The rise of knowledge work is increasing the importance of having a strategy to address process improvement for untamed manual processes in paper intensive environments.  In this article I discuss the role that adaptive case management technology can play in that strategy.

The Challenge of Knowledge Work

In the recent McKinsey article “Rethinking Knowledge Work: A Strategic Approach,” [i]  Tom Davenport issues a challenge:

“In the half-century since Peter Drucker coined the term “knowledge workers,” their share of the workforce has steadily grown—and so has the range of technology tools aimed at boosting their productivity. Yet there’s little evidence that massive spending on personal computing, productivity software, knowledge-management systems, and much else has moved the needle. … It’s time for companies to develop a strategy for knowledge work—one that not only provides a clearer view of the types of information that workers need to do their jobs but also recognizes that the application of technology across the organization must vary considerably, according to the tasks different knowledge workers perform.”

Applying case management for business improvement can help address this challenge by focusing on better ways to accomplish the continuum of knowledge work, dealing with complex problem areas that can provide differentiation. Examples of the breadth and adaptability of case management include activities surrounding a patient record, a lawsuit, an insurance claim, a disputed order, a citizen service request, or a contract. Throughout all of these examples the common theme is the need for human involvement in the process.

Human Judgment is the Common Theme

There is always human judgment involved with case management, though the amount depends on the degree of structure for the case type or pattern. The case management approach seeks to amplify rather than replace human knowledge and collaboration in those case patterns to improve productivity and business outcomes.

With a case management strategy, organizations have achieved 20% to 35% current year productivity gains in their respective industries, and have sustained those results through permanent changes that eliminate paper, innovate and extend services through online channels, and create improved collaborative decision making environments.

The Role of Technology

As organizations pursue a strategy to use case management for transformative change, technology can help guide and accelerate time to value. Forward-thinking organizations are wielding technology in several creative ways:

• Invest in knowledge work
• Design for user adoption
• Use fit-for-purpose tools

Invest in Tools for Knowledge Work
There is a central tenet in case management of enabling knowledge work and workers. Further, there is an understanding that driving effective human interaction – by enabling “smarter workers” - has an enormous ability to positively affect business outcomes.

There is a balancing act between “free-access” and more “structured” approaches (as Davenport calls them), but the desired outcome should be the same in my opinion -- autonomy for the knowledge worker to accomplish their goals using their best judgment. It is our responsibility to provide the environment, technology and information to enable that to happen in a productive fashion.  Traditional BPM process automation techniques are effective when the process is predictable and repeatable. According to the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC), “In contrast, knowledge work involves processes where goals and certain tasks are well established, yet the exact sequences of these vary with each case. These processes are not nearly as predictable as those found with traditional applications, business process management and workflow, but the need for achieving productivity in knowledge work has never been greater.”

Using a case management approach enables organizations to invest in “smarter workers” by delivering intuitive, context- and content- aware process applications and collaborative capabilities to support and guide the daily work of process participants.  This is often called the “guardrail” approach by my colleague Tom Shepherd. Adaptive case management delivers that autonomy.  This includes richer “workbenches” for knowledge workers, integration of social technologies, such as improved collaboration tools and improved support for process participants via capabilities such as mentoring and self-adjusting processes.

Design for User Adoption
Despite automation gains, industry processes are still heavily people and paper-oriented. So, it stands to reason that changing the way business is done for the better means finding new ways of handling information and revamping manual processes. In their global survey “What Successful Transformations Share”,McKinsey advises that given the importance of collaboration, leaders at companies starting a transformation should put a priority on finding efficient and scalable ways to engage employees.

In a digital era characterized by increased collaboration, organizations are shifting from a purely IT-centric strategy to create dynamic, business-driven process solutions. A critical element in that shift is the renewed emphasis on designing user-centric environments and controls. Part of this growing trend is the move to support less rigid patterns of work. For maximum impact, these process improvement initiatives must have an obvious and direct impact on each individual stakeholder. Further user-centricity requires the availability of context-driven content and the ability to support decisions via the integration of all pertinent data, tasks, milestones, discussions, events, policies and processes. Collaborative case management is responsive to less prescriptive processes where work is centered on and driven by the process participants.

Managing and controlling processes is what we are ultimately trying to achieve. The fact is that most work processes, including the hardest ones to control, are carried out by people rather than computer systems. To amplify human-driven processes, leading organizations are including user work study and a focus on user interface design in their business improvement strategies.

