but that alone is not clear enough. It’s much clearer to say that PPM is about managing projects and aggregations of projects generally leveraging a project management office (PMO). Basically PPM is all about projects, but more mature organizations extend beyond IT to business projects and manage application and project portfolios as well.
There is confusion because projects leverage processes in creating project deliverables, thus attaining project milestones. Some would go so far as to say that a project is a process. Others would still consider a process an asset that would fit in a portfolio that could be managed like projects. After all, don’t processes have dashboards similar to those found in a mature PMO?
Some say that the process center of excellence (PCE) views that process portfolio management is much different than project management, because projects are temporary and processes are institutional for supporting business on an ongoing basis. Still others would say that the management techniques for processes are very different than those for projects. BPM is all about business processes.
The PPM View: There is Process in my Projects
PPM practitioners believe that project management is a discipline aimed at meeting deadlines and budgets allocated to project efforts, and that it is performed more consistently in IT than in the business; but a few project managers see the applicability of BPM to projects. It is clear to them that PM is crucial to BPM efforts.
Processes can really help PPM in recognizing best practices in creating deliverables and making these best practices a repeatable process that is leveraged in many future projects that need to create the same deliverable.
In fact, there are a number of BPM-minded folks that believe a project can be imported into a BPM engine an executed like any other process.
The BPM View: Project Management is Just another Business Process
Some BPM folks would view project management as just another enterprise process that can be managed and tracked like other business outcomes, but business processes are more predictable and repeatable, whereas projects are more flexible by nature. There is, however, a stream of best practice processes that can be leveraged in producing project deliverables.
Project management can help BPM during the process building phase by leveraging scaled down project methods that are iterative in nature. These methods are likely to include the following:
- Common terminology for projects
- Project charter template
- Schedule template
- Formal client feedback procedure
- Defined project meeting formats
- Scope statement templates
Project management stops once the process is built and another set of improvement techniques take hold. I like to use the analogy of the manufacturing line. PM can be used to build the manufacturing line, yet managing the running manufacturing line is not a project, but an ongoing effort. BPM provides for process measurement and improvement for correct and consistent products done in a timely fashion for the cheapest cost while leveraging resource utilization like a manufacturing line.
Bottom Line:
Both projects and processes need governance, and though there is common ground around building processes with great project management and running a good project with repeatable processes that are best practice towards accomplishing deliverables, the deliverables and skills are quite different. In the future, I expect that processes will become more nimble as they learn to leverage process snippets dynamically to support knowledge workers, but most busines processes are quite repeatable today. As this evolves, the commonality between BPM & PPM will grow, but PPM is about projects and BPM is about processes.
Topics: BPM | 4 Comments »
Is BPM a True COTS Tool?
By Jim Sinur | April 9, 2008
Wikipedia defines COTS as follows:
Commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) is a term for software or hardware, generally technology or computer products, that are ready-made and available for sale, lease, or license to the general public. They are often used as alternatives to in-house developments or one-off government-funded developments.
The use of COTS is being mandated across many government and business programs, as they may offer significant savings in procurement and maintenance. However, since COTS software specifications are written by external sources, government agencies are sometimes wary of these products because they fear that future changes to the product will not be under their control.
The motivation for using COTS components is that they will reduce overall system development costs and involve less development time because the components can be bought instead of being developed from scratch.
COTS
BPM clearly falls into the COTS category from a number of perspectives. First of all, it is software that is ready made and can be instantly used to create working processes. What makes BPM unique is that there is a low barrier to entry in that it has a pretty low learning curve for IT professionals, and in most cases business analysts can make headway pretty quickly.
Secondly, BPM is engineered to be agile. One can create a process application that can change in near real time, assuming a fast change control path is provided administratively. Thirdly, BPM can dynamically orchestrate pre-built templates and services leveraging service oriented architecture. (See blog article Can BPM Based Templates Compete with COTS Applications? )
Process templates are jump-start processes that can deliver a core best practice for a particular business focus. An example for local government would be the onsite management of building permits or building inspections. An example for all government levels would be the management of constituent correspondence and/or the management of delegated tasks.
