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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 |
March 5th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
[…] Prevalent Process Patterns Enable BPM Benefits Differently (tags: bpm cx) […]
March 5th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
[…] Prevalent Process Patterns Enable BPM Benefits Differently | Jim Sinur’s BPM Blog Great post by Jim Sinur on the three main process patterns: basically, integration-centric STP, human-facing transactional, and collaborative. And only 50% gratuitous graphics this time! (tags: bpmn) […]
March 6th, 2008 at 9:39 am
I referenced your article. Nice job.
http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/business/archives/bpm-design-patterns-22916
March 7th, 2008 at 6:56 am
I wonder where you would position Case management (a BPM solution which has been around for quite some years already).
In my opinion, it could be a patterns in the STP variant, dealing with exceptions. But it also can be a class on it’s own - to support processes where:
- Events are difficult to time (in sequence)
- Most decisions are based on the knowledge of the knowledge worker
- Activities can be done in any order
It might be possible that the “knowledge worker pattern” will eventually be split in the following sub patterns:
- Collaborative intensive processes - where more than 1 person will need to work together at the same time to push a process futher (of maybe we could call this human interaction management?)
- Case management - where one person has a lot of freedom on the proces execution flow
If we map out two dimensions:
1. Amount of people that need to be involved at the same time:
- 0 (all can be automated)
- 1 (serial workflow)
- More (collaboration
2. The “structureness” of the process
- Very structured
- Semi structured/flexible
- Unstructured
Than one can map out the various patterns:
STP for 0 involvement, very structured
WFM for 1 person, very structured
Casemanagement for 1 person, semi structured
Collaborative for M person, structured
HIM for M person, semi structured
and finally Groupware for M persons, unstructured…
Would be interested in hearing your views on this model, in regards also to the HPW - High Performance Workplace…
Regards,
Roeland Loggen
March 10th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Thanks for the deep thought on this. Even after reading your interesting points, I view case managment as an enabler of all forms of process management. patterns. Of course, the longer a business event persists in a process, the more likely case management will be involved. There is another apsect of case management that enables collaboration as well as persistence of the business event. I think there will be evolution in the knowledge arena, but I’m not convinvced that case management would be a process pattern type. I think we all be watching this progress.
I view the HPW and HIM as similar concepts.
April 30th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
[…] interesting view to process patterns can be checked out at link (http://www.global360.com/blog/index.php/2008/03/04/prevalent-process-patterns-enable-bpm-benefits-di… ). At one end are core standardized processes (mostly automated) and at the other […]