Accelerate Process Improvement with Leaner “Fit-for-Purpose” Tools
As the global economy begins its recovery, organizations do not want to return to the “business as usual” of the past. There is an increasing demand for lean tools to get more done with fewer resources. Case management meets this demand. First, case management itself is a “fit-for-purpose” technology that can be tailored to a particular process role to provide exactly what is needed to accomplish the work. Consider for example case management solutions for new insurance policies that provide an underwriter “workbench,” where there is a need to involve and balance people, paper and process and where human judgment often is required for exception handling or contextual decision making. In addition, case management can support projects for faster time-to-impact across the value chain.

Some case management technologies can provide a leaner fit-for-purpose approach by delivering a more component-based toolset to enable configurable solutions, providing greater impact at a lower cost. Faster-time-to-impact can also be driven by case management’s ability to leverage an organization’s existing infrastructure as well as provide a scalable solution to support a wide range of implementation types -- from application-specific process improvements to transformational business initiatives. To drive down the cost of solution deployment, case management can sit lightly on top of legacy systems without a “rip and replace” required, and can leverage enterprise-wide technologies such as Microsoft SharePoint and Visio for example.

Does your organization have a knowledge work strategy? What approaches are you using to assure that technology supports that strategy and are they succeeding?  In my next article, I’ll begin sharing case study stories and lessons learned.  

About Deb Miller
Deb Miller is Director of Market Development for Global 360. Her work focuses on industry strategies for business process improvement. Her career includes more than 20 years of global industry experience with GE.You can read more of Deb’s writings at http://DebsG360.wordpress.com/ and follow her @DebsG360 on Twitter.

“Social technology” is a term that gives business executives heartburn. Based on the increasing level of buzz, I’m betting Rolaids and Alka-Seltzer are enjoying banner sales years. But antacids are not the answer for company leaders skittish about social in the workplace. First off, basic sociological and demographic data clearly indicates they are fighting a battle they’re destined to lose. More importantly, by ignoring advances in social collaboration, these executives are missing a major opportunity to improve how their organization operates – from product and service quality to customer satisfaction, organizational responsiveness, employee retention and more.

The first step towards removing the fear and realizing the value is to change the terminology. The end-goal is not to let pure “social technology” run rampant within the organization; it is to unleash the latent intelligence held by a company’s knowledge workers through “social business collaboration.” This requires a different technology approach than is being espoused by the majority of software vendors hoping to jump on the social bandwagon.

I’ll examine a few of the reasons for enterprise reluctance to embrace social technology. Some are quite valid; some less-so. Then, I’ll describe how a social business technology approach obviates those concerns and delivers real business value. First, though, I have to start with a reality check about the inevitability of this new technology wave.

“Get Social or Get Left Behind”

Social collaboration technology has seeped so deeply into our personal lives that there is no turning back. Facebook attained more than 500 million users in late 2010, and people collectively spend more than 700 billion minutes per month on the site.[1]

The generation now entering the workforce expects the same sort of “always on, always connected” experience in their professional lives, and that expectation will only increase over time. Social software, with its intuitive interfaces and functions, has already supplanted email as the communication and collaboration method of choice for the rising generation of corporate workers. According to a recent survey by global analysis firm IDC, 48% of respondents indicated they will use social software more than email in 2011.[2]

Of course, it’s not just employee expectations that need to be considered.  Analyst firm Gartner has stated that by 2015, internet-supported social processes will influence at least 80% of consumers' discretionary spending.[3]This has led the firm to conclude that “Either business gets social or it gets left behind.”[4]

Objections to Social in the Enterprise

Executive push-back around introducing social technology to the workplace commonly falls into three camps: 1) it will decrease productivity, 2) it requires a radical change to how we operate, and 3) it’s all just hype. Let’s examine all three arguments:

1) Social technology is just a time-waster

We no longer toil in Dickensian-style sweatshops (well, most of us, anyway), but let’s face it: employees are paid to work. There is no business rationale for investing in a new technology that will simply provide a platform for employees to plan where to go to lunch, or to discuss the movie they saw last night. Further, social feeds are often cluttered, with a low ratio of signal-to-noise. Employees already suffer from information overload.

This is a perfectly valid argument. The last thing an organization needs is more undirected “chatter” distracting employees from their activities and the information they actually need to do their jobs more effectively.

2) Adapting to social will require a radical change

If you ask any business or IT executive about effecting change in their organization, you better be ready for a long tale of frustration. An entire industry of consultants, authors, academics and vendors has accumulated around the issue of Change Management. As a species, we don’t particularly like change, and we generally do our best to resist it.