SOA provides for the assembly and leverage of reusable portions of code, composite flows and sequential process patterns in a COTS tool in order to leverage off the shelf portions of a process (a process snippet) and/or application components. An example for local government would be a reusable code portion for determining if a vehicle license is truly paid and up to date. All government levels could use an identity authorization service assuming interconnected state systems and/or a national identity card and/or an iris scan authorization.
Bottom Line:
BPM technology is readily available to buy, templates are emerging and services are becoming more commercially available from a number of sources. Software as a service promises to deliver even more availability. BPM has many dimensions of COTS behavior that go above and beyond the simple definition of ready made software for purchase, but it is certainly COTS at heart.
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BPM and Workflow: Viva Le Difference?
By Jim Sinur | April 3, 2008
Many folks that I have talked to in the past think that there is no difference between workflow and BPM. I would like to examine the arguments around this statement. It’s not quite so simple to say they are the same because of the scope of BPM versus workflow, and it’s hard for folks with a workflow history to see the difference.
The Workflow View:
The workflow view says that work does flow in a process, so BPM is obviously workflow. It might be a bit fancier in the technologies that surround and enable process activity, but BPM is truly workflow. Workflow, as a technology, handled the work that was passed from one human to another.
Early instantiations of workflow were software implementations of passing multi-part carbon-paper-laced forms around, (designed before copiers, carbon paper was fused between multi-colored paper copies to duplicate through pencil/pen pressure on the top form), except these forms are now digitized. We have come far and are saving trees now, so content-based workflow is viewed to be the grand-daddy of BPM.
The Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) is active in BPM, so BPM must be purely and simply “workflow on steroids”. I even used this analogy to avoid the arguments with workflow types.
The BPM View:
I think to say that workflow and BPM are one in the same is a bit outlandish, myself. Yes, work does flow inside of BPM technologies most of the time. It’s not true that work flows when sharing and collaborating within a case folder for knowledge workers because there is no flow. Each worker does their thing on a shared set of information that may or may not have activities completed on them. I think there are two other fundamental differences.
First, BPM is more than work flowing; it’s a practice and a discipline. BPM is a management practice that treats processes as a corporate asset in order to attain the goal of improving business agility and operational performance while staying compliant. Also, BPM is a discipline that employs methods, rules, metrics, practices and software tools to manage and continuously optimize an organization’s activities and processes in light of management strategies, decisions, policies, goals and tactics.
Secondly, BPM is agile, real time, can include deep system activities, and is visible. Workflow does not employ rules and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which are essential for running agile activities. In the pursuit of constant optimization (saving as much time and money as possible under a set of changing conditions), BPM employs real time, complex events that can be initiated outside the scope of the process and allows for management to visibly see the effects of work completion and outside activities’ effect on the results.
Bottom Line:
Like it or not, there is an implicit link between workflow and BPM; but BPM is so much more than just “work flowing” AKA workflow. The discipline is going to a level of sophistication that business professionals demand and the technology is much more than workflow. These concepts are connected in the same family as process activity, but workflow is like the “horseless carriage”. BPM is the high performance vehicle for a number of needs.
Topics: BPM | 1 Comment »
What’s the Big Deal about Agility in BPM?
By Jim Sinur | March 26, 2008
One of the biggest differentiators between workflow and BPM, besides real-time visibility through activity monitoring, is agility. Agility is defined as the ability to think and draw conclusions quickly to exercise nimble movements easily.
This could be in response to real-time monitoring and/or policy changes needed by management and/or behavior changes required by clients. BPMS technologies are instrumented to be agile; therefore allowing for rapid response to business conditions.
BPM Agility Comes in Several Flavors: (Aiming at Agility)
BPM has features that allow it to exercise agility. First of all, BPM allows for agility in the process development phase in that it can leverage SOA. BPMS capabilities have the ability to search directories for reusable process snippets and/or business/technology services.
Secondly, BPMS platforms have the ability to externalize rules, generally in business rules engines, to allow for dynamic changes in the execution of processes. An example would be to change the limits on the size of a loan that would require extra underwriting steps in light of the tightening credit market and better risk underwriting practices.
