There are many well-documented benefits of Business Process Management (BPM). One of the most significant is the ability to take an important process within the enterprise and add automation, management, and visibility to it, as well as streamline its efficiency. One of the challenges, though, is the very real and fairly common goal of capturing, automating and managing processes that are not particularly well-defined. (See Fig. 1.)
For example, a more dynamic or ad hoc process might involve interactions among various users (potentially both inside and outside the organization) as well as documents that need to be edited, revised, or customized and then moved among various touch-points in the enterprise and across the greater corporate ecosphere.
In many cases, the “processes” that develop in a spontaneous or ad hoc fashion are much more difficult to align with the traditional format of structured business process modeling and management. There are two components to this equation: the documents and forms that are the starting point; and the actual act of moving or routing those forms and documents through a process that needs to be flexible and easily changed to reflect business variations.
Finding ways to take these forms and documents and make them interactive in a managed way, and then route them successfully through a workflow, can be daunting. Fortunately, there are several vendors attempting to solve just this problem, and they are approaching the problem from very different starting points.
The Engagement Gap
Within standard operations at the enterprise level, there are collections of internal systems that contribute to successfully and smoothly running the business. These include such popular enterprise software categories as BPM, enterprise resource planning (ERP), content management, customer relationship management (CRM), and sales force management.
The various constituents inside and outside the enterprise—including employees, business managers, customers, partners, suppliers, and distributors—need to interact with many of these systems on a regular basis. However, it is often very difficult to successfully engage these constituents at the right time and in the right way to facilitate business productivity and operations. This has been identified by some software vendors, most notably Adobe Systems, as the “engagement gap.”
Essentially, the engagement gap is defined as the distance between an organization and its internal business processes and the internal and external people who are (or should be) engaged in any one of those processes. Too often, there’s a discontinuity between the automation of a process and the potential users who should be connected to that process.
How does one bridge the engagement gap? Vendors are taking novel approaches to this challenge, and it is worthwhile to examine a few of them to understand how BPM is evolving to support some of the more ad hoc components of business processes. The challenge can be addressed from the document perspective, or it can be addressed from the process perspective, and below we highlight what two of the solutions look like.
To illustrate one approach, consider Adobe. As most people know, Adobe Systems has established its products as the ubiquitous desktop client and components for viewing dynamic forms and documents, most notably with its Adobe Reader and Flash Player. With more than 900 million computers and devices utilizing Adobe client software, Adobe products are an integral part of both the business and consumer computer landscape.
One of Adobe’s most recent goals is to encourage the creation of “customer engagement” applications: Web-based processes to help simplify and automate processes that cross organizational boundaries and improve communication with external constituents.
In 2004, the company launched LiveCycle to address the need for taking forms and documents and using them to engage various constituents along the path of a business process. The new LiveCycle Enterprise Suite (ES), launched earlier this year, provides companies with the ability to create customer-engaging processes through interactive applications, real-time data capture, and dynamic and secure workflows.
Based on a rewritten and unified J2EE server platform, LiveCycle ES provides a collaborative development environment for creating business processes across industries such as financial services, manufacturing, life sciences, and government. As a player in the human-centric category of BPM, Adobe currently has more than 1,300 LiveCycle ES customers.
A second solution that reflects some of the more dynamic and ad hoc components of business process management comes from BPM vendor HandySoft. The company recently released BizFlow 11, its standard BPM platform, with some very interesting updates.
The latest version focuses on offering tools for helping to manage the dynamic and ad hoc processes that prevail throughout the enterprise. (Many experts use the “80/20 rule” to explain corporate processes—meaning that 20 percent are structured, and the remainder are dynamic or unstructured.) BizFlow 11 seeks to facilitate managing some of these ad hoc processes by engaging various constituents where they are most comfortable, whether it be in e-mail or via popular Microsoft productivity applications.
For customers who want to significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to get the first business processes managed, HandySoft has introduced OfficeEngine, a standalone thin-client application that can be used seamlessly with Microsoft Outlook. Roughly half the cost of BizFlow, OfficeEngine is designed to merge structured and unstructured data and processes into one cohesive environment, and includes an extensive search capability that can link with external systems. OfficeEngine, like BizFlow, can document and model processes in real time, while business users are working. Average implementation time for OfficeEngine is less than 30 days, while more traditional BPM projects take two to three months using BizFlow.
Like Adobe, HandySoft understands the importance of bridging the engagement gap by bringing process management functionality to the user in the vehicle that is already being used on a daily basis. HandySoft leverages an auto-discovery technology to help discover and model processes automatically while workers are doing their daily tasks. While this sounds sophisticated, it is a technology that a number of other vendors in the BPM and business intelligence space are using, and it has proven quite effective at speeding the time it takes for a new process to be modeled and automated.
Like many business solutions, there are many avenues to solve a problem. These two vendors are providing solid foundations for organizations to gain better control, management, and oversight of their dynamic and ad hoc business processes. I believe that we’ll see an increasing number of vendors and solutions addressing these areas with more focus over the next few years.
David Kelly is the founder and president of Upside Research. Formerly senior VP of analyst services at Hurwitz Group, he can help companies profit from the diversity of a changing technology landscape.
