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Democracy: AKA Collaborative BPM
By Jim Sinur | November 28, 2007
Many people think that BPM enables straight-through processing (little or no human interaction) and is the servant of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)/composite applications for orchestration/sequencing needs.
While these are proven and productive tributaries to BPM, they are not exclusive approaches to BPM. In some cases, it is so bad that some myopic IT professionals and vendors view that these paths as the only viable approach to BPM.
This view equates human activity as a necessary evil to handle the few exceptions that might occur when there is missing information. Some power vendors are even using the SOA approach for platform and client control.
The reality of the situation is that there are more exceptions than these folks imagine (over 50%) and the age of collaborative BPM is dawning to deal with this reality. In addition, BPM, equipped for collaboration, will be serving the knowledge worker in new ways.
Enabling the Process Worker:
Process workers are abundant in industries that have constituent (customers, employees, partners, shareholders) interactions that require the combination of interpersonal skills combined with judgment.
Today, BPM is excellent for managing process work through some pretty impressive productivity features such as:
- Case and Content Management
- Customizable work list support for human task access.
- Escalation capabilities to address late/important work
- Thin- and thick-client access to work queues
- Dynamic work allocation formula
- In-flight process viewer in multiple languages
- Ability to modify cases in-flight
- Ability to have multiple versions of the same workflow running at once (version control)
- User group administration and role-based access to managerial capabilities.
- Reporting and administration, including security.
- Support for roles and resource mapping and user administration
Reaching the Knowledge Worker:
Today BPM supports collaboration through the development of a shared model of process about to be implemented. Really good BPM tools have environments that are focused by role.
Few, if any, are good enough for business professionals while still supporting versioning, annotation and process integration. Fewer still can share common process meta-data between the business analyst and the IT professionals while maintaining each view.
In the future BPM will have to support more collaboration during the process execution phase to allow knowledge workers to tap each others knowledge. This requires a different kind of process with the following features:
- Support for process snippets / indeterminate processes.
- Ability to include workers outside the native environment.
- Links to pervasive user environments (Office, SharePoint).
- Multi-channel, multi device support & location awareness.
- The ability to support and capture discussions around work in progress, goals, targets, policies, rules and deadlines.
- Access to shared work lists, calendars and case information, including unstructured information/content.
- Setting up collaborative work spaces, such as community suites/chats and virtual team rooms with voting capabilities.
- Support for group decision tools, data analysis tools and process/application sharing.
- Inclusion of various collaborative technologies, such as e-mail, instant messaging, Web conferencing, blogs, bulletin boards and social networks.
Bottom Line:
BPM will have to morph and collaboration will be one of the key features of BPM 2.0. You only have to look at the pace of SharePoint adoption to see that the need is clear, but it is only a good start. There is more that needs to be developed to create the next generation of collaborative BPM, but there are benefits a plenty until then.
Topics: BPM |
February 1st, 2008 at 9:35 am
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