Thirdly, the sequence of flow can be dynamically determined and late bound. This could be the dynamic creation of a composite flow by combining unrelated existing process snippets and/or services based on the needs of the knowledge worker directing the processes or intelligent controlling heuristics.
Policies/Rules are Central: (Applying the Forgotten Ingredient)
Rules have a significant impact on the agility of a process and permeate many aspects of a business-change-friendly process. The ways rules can have an effect on process include the following:
- Process Flow Control
- Variable Tolerance Levels
- Goal Representations and Constraints
- Recognition of Relevant Events
- Recognition of Complex Events
- Recognition of Optimization Opportunities
- Guidance for Optimization Outcomes for Processes, People
- Complex Decision Assists
- Recognition of Emerging Business Scenarios
- Suggestion for Policy Changes
- Service Orchestration Order
- Service Logic
- Composite Application Flow
- Legacy Application Control & Leverage
- New Scenario, Policy and Rule Rollout
Exploiting the Strength of Explicit Processes: (Ascending to Proactive Management)
There are two ways to exploit the strength of explicit processes, rules and services (refer to figure 1). One is in a reactive way where the need for changes are recognized, evaluated, implemented quickly, and can be handled as they occur. The implication here is that knowledgeable process managers can anticipate the impact of change and not cause cascading effects.
Figure 1:
For organizations and/or process managers that are proactive by nature, there are techniques for anticipating conditions and scenarios. By linking policies and rules to likely scenarios, managers can have predetermined courses of adjustment waiting in the wings for the right set of conditions. Sophisticated organizations might want to create scenarios around strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOTS). Keep in mind that these methods may work slightly different for each type of process pattern (see Prevalent Process Patterns Enable BPM Benefits Differently).
Bottom Line Process: Leveraging Agility for Advantage
If your processes are quite fixed and oriented to straight through processing, you may not need the agility afforded by BPM suites. Even the most stable of companies seem to be affected by the swings of a world market and the resulting economies, so I think these kinds of situations will become rare over time.
If you suspect that change is headed your way, the agility afforded in today’s BPM suites will become a welcome friend. Be prepared to declare your management style for agility, but it will likely include both reactive and proactive methods over time. This will usher in a period of enterprise decision management that will help guide process behavior.
Topics: BPM | 1 Comment »
Content is Cool
By Jim Sinur | March 18, 2008
Co-authored by Tom Donnelly and Jim Sinur.
Many people think that content is just a fact of life that needs to be captured, stored and managed. This is not that cool, but some organizations are proving this wrong. To that end, we challenged ourselves to find some cool content enabled process applications.
Cool Today:
Come over and see my pad
Have you ever gone to a county office to look up information on a complex document only to find the county options to view this information are somewhat limited? In a county office in the western U.S. they have solved this problem by providing the public with a 42-inch flat-screen monitor to retrieve and view blue prints and other engineering drawings.
This allows a customer to zoom and pan large images, eliminating the need for the traditional magnifying glass. When they have identified the information they need, they can either request a print of the zoomed section(s), or the entire document. Thus making it easier for the customer to not only find, but add that information to the report or contract they are researching.
What makes this solution even more valuable to the county’s customers is the window-in-window functionality. Zooming is great, but the issue with zooming is that the user often loses perspective of the entire document in the process. They find the information they need, but do not know how to get to the next item on the image they want to view? The conservative users among us have become familiar with the process of zooming in to what you want, followed by zoom out to find out where to go next.
While the more adventurous users get lost while panning into the unknown of a zoomed document, relying on bumping into familiar features to at least identify you are going in the right direction. These county customers have overcome this technical issue inherent to traditional zoom technology with the addition of the zoom pad and a navigator function.
The zoom pad allows an adjustable and movable window that lies on top of the full image. As the user moves a magnifying glass icon across the image, the zoom window displays the information under the icon. This simulation of the traditional magnifying glass function allows the customer to zoom to multiple points of information on a complex document without loosing perspective of the entre document.
The zoom pad might be easy to relate to, but the more popular function is the navigator. The navigator also has a resizable and moveable window-in-window, but in this function, the full image is in the smaller window. As the user increases the zoom, a shaded area is reduced in the smaller document to highlight the section currently be viewed in the main window.