While this is undeniable in a broad sense, it is a fallacy in regards to social collaboration. The reason social technology has taken off so rapidly in our personal lives is because it is truly an extension and facilitation of how we as humans want to operate. We like to discuss, and share ideas. We need others’ input to broaden our perspectives and to be effective problem solvers. And we are naturally voyeuristic. We like to see what other people are thinking, doing and talking about. Social technology is actually one of the best examples in history of technology that enables us to NOT change our behavior, but rather to translate that behavior into a new realm.

3) Social in the enterprise will not deliver on its promise

This is a valid point for discussion, as we’re still in the early stages of adoption and the ROI data has not been collected en masse. However, there is plenty of evidence suggestion strong value that as of yet is largely untapped. Social is a powerful vehicle for reaching and nurturing customers, as more than four in five U.S. online adults now participate socially.[5]

In terms of social’s value within the enterprise, the analysts are unanimous in their support. Per Gartner, “Social software supports virtual environments where participants create, organize and share information; find, connect and interact with each other; and analyze the relationships among participants. Social software can improve collaboration, spur creativity and facilitate decision making.”[6]

Forrester Research makes the case stating, “Among the new modes of working, greater collaboration between designers and other internal stakeholders — such as manufacturing, sales, and marketing — has enabled innovation leaders to harness contributions and feedback from more business perspectives, get the product right the first time, and generate repeatable returns on their new product development efforts.”[7]

The Solution – “Social Business Collaboration”

Social in the enterprise is inevitable. It holds the potential for tremendous new value. It also presents some very real concerns. The solution is to focus on “social business collaboration” by utilizing the right purpose-built technology platform.

How do you do that? By grounding your enterprise social collaborations strictly within the context of business processes and business events. Bringing social collaboration into corporate processes in a controlled and actionable way is how you will yield new business opportunities.

An advanced Business Process Management (BPM) software platformwith intuitive social collaboration capabilities puts social in the required business context across the enterprise, through the supply chain, and out to customers. It gives employees of all levels a filtered, personalized view of the business events that matter to them. It also delivers the ability to take immediate business action directly from the social interface, whether that means a simple approval, a quick collaboration to resolve an issue, or the launching of a new case for further attention.

The platform must also easily integrate with external 3^rd-party enterprise systems, such as Salesforce.com, and provide the ability to not only read data, but write data back to the system of record. To be truly effective in harnessing external information and ad hoc events outside of, but impacting, the enterprise, it must also incorporate pure social systems such as Twitter or LinkedIn directly into an employee’s event view. These external social channels represent a growing and untapped source of new insights into customer sentiment, sales opportunities, support issues and more.

An advanced BPM platform, such as the Appian BPM Suite, leverages the collective knowledge of an enterprise to gain efficiency and improve the quality of processes through a familiar social interface that spurs adoption and easy use. The hallmarks of such a platform include:

•  Key Event Monitoringto track events from people and systems in real-time, with auto-generated alerts on hazards that could impact the business and take immediate action from the feed or mobile interface
• Personalized, Filtered Viewsthat can be subscribed to across relevant application or process areas
• Easy Collaborationfor comments, questions and collaborations on business events through real-time message posts and ad-hoc updates to targeted groups within and outside of pre-planned business processes
• The Ability to Take Action to complete tasks from directly inside the event feed (or with a truly advanced platform, from a mobile device, using optimized mobile forms to capture data and route tasks)
• High Securitymaking all information and data accessible through role-based permissions and securely transmitted using SSL to web (and mobile) interfaces

Conclusion

Forrester Research advises, “To thrive in an era of Social Computing, companies must abandon top-down management and communication tactics, weave communities into their products and services, use employees and partners as marketers, and become part of a living fabric of brand loyalists.”[8] This is what the transformation from “Social Technology” to “Social Business Collaboration” enables. It grounds social in the enterprise in a business context, increasing the manageability of social interactions, and achieving more meaningful, effective and valuable collaborations across the organization and outside the four walls.

So, for corporate executives wary of what all the social buzz means for their business, my advice is to investigate an advanced BPM Suite platform. Your employees will thank you, your customers will thank you, and you’ll have one less thing to give you indigestion.

