So much has been written about efficiency in manufacturing that its is time for the masses of us office-bound companies to get a look in. A production line in a manufacturing company works so well to improve efficiency of building widgets because it constrains the way the half-completed widgets move, who gets them next and what they do with them. In the back offices of companies, things aren't so easy, so it can be hard to see why there is lots of activity with minimal productivity.Take a read of the rest of the article to find out how I think that simpler online / SaaS solutions may often be better than complex and expensive enterprise software, even for the big enterprises that can afford it. This is just part of my white paper for rapid process improvement: Seven Steps to Escaping Process Chaos.
Ian Gotts of Nimus: "The two are inextricably linked already. If I want to perform some task such as sign off a PO then I probably need to access the Purchase Policy document which will be part of ECM."
Malcolm Ross of Appian: "There's a definite need to unite the features of these two worlds to create more powerful content and process systems."
Doug Mow of Virtusa: "From the customer, patient, subscriber or end user perspective I want a seamless UI that doesn't distinguish between any class of functions. "
Brian Reale of ProcessMaker: "It is one thing to route a document or a PO, add a signature, and then store it in a DMS. It is another thing to start a process in a rich contextual environment and have that environment intelligently populate with the pertinent information based on attributes like user, place, time, and company policies. "
Peter Evans-Greenwood: What's a document/record anyway? A page in a wiki? An email? SMS? A tweet? Defining the scope of BPM and ECM as processes and documents ignores the ongoing erosion of boundaries between organisations and communications channels, and existing solutions are too intrusive to push into these new channels.
The short answer is this: in any business that uses BPM in critical applications, BPM is already integrated with ECM. I think it unlikely that we'll see anyone but IBM and maybe EMC really producing a credible E-BP-CM suite.
Why do I believe this? Well, its important to ask why ECM is so important to businesses... Its not the collaborative-Sharepoint-less, "let's be happy and work together" stuff. Its the fact that in real business, at the end of everything we do in a business process there needs to a record of the transaction, the decisions or whatever that formed the outcome. Of course, that does not need ECM if the data we were work with at every step was fully structured (an online form producing structured database records). But for the real world, documents do exist, and ECM provides a way to handle them.
As Doug says we must interact with documents, and as the vendors hinted, document management ain't that hard for BPM vendors. The problem is that throughout a process, documents will form part of the final business record. BPM vendors rarely manage to focus on understanding the complexities of electronic document and records management, therefore they rarely do much more than routing documents -- plain old-fashioned 'imaging and workflow'.
What is really needed from BPM is a final step: registering the records and the decisions of the process in the corporate records management system, keeping the context of everything that was done. Working with documents and process context appears in some of the marketing around case management. Though more often than not people get more excited about how processes can change dynamically, than how they can be recorded permanently. So I expect adaptive case management (ACM) to be another missed opportunity.
It really is a shame that records management has such a 'stodgy' appearance, since it is such an important part of business processes.
Managing my own knowledge work. As I wrote my own Adaptive Case Management system for my own knowledge work, I was able to organize my own work. As the number of cases increase – 3000 now including sub-cases – I become aware of patterns.
Feedback from my first pilot. This was very interesting, because the main focus for my pilot is usability. Usability is strongly interwoven with these patterns of knowledge work.
The things I always wanted to model, but never was able to. I governed the modeling of thousands of models of structured processes from all areas of business processes. But because the modeling language was only able to model predictable processes, I never was able to model unpredictable processes.
Unfortunately this 'fun' discussion wasn't as a result of something I blogged, but its worth a look. According to Adam Deane:
My view is that Case Management should be implemented by ECM vendors, not BPM vendors.
Case Management revolves around data, documents and data therefore should be dealt by ECM professionals.
ECM requires a different set of skills than BPM.
It would be in the customer’s best interests to have separate systems for BPM and ECM.
I personally believe that it doesn't matter where Case Management sits. Its the business value that this type of solution can bring to businesses that is important. And until my business, or somebody else's is as synonymous with the that specific category of solution as SAP is with ERP, we all need to just accept that the industry is a bunch of pigeon-holes.
Follow along with the comments on Adam Deane's blog. Its getting fun...
A post from the Improving It blog
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