BPM evolution brings automation, integration and analysis

submitted directly to CSAA in digital form. A variety of e-mail addresses have been established to direct document-centric processes such as claims and underwriting paperwork, photography and reports to the appropriate work queue.

"An intelligent robot in the Global 360 application monitors Outlook mailboxes and imports these e-mails into G360 Workdesk with indexing information, routing messages to the appropriate individual," Liu explains. In this case, Outlook is being used as part of a system-to-system workflow. When the users process the claim, they are working in a dedicated BPM application.

"For users who are focusing on activities such as claims processing as a primary part of their work," says Ben Cody, VP of product management at Global 360, "interacting with BPM systems through Microsoft applications makes sense. Where integration with Outlook as part of someone's desktop helps the most is with people who do not do a lot of process activity."

But once a process such as a document review is in a BPM system, the enterprise can then track whether the task was completed, escalate if a deadline is not met or automate its routing. In some of its applications, Global 360 integrates in the reverse manner, launching an Office application (InfoPath, for example) from the BPM system, so that a user can fill out a form and submit it back into G360 WorkDesk.

In addition, the available data then allows metrics to be run. "We have invested a lot in BI for BPM," adds Cody. "Just as people need data about their sales, they need information about processes enterprisewide."

Global 360 can access process information outside its own application, to provide a broad view of historical data as well as predictive capability.

"Our customers can work with marketing when they are running a new campaign, and find out the impact in advance if new applications come flowing in. Global 360 can provide visibility even if a process spans multiple systems."

More on Microsoft and metrics

The Metastorm BPM Suite has been integrated with Outlook and Sharepoint for several years, and Version 7, released in July 2006, has a more robust integration with Microsoft Sharepoint that enables greater collaboration.

"Users can have everything at their fingertips on a dashboard in Sharepoint, and can drill down to look at watch lists and intelligence reports that are monitoring content," says Laura Mooney, senior director of corporate and product marketing at Metastorm.

Microsoft Office 2007 will allow Metastorm users to remain within Office while submitting content into the Metastorm BPM Suite. "This process is transparent," says Mooney, "allowing the user to place content into the BPM application without having to exit Word, Excel or other Office application."

Metastorm also has worked on bringing more BI into BPM, through its two-year partnership with Hyperion. "Hyperion allows us to provide visibility to management, and present scorecards and dashboards with key performance indicators linked directly to the process," Mooney explains. "When companies carry out more BI on their systems, they can do more to improve their processes."

For example, companies can identify their most profitable customers and adapt business rules to escalate them to the top of the list to expedite a process, communicate proactively, or reallocate resources so their most productive call center staff are the ones to deal with them.

BPM: IT and business users should partner

A perennial challenge with enterprise applications is to achieve a meeting of the minds between the business users who want functionality and the IT staff who create it.

"Our view is that business users and IT come to the table with different skill sets that are complementary," says Pat Morrissey, senior VP of marketing at Savvion. BPM is all about giving business users control over design and runtime, but quality assurance needs to come from IT.

The Savvion Process Modeler, available at no cost, allows business owners and IT staff to work together by providing a common language and visual representation of processes. But IT must take the lead when mission-critical processes are involved, to control aspects such as authentication and data integrity. "Companies that have cracked this code are the ones that are most successful with BPM," says Morrissey.

The need to combine the requirements of business users and the skills of IT also occurs in situations where multiple applications are involved in processes. "Weapons-grade features need to be used in mission-critical processes to integrate multiple applications or leverage Web services," says Morrissey. "Powerful debugging tools, for example, are needed to find out where Web services are causing cascading problems in other applications." In some cases, Morrissey adds, Savvion BusinessManager has been deployed in place of products that were hindering other applications.

The advent of service-oriented architecture (SOA) offers the promise of flexibility and agility, but sometimes conflicting business logic among the different applications can cause the programming equivalent of a short circuit. One of the dividing lines between enterprise-level and silo-BPM products, according to Morrissey, is whether the software gives visibility into how other applications are affecting the processes.

Finally, IT must be involved in ensuring that all processes are auditable. Morrissey says, "You need to be able to capture everything that changes in the architecture from the time it starts to the time an instance completes."

That is a key issue where BPM meets Sarbanes-Oxley, because no process should occur that cannot be audited. For example, if information in IMs is affecting process decisions but is not documented, compliance can be compromised. Savvion's Forensic Auditing is said to let business users locate process problems and document compliance, and avoid the need for IT to develop special configurations to meet auditing requirements.