This not only allows the user to keep perspective of where they are in relationship to the entire document, but also allows the relocation of the zoom to occur by moving the shaded area across the full document view. This definable pan cursor allows a customer to easily change the focus from a mail box in the front of the house to a gazebo in the back yard with absolute ease and speed – and without the headaches.
Overall this function reduces the time of searches and views and allows customer to eliminate unwanted prints.
Avoiding the stick in the mud:
Who hasn’t gone into a county office to find the specifications of your property? Later, you walk around the yard with a tape measure and a print out checking to make sure that you didn’t expand your garden into your neighbors yard or if that sickly-looking tree is your problem or your neighbors.
In a county in the western U.S., the public can now perform this task in one simple step by retrieving land plot specifications using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) images that can be overlaid and later removed. Now these citizens can not only see their plot dimensions, but often see the feature of their concern. That old sick tree is sure to be displayed with the property line showing who is responsible for dealing with it.
While your garden expansion might not show up right away, it will eventually show up on a future image. What is important to private land owners and contractors with this feature is the quick addition of updated landmarks and features that allow more detail plans to be drawn.
Many a contractor has run a foul by a tree or addition that didn’t show up on the original plot.
The celluloid hero exists:
It is a word we don’t like to say anymore: microfilm. But realize that it has been around far longer than digital imaging and is arguably still considered a better long term archive media. Customer will often not admit to it, but if you are a company with an extended history, most likely you still have documents stored on microfilm. But why are they still there?
Isn’t it a digital world? Often the reason is that the last item a company wants to spend money on is the conversion of historical documents. And why should they? After all, maybe only 10% or 5% or even 2% of these documents may ever need to be retrieved. So we leave it in the backroom, reluctantly performing retrieval for documents that are still active.
In an insurance company in the mid-west, a system exists that allows them to find and convert active folders to digital images - thus finding the needle in the haystack. How? By letting the customer find them. As customer service and underwriting departments request documents from their digital content system, request for microfilm documents are sent to a microfilm retrieval system.
In this system, every request for a single document will propagate a request for the entire customer’s folder. This request produces a media hit list that allows the operator to efficiently insert roll after roll of microfilm while the software drives the analog device to produces digital images. What is returned is the customer’s original request along with the rest of the customer folder, which is automatically indexed into the digital system. Follow-up requests are easily managed since the rest of the folder is already available as digital content.
The end result – A cost effective method to put active documents online while minimizing the cost of conversion.
Cooler Tomorrow:
Rules-driven BPM and content used in concert promise to create some new forms of efficiency. Consider the insurance company that took variable terms and conditions, guided by core policies and constraints, to dynamically create policy contracts that eliminated getting the legal department in the critical path except in rare cases that only required a quick review by a paralegal to insure compliance with the policies.
Bottom Line:
This is just the beginning of leveraging content in cool contexts. BPM 2.0 is going to accelerate the use of content and micro content in new ways to support knowledge-heavy processes. We believe the spotlight will shine on those processes that learn to leverage content in cool and effective ways.
Topics: BPM | 2 Comments »
The AIIM Conference in Boston
By Jim Sinur | March 7, 2008
I attended the AIIM Conference earlier this week and walked away thinking that it was a conference of extremes. It was certainly large in scope and had plenty for all, but seemed to have a vendor driven “take-it-or-leave-it” attitude.
Just like companies that provide standard transactions and expect customers to “just deal” with them, AIIM pretty much drives attendees in ways that seem designed to benefit AIIM. Consequently, it was not attendee friendly by any means. The best way to describe it was you could have any color black “Model T Ford” you wanted.
It was certainly a bi-polar experience for me as some of the presentations were stellar and some of them just plain stunk. There was no consistency in the quality of the material and there was no opportunity to rate any of the sessions while you had the buzz or dull-turning knife sensations.
The BPM track had great marketing material, but the actual sessions were weak despite AIIM’s own survey showing that BPM was the biggest thing on their client’s radar screens. It’s like AIIM is giving BPM lip service. Despite the four dichotomies I will describe here, I did dig out some good material, though it was not easy. It makes me appreciate how good Gartner and others are at running their conferences.