About the Author

Ben Farrell is a Director at Appian, the BPM software innovation leader

As market forces continue to change, business leaders are searching for the best ways to deal with uncertainty and deliver improved performance. Most leaders are realizing that human capital represents one of their most important assets. In many cases, people are the organization’s best competitive advantage, whether the focus is continuous product innovation, superior service, or faster response time. According to a Workflow Management Coalition study, knowledge work now accounts for 25% to 50% of all work, with the percentage growing. Businesses are taking a hard look at strategies to better serve knowledge work requirements, reaching beyond traditional technology and mindset to be more dynamic and collaborative.

In a March 2009 essay by McKinsey’s worldwide managing director Ian Davis entitled The New Normal, he wrote“The new normal will be shaped by a confluence of powerful forces—some arising directly from the financial crisis and some that were at work long before it began. Through it all, technological innovation will continue, and the value of increasing human knowledge will remain undiminished.”

Many believe we are experiencing not merely another turn of the business cycle, but a restructuring of the economic order. The question is, “What will normal look like?” McKinseysuggests that while no one can say how long the financial turbulence will last, what we find on the other side will not look like the normal of recent years.

Business Challenges in the New Normal

As a result, adapting and improving mission critical processes has become increasingly important to survive and thrive in the new normal. Case management will prove essential to those efforts.

In their research report “Dynamic Case Management – An Old Idea Catches New Fire”,Forrester Research, Inc.describes major business drivers behind case management:

• Increased need to manage the costs and risks of servicing customer requests — like loans, claims, and benefits
• Greater emphasis on automating and tracking inconsistent “incidents” that do not follow a well-defined process
• New pressure on government agencies to respond to a higher number of citizen requests
• New demands that regulators, auditors, and litigants place on businesses to respond to external regulations
• Increased use of collaboration and social media to support unstructured business processes

All of these drivers reveal the increasing need for organizations to adapt to the unpredictable nature of business as it happens.

For banking and insurance, increasing compliance demands from federal, state and other regulatory bodies require more agile processes that can evolve and adapt on a continuous basis. Process improvements are needed that leverage the capabilities of existing personnel and applications, gathering and presenting information from disparate data sources for optimum decision-making to retain profitable customers and attract new customers through a myriad of distribution channels.

For the public sector, there are increasing demands to improve service delivery under tightening budget constraints. This is particularly difficult where the service requires the ability to adjust guidance in context based on events that occur as the service experience progresses, particularly in the justice or social services arena.

The commercial sectoris seeing manufacturers and retailersdeal with demands to cut costs without disrupting their supply chain. Retaining key suppliers, delivering new products, and continuing to provide high quality customer service all require more dynamic and responsive processes along the value chain. This requires better ways to deal with exception processing in pursuit of the “perfect order” when orders fail to follow – as they so often do – the “happy path.” Market drivers are pushing customer-to-cash priorities in the financial supply chain and demanding process improvements that can maximize cash flow while holding risks to acceptable levels.

Adaptive Case Management Helps Businesses Win in the New Normal

The essential distinguishing characteristic of adaptive case management is the “unstructured” progression of a case from initiation to its final state. In case management, human judgment, external events, and business rules don’t determine paths through a predefined diagram. Instead those factors determine at runtime which activities need to be performed and whether additional steps are required.

Moreover, a case is rarely a single process in the conventional BPM sense. It is a collection of processes and isolated tasks, the number and identity of which cannot be fixed by a predefined template or rules.

Conventional BPM can manage the various individual processes involved in a case, but it has difficulty managing progress of the case as a whole. In case management, the case folder provides overall coordination of the entire case, partially defined in advance, but with the flexibility to change in real-time as each case proceeds.

Case management solutionsenable a shift from the predefined, model-driven approach of traditional business process management to providing user-focused capabilities that allow people to adapt to business in real time. With case management, executives leverage their workforce to achieve 25-30% productivity gains in their business units and across their value chains.

In what is at best an uncertain world, case management presents a better way to accomplish work, dealing with unpredictable, complex problem areas that can provide critical competitive differentiation. The result- case management solutions are delivering on boardroom priorities: improving current year measures and driving transformative change.

About Deb Miller
Deb Miller is Director of Market Development for Global 360. Her work focuses on industry strategies for business process improvement. Her career includes more than 20 years of global industry experience with GE.You can read more of Deb’s writings at http://DebsG360.wordpress.com/ and follow her @DebsG360 on Twitter.

