Introduction
Numerous independent case studies and analyst reports substantiate the impressive ROI organizations can accrue from the adoption of BPM. There is also no longer any debate about the fact that the technology of business process automation has matured and is available for organizations to use today. Many industry observers and vendors have moved on to more advanced capabilities such as process optimization and BAM. Yet the penetration of BPM in Global 2000 companies, who are the early adopters, is projected by Gartner Research1 to reach only 20% by the year 2009, suggesting that it is about 5% today. There is obviously a discrepancy between the availability of the technology with impressive, documented case studies of ROI, and the lack of wider adoption by the market.
This white paper highlights one of the most important contributors to this discrepancy. It argues that business process management is ultimately about people, not technology. While technology enables BPM, it is people who lead, manage, and participate in business processes. Importantly, BPM, analysts and vendors have not focused enough on the importance of human-centric needs. The people side of BPM introduces a level of complexity and usability nuances that is greatly underappreciated. People needs cannot be addressed solely by a rigid and sterile focus on automation.
The paper contends that a deeper penetration of BPM will be achieved as users and vendors begin to understand what it takes for knowledge workers to participate in business processes, both as owners who define processes and as participants who use the automated solution. It highlights a number of seemingly straight-forward, but frequently overlooked features as examples of what is needed to deliver full-featured human-centric BPM. Taken individually, none of these features is a compelling change agent which is the reason why vendors and analysts have not given them the importance they deserve. However taken collectively, these capabilities can transform BPM from a cold and robotic system for automation into an intuitive, user friendly tool that eliminates redundancy and accelerates how work gets done.
What Makes Human-Centric BPM Different?
Human-centric and system-centric BPM systems look strikingly similar on the surface. Both involve processes that have a process map to encapsulate the flow, activities that indicate what tasks need to get done, and rules that dictate the various paths the process can take. In addition, human-centric and system-centric BPM systems have comparable tools such as a server that controls the processes and applications for modeling, integration, and reporting. The block diagrams in vendor or analyst slide decks showing the architecture and its various components, and the marketing message about the benefits of each are also striking similar. Even to an IT professional without in-depth knowledge of BPM, the two categories of products will look similar. However, when one looks under the surface and evaluates the requirements, one will find major differences:
i. Number of Participants: Most organizations have a small number of enterprise applications and a large number of employees. System-centric processes have significantly fewer participants as compared to human-centric processes for which every employee could be a potential participant. The need to include larger number of participants makes human-centric processes far more challenging and difficult to automate, especially as the roles of these participants are in constant flux.
ii. User Interface: Enterprise applications do not need a user interface to communicate with. Instead they need a common format for data exchange. XML is rapidly becoming the de facto data exchange format. Moreover, the data exchange format does not change often because systems are simply too expensive to change. Human-centric processes require a user interface which is typically an electronic form. Organizations are very particular about the quality of their electronic forms and the security and privacy of the data presented in these forms. More importantly, the forms change often.
iii. Need for Collaboration: Systems to do not collaborate with each other. The closest they come to collaboration is to share data as part of a structured process. In contrast, people have a strong need to collaborate with each other. People like to consult, assign, delegate and monitor the assignments. This is especially true in the knowledge economy of the 21st century where collaboration is an essential ingredient of learning.