The Dichotomy of AIIM and On-Demand:
There was the paradox of a green AIIM and a resource hungry On Demand.
AIIM was about capturing, storing and managing content in a very “green” fashion. There were deep details about the challenge of capture for multiple formats in multiple locations leveraging multiple technologies. There was a pride in capturing, indexing and transforming all types on content from both the vendors and the case studies. There was a strong green angle while saving time and money, so no wonder companies are keen to get this rolling. There was a little too much emphasis on justifying the need for electronic content on the basis that some compliance lawyer might have to work harder without automated content. There are certainly other better reasons.
On Demand is about paper-eating machines that can spew reams of papyrus faster than we can cut down trees, I kept thinking these machines were the culprits responsible for filling my snail mailbox full of undesirable junk mail. I imagined a new XBOX or a WII game that would allow me to blow these beasts up, thus giving me a score in trees saved and mail boxes emptied. Seriously, there were a number of “eye popping” machines that could print, sort, fold, stuff and auto-stack material for the mail. The quality of the print was astounding and I was slack-jawed several times watching these engineering wonders. I felt guilty in delighting in these wonders because my boss wanted me to gather potential partner candidates.
The Dichotomy of Commodity and Cool:
There was also a strong scent of consolidation and commodization in the air. I even overheard several of the mid sized vendors lamenting about the evolving consolidation when they thought nobody was listening to them. After all, how many vendors do you need to capture, store and manage content? I understand it’s not that simple, but the power vendors are swiftly moving on this large target.
In the same breadth there was excitement around content analytics, rule-driven micro content, web content, content taxonomies, social networks and other Web 2.0 influences. There also was the intrigue of someday having Google taking over everything (really?). Here I thought Chindia was going to dominate. Peter Fingar, please say “it aint so”
The Dichotomy of Simple and Confusing:
The most ironic thing for me was that the opening keynotes were about how simplicity, friendliness and ease-of-use were factors used to sort out the winners of the world. The opening sessions were compelling and entertaining. I really believe simplicity wins, but AIIM was the least compliant to this principal in it’s dealing with the attendees.
There was no map of the multi-level and complex facility; only a vendor floor layout. The registration process made each of the attendees stand in three lines. There was one line to scan your pre-registration form; another line to pick up a near empty bag plus your badge and one to get the conference guide (One inch thick with no pocket guide). AIIM does not understand BPM or elegantly simple/efficient processes.
The biggest farce was that the content masters hid the content from the attendees. There was no presentation CD or instructions on how to get the presentations online. The confusing web site did not offer the presentations in any overt way, so I called AIIM’s “helpless desk” and was summarily dumped into a voicemail system. I tried calling the outsourced registration folks as well. I still have not heard back. I guess $1500 dollars was not good enough to have simple and clear access to the content (the presentations). If I had a “fools of process” or “how to steal from and kick your victim simultaneously” award, AIIM would win it.
The Dichotomy of Breadth and Depth:
There was such a breadth of offerings that it would be hard not to find what you wanted, but the depth of most of the presentations were lacking. You could not drown in the deep end of any presentation I saw or anything on the website. I did like the ECM survey because it had useful information and it was easy to find and download. It was also rich in useful information for both vendors and clients alike.
Bottom Line:
It is clear that AIIM will have to morph and change to stay thriving, but I did dig out what I needed, though it was not easy. Content and clients are too important to have the AIIM conference be just a clumsy, vendor frenzy. Perhaps after the consolidation, AIIM can focus on quality content and a quality experience.
Topics: BPM | 2 Comments »
Prevalent Process Patterns Enable BPM Benefits Differently
By Jim Sinur | March 4, 2008
I believe there are three common patterns of workflow that thrive under the banner of BPM. Each of these patterns deliver productivity in different ways, consequently the methodologies, tools and techniques differ around these patterns.
While these patterns may be used in combination with each other in trying to enable a certain type of business process, they can easily be identified and managed uniquely. The process professional that understands these are handled differently will likely seek and attain results faster than those who don’t understand the differences.
