Business process management (BPM) software has progressed from a niche solution for automating administrative processes to a strategic business tool that is being used to standardize and optimize mission-critical operations

• Streamlining and automating human-oriented and system-oriented workflows
• Driving consistency, quality, and standardization of business processes
• Increasing organizational throughput
• Ensuring regulatory compliance
• Sustaining change (Lean, Six Sigma)

Although today's BPM solutions automate and optimize structured business processes exceptionally well, research says that only 20 percent of the work performed by employees each day adheres to a formal or structured business process. The other 80 percent of an employee's work is unstructured or completely dynamic.

Unlocking the value of all types of daily work processes requires extending the same value of traditional BPM for structured processes -- visibility, control and productivity -- to the 80 percent of work that is dynamic. But BPM solutions are designed to support structured processes: workflows that follow formal (rigid, concrete) rules defining roles (who can do what, when), policies (laws, rules), and procedures (interactions, approvals).

"Structured" BPM is perfectly suited for automating formal workflows (e.g. procurement, enrollment, compliance, expenses). However, structured BPM is not designed to support constantly changing workflows (e.g. tasking, action tracking, and project management) that make up 80 percent of the average employee workday.

As a result, knowledge workers (today's white collar production engineer) naturally turn to e-mail to manage dynamic work. E-mail has literally become our day-to-day anchor for initiating, tracking, and completing dynamic work or "Taskers."

While it is a tremendous productivity tool, e-mail in turn can result in a world of noise. E-mails pile up. They can have too much or too little information to quickly determine status and results.

E-mail has:

• No control over who sees what
• No status visibility for executives
• No real way to hold personnel accountable
• No way to prioritize

Furthermore, e-mail creates unnecessary, redundant work as it is not integrated with organizations' core business applications in any meaningful way.

This increasingly common problem of e-mail overload makes it difficult for workers -- who receive and are courtesy copied on too many e-mails -- to monitor taskers. Executives and managers have almost no visibility into the taskers of their direct reports. They must read every e-mail within their inbox to know whether a tasker has been opened, sub-delegated, questioned, or completed.

E-mail lacks the enterprise visibility necessary to monitor work in real time, identify issues as they unfold or take corrective action before larger problems arise. This void between process-driven work and e-mail clutter challenges the constraints of today's current BPM solutions.

There is a need for something that delivers the same visibility, control and productivity of traditional BPM solutions, but for the other 80 percent of work.

Structured BPM + Dynamic tasking

Organizations today are looking for BPM solution platforms that find the middle ground between the structure of traditional workflow automation and the flexibility of e-mail. Within the same BPM platform, knowledge workers would like to support both structured and dynamic approaches:

• Structured Approach:

• Dynamic Approach:

Knowledge workers can decide whether to dedicate time and resources to define processes, or move directly into a dynamic workflow. Going dynamic means dynamically initiating and tracking taskers as participants perform their jobs. Initializing dynamic workflows minimizes the costs involved in traditional business modeling.

Including dynamic tasking into the overall BPM paradigm transforms what was once a series of peer-to-peer e-mails into a single, centralized dashboard. BPM + dynamic tasking clearly illustrates the origins and objectives of each task with a step-by-step snapshot of the task from inception to completion. The monitoring power of BPM provides a centralized pictorial view of the tasker that includes all individuals involved, all comments and collaboration, all attachments and all status information.

Conclusion

BPM is evolving and organizations around the globe are leveraging BPM solutions to design, monitor and optimize processes enterprise-wide. The traditional, static nature of BPM, however, is too rigid to accommodate today's dynamic business environment. The vast majority of work performed within organizations today -- roughly 80 percent by some estimates -- is executed in a dynamic, unstructured environment of e-mails, meetings, phone calls and face-to-face meetings. This world of noise lacks visibility, accountability and guidance. The result is a reactive, non-agile enterprise that is not driven by the directives of senior management and cannot improve based upon an understanding of what is or is not working on a daily basis.

BPM + dynamic tasking fills the void between process-driven work and e-mail clutter. It allows organizations to leverage the structure and automation of a BPM platform with the flexibility of e-mail. This approach helps drive breakthrough productivity throughout the organization by delivering integrated products for both structured and unstructured processes that make up today's dynamic work.

Garth Knudson