With market demands increasing and margins decreasing, businesses need a facilitator to help them maximize organizational performance. Businesses must optimize resources and streamline processes to gain agility and efficiency and reduce costs and risks in a dynamic environment. Therefore, they are increasingly relying on

Business Process Management (BPM) to attain real-time visibility into business processes to manage their life cycle. However, over the years, BPM implementation has become synonymous with process automation without having an end-to-end process view. This limits the capability of a

BPM solution such that intended results may not be fully realized. It is important that organizations focus on process visibility, control and continuous improvement as key aspects for a successful BPM system.

Today, in several organizations, a good part of any end-to-end business process is encapsulated in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, business applications and certain bespoke applications. However, the key challenges to be considered regarding BPM are:

·         How can a business utilize existing investments while adopting BPM to manage business processes?

·         How can an organization ensure visibility into end-to-end business process performance to drive continuous improvement such as better management of resource allocation?

·         How can a business decide which process lag to automate using the BPM system toolset?

The next few sections in this paper seek to address these questions by outlining the need for process visibility, control and continuous improvement and how to attain the same in organizations.

Need for Process Visibility, Control and Continuous Improvement

Several factors must be considered to ensure process visibility, control and continuous improvement. These include:

·         Identifying bottlenecks- The first step towards business process performance improvement is to identify the critical bottlenecks and inefficiencies involved in present processes and define an improvement strategy for them. In such a manner, process improvement can help deliver business value.

·         Increase Operational Efficiency- Once the key performance bottlenecks and inefficiencies are identified, appropriate corrective measures can be implemented to eliminate these bottlenecks through effective management of key process parameters.

·         Business process outsourcing- With today's processes having a global footprint, it is important to keep a fine balance between standardization and localization ratio for agility and outsourcing of business processes. Thus, businesses must first categorize processes for agility versus standardization to identity areas with potential for outsourcing.

·         Assessing process performance metrics– Process performance metrics (like revenue, time to market, etc.) must be determined early in any implementation and then managed through a continuous monitoring and feedback mechanism. This enables the organization to continuously realize business value from such processes.

·         Developing a process governance model- A proper governance model unites key stakeholders with a concrete role-responsibility definition. This enables financial and process performance governance and assists the organization to achieve set business performance goals.

A Real World Scenario

Let us consider a business process case study to elaborate on how processes reside in a typical organization by examining the process life cycle for a new product launch in a consumer product organization.

Typically, launching a new product is a long process spanning 60 to 90 days and -involves the following steps:

·         Launch an initiative for the product- An initiative can contain a single product or a group of products. It is triggered by an initiative manager who creates the charter and outlines its activities. S/he defines specific service-level agreements and allocates resources to each activity.

·         Finalize the formula- Once the initiative is launched, the R&D department develops formula details for the new product based on the parameters defined within the charter. The final working formula for the product is stored in the formula database.

·         Package design- After finalizing product formulation, the materials department begins designing the package for the product. Third-party designers may be involved in smaller tasks such as artwork, graphics, etc.

·         Plant setup- The final product formula and package design must be manufactured. This requires configuring the manufacturing plant to begin production. This typically includes setting up the plant for the new formula, the new product (the same formula can have multiple products associated with it) and the packaging material. Raw materials are procured to begin full-scale production after which the initiative manager confirms the milestone completion.

·         Marketing- Here the business manager begins the marketing campaign for the new product by announcing it to consumers and partners, while simultaneously authorizing the manufacturing plant to being production.

·         Production and shipping- Production houses begin large-scale production in plants and assemblies. The final products are shipped to the delivery centers for distribution to the retail stores, thereby marking the end of the 'New Product Launch' process life cycle.

In the above illustration, the biggest customer issue is lack of visibility into process performance. The entire process is spread across multiple departments/ systems making it tedious to monitor the process and ensure smooth progress of the launch. Further, the business is unable to identify problem areas and adopt process improvement initiatives. As a result, the overall process performance efficiency decreases, leading to delays, directly impacting the business.

Achieving Process Visibility, Control and Continuous Improvement

Managing, monitoring and analyzing business processes end-to-end has become an imperative for organizations as they seek to optimize resources and drive revenue. The implementation of an end-to-end business process and system can be illustrated as:

For seamless BPM, organizations must fulfill certain requirements, as outlined below:

Need for an end-to-end process view

Organizations require an end-to-end process view since it is critical for operational efficiency and increased business value. Processes often reside as static models and do not enable a comprehensive runtime view. Over the years, enterprise software systems have scaled up to incorporate business process and workflow management components on top of the core Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions. As a result, one complete process may become fragmented with part of the workflow in one system (ERP) and another in another application. In such cases, the end-to-end process view must not be lost.

