It’s Not Your Grandad’s BPM Anymore
ANDY: I’ve been thinking a lot about the impact of portable devices on business processes lately. What I asked Dave is this: ‘“How do you keep them down on the farm?’ Imposing ECM practices on today’s ‘social networked’ workforce can be problematic. It’s way too easy to skirt the rules and use their more familiar communication tools. Is ECM something that can be ‘forced’ onto a workforce? Or do you have a way to make it more palatable to the ‘digital natives?’”
DAVE: “This raises an interesting philosophical question for me—‘Is it better for all content to remain secure at all costs, than for users to be able to work as effectively as possible?’ Of course, the answer to this depends on the type of content being discussed, the industry involved and so on, but as a general rule I feel that if a user cannot be trusted to be responsible with the content they are interacting with, then they should not have access to that content. If a senior manager decides to share content on a public cloud file sync and shared website then they will know the risks—but they will also have a good reason to do that. Surely the sensible thing to do is not to block that access, but to understand why that access is required? Once you have that understanding then you are able to either point that user in the direction of an alternate, more secure, method of achieving their goal that you already provide—or you need to find a secure solution that delivers against their need.”
A New Perspective on Content Management and Work
As much as I enjoyed my interaction with Dave Jones, I needed to turn to Bob Ragsdale, VP marketing at MicroPact. A very interesting conversation indeed.
BOB: “BPM is about structured data and structured processes... machine-to-machine interactions. But at the other extreme is case management, which deals with unstructured data, documents, images, audio and serve a lot of unstructured processes that are driven by the knowledge worker. It deals with flexible processes. Now, the reality of life is that few things fall into either of those extremes. They exist in the gray area in the middle,” he said, quite accurately.
“With BPM, you start with process modeling. But with case management, you start with information. It’s closer to data modeling, which is where it comes close to ECM. If you were to build a case management tool from scratch, you would never build it around process... you would build it around data modeling. They’re really two ends of the spectrum.
“In case management, you build it around ‘states.’ An opening state, a review state, a closing state. It wouldn’t look like BPM. It might have BPM-like capabilities, but it would approach from a different angle.
ANDY: So I pulled out my can of questions, and asked, “I’ve often said that there is no such thing as an ‘ECM product.’ ECM is a strategy.”
BOB: “I think that’s a fair statement. Case management and content management are coming really close together. But most of life is case management, when you think about it. It’s very rare that anyone starts with a process. When I go out on a weekend, I don’t say ‘OK, I’m gonna jump in the car and turn left toward the lumber store and turn right at the grocery store.’ You start with information. ‘I’m gonna need some food and some lumber and some bedsheets…’ whatever. That’s the data. And based on the data, I figure out the process. That’s why you need flexibility, because somewhere along that path I will get a call that says I need to go the dry cleaners. The point is that there are events that you cannot predict.” Well put, I thought.
“Let’s say I’m processing a Medicare claim, and I encounter something outside the norm. A well-designed system will allow a knowledge worker (who has the right permissions) to create a new path and send it down that path. Or somebody who doesn’t have that permission level and suggests a new idea. Somebody higher up can approve that idea, and allow it. A well-designed system has that flexibility. And maybe, after they do that, and assuming it’s successful, that can be repeatable and served up to other people as a common process. Or it might be a one-time event. That’s just what it was.”
ANDY: This ‘well designed system’ thing. Hmmmm. So I asked Bob the “Whose job is it?” question. “Is it an IT responsibility or a business role or a little bit of both?”
BOB: “It’s a lot of both,” he answered emphatically. “Let’s use the Medicare example. You can create a process that takes care of most of the usual questions. But you go back to the user and ask, ‘What happens when this occurs?’ And they say, well we do this... And you add that to the process, so you gradually build a system.”
Bob was very firm about the future of BI, and I appreciate it. “We’re finally getting away from the really heavy BI tools where ‘specialists’ are needed who can figure out how to work the data warehouse. We’re at the point when we have self-service BI tools, and you just type in a business question. ‘How many Medicare claims did we process in the Northeast region in 2013?’”
It doesn’t sound like much, maybe, but it’s a tremendous advance in work processes. I hope you read the rest of this paper and learn more about the utter transformation in business processes.