I have seen each of these in their pure forms and have had the challenge of enabling and transforming them to something better. I will be referring to Figure 1 throughout through this posting.
Figure 1: 
Straight-Through Processes: (Program Controlled):
This workflow pattern has been highly sought out and highly enabled by hand crafted and/or purchased applications. Through the linking of transactions, sub-applications, services, composite applications and application integrations via BPM technologies, significant economies can be gained by leveraging automation. These straight-through processes have all the rules baked into them and do not require humans to guide them in any way except to change the embedded rules when and where necessary.
This assumes that they perform flawlessly and do not hang up in any way. Examples of this kind of process would be “jet underwriting” and “automatic claim processing”. I view this as the robotics of the white collar manufacturing line where the business process is accomplished in fractions of a second and the rules are automated. Refer to the bottom band on Figure 1.
The problem with this approach is if the exceptions swamp the automatic process, then process workers are generally introduced. These processes are fairly inexpensive to run, so there is an economic benefit to automating these processes. This is the domain of the power vendors and your IT folks.
Process Worker Processes: (Process Worker Enabled):
This workflow pattern organizes human capital and flow of work that requires knowledge, cases, content and skills. While this pattern may leverage application transactions and composite applications, the work surrounding these kinds of processes involves the human touch. Quite often the work is passed from one job specialty to another and polices, constraints and rules are partially enforced by humans (see the middle band on Figure 1).
If the control is application based, then humans perform “heads-down” activities in order to feed an application transaction need and generallyachieve completion in minutes (sometimes less where highly specialized exceptions are involved). An example of this kind of process would be a customer service center where address changes would be preformed. The customer service representative would select an address change from a menu of capabilities, complete this process and potentially go on to another short and sharp online process. These are relatively inexpensive processes, but certainly not straight through processes.
The prevalent use is around cases, and the work is not considered complete until certain unknowns have been resolved. These kinds of processes can remain “open” until certain completed activities occur. While these can be completed in minutes, they can remain unresolved for months, requiring definite goals for completion. An example would be a life underwriting process where a doctor’s exam has to be completed before the policy can be issued because of the age of the insured and the size of the policy.
The policy will not be issued as a contract until the results of the exam are known and interpreted. Quite often you will see content/image processing accompanying the case folder needed to organize the legal audit trail of activities and their results. Often you will see forms of patterned correspondence automatically generated out of these processes and they are likely to be involved with a value chain of sorts.
Knowledge Worker Processes: (Professional Knowledge Worker Guided)
At the top of the process food chain are processes that require a high level of skill that might not be available in one person. Condequently, it may require the collaboration of multiple people that may or may not be employees of your organization. These kinds of processes are resolved in hours at best and sometimes can go unresolved for longer periods of time (see the top band on figure 1).
These processes are indeterminate by nature in that they may be undefined in terms of goals and outcomes. Quite often the activity starts as a “one off” situation, yet after months of experience ends up as a set of best practices that can be baked into the process worker level. An example of this kind of a process might be to determine if a potential insured condition of “double vision” is a deal stopper or maybe something that an insurance company might charge more for over the life of an insurance policy.
This might require consultations with paramedics, advanced underwriters, doctors and “double vision” experts outside the company. These indeterminate processes might involve voting and leveraging process snippets once the decision is made. These are very expensive processes that BPM can help manage and potentially discover patterns of completion that can be made into knowledge maps and process snippets. These processes are new and evolving along with Web 2.0, knowledge sources and collaboration across value chains. This is the frontier of BPM today where the policies and rules are being defined on the fly.
Bottom Line: Knowing the Nature of Work Determines the Process Pattern
The reason that BPM is moving out of the IT domain and more into the business domain revolves around the nature of the process, new levels of human interaction, the required need for speed, the required need for cost and the level of repeatability.
As the rules around a process move to a more solid state, the movement towards more repeatable processes is sure to continue for the foreseeable future. An understanding of the migration of workflow from the top knowledge worker processes down through process workers to pure automation will be a key survival skill for organizations going forward in order to compete effectively. Look for new BPM applications focused around knowledge and collaboration going forward.
Topics: BPM | 6 Comments »