Businesses can model the end-to-end process using the following strategies:

·         Management of key performance indicators (KPI)-Businesses must identify and monitor key indicators of overall process performance and business value at various stages. These need to be analyzed and reset/ tuned to enable process improvements.

·         Notification to handle proactive monitoring and exception scenario- Key service-level agreements must be attained by any process for business assurance. Companies need to visualize failures and exception scenarios and build a notification mechanism to pro-actively notify users.

·         Exception handling with respect to the overall process- Once the exception scenarios have been identified, a framework can be designed to appropriately handle those exceptions. Exceptions that recover automatically can utilize programmed exception handlers. In all other cases, key stakeholders can be notified for intervention.

Need for better process integration

Typically, business processes are fragmented, spanning business lines/ units/ departments. Only a part of the process/sub-process is fulfilled within each of these individual units/departments (as depicted in Figure 2).

Thus, business process owner get a segmented view of the process being implemented in different sets of applications - including ERP - and managed by different departments. Organizations must ensure visibility into each of these process touch points to understand the big picture.

As organizations link processes across different systems, they must identify the end of each application-specific process so as to initiate the completion of the overall process.

Organizations require an event/notification framework involving these touch points to maintain sequential processing. Some aspects that need to be looked at to link processes across systems (like ERP, Workflow systems and other enterprise systems) include notifying the completion of the process to subsequent application components. This notification must carry the 'How, When,

What' information about the completing process step. In an enterprise, there may be multiple such notifications and it is important to sequence them in the right order to keep the process execution order intact. Further, if there are notifications from process completion in two or many applications, they can be correlated to a single step in the overall process.

Need for an overall ownership for Business Process KPIs

The KPIs must be defined and driven by business groups who have an end-to-end understanding of the business process and the different departments and systems involved. It is only then that the indicators can be monitored and measured to realize business benefits.

Moreover, the ability to generate a dashboard that reports on KPIs at real time is a key requirement from a business performance visibility and assurance point of view. The reporting needs to be in the form of easily readable visual charts that the business community can grasp at first glance. At the same time, the reports must be easily configurable to generate information for various categories of users - from high-level dashboard reporting for the top management to the more detailed, transaction-level reporting for business analysts and application owners.

Need for going beyond process automation

Any organization aiming to improve processes needs to look beyond the realm of mere process automation.

A BPM solution needs to optimize processes dynamically at run-time to take care of bottlenecks/inefficiencies. To enable this, there needs to be a mechanism so that the process can adapt to inefficiencies/ bottlenecks automatically. The operation must be based on certain predefined conditions or rules and implement corrective actions like re-organizing, outsourcing, resource optimization (like role-shifting, etc.). These initiatives must have an end-to-end process view rather than a narrow departmental focus.

In the event of human intervention, the notification framework can be leveraged to notify the appropriate stakeholders for the necessary action to be initiated to remove the bottleneck. In such scenarios, what becomes critical is the system's ability to provide the user a way of optimizing the process at run-time for optimal performance.

Solution for Realizing Process Visibility, Control and Continuous Improvement

This section gives a high-level view of a BPM solution, which includes the basic aspects of:

·         Capturing the business process events

·         Analyzing and correlating these in the process context to extract the appropriate metrics

·         Reporting/notifying the metrics to the business user in a comprehensible format

A typical solution constitutes of the following major components:

Event Generation and Consumption

·         Event Generation- This helps identify the point of notification from application and tapping into application-specific events for propagation. It provides a common event model for consistent interpretation of events from the various enterprise source systems, with a messaging environment to propagate events for analysis and correlation.

·         Event Processing- This component interprets the captured events. It connects to the messaging layer, consumes the published events, and analyzes them based on certain predefined rules. Based on the rules, correlation takes place on key attributes within a single event or across multiple events and provides the ability to configure correlation rules. A notification event is generated flagging the completion of the event analysis and correlation.

Process Modeling and Monitoring

·         Process Modeling- Process modeling involves representing the sequence of events and activities performed by various business participants. It involves carrying out the process description and is followed by identifying user roles and defining the detailed workflow steps involved as part of this process flow. Interfacing with the various enterprise applications and systems is defined during this phase.

·         End-to-End Process Monitoring and Notification - The monitoring solution is key in tracking the performance of the process being implemented. Monitoring requirements need to be identified as part of the process modeling phase. Process monitoring presents a view on the current state of the individual process instance and provides the ability to define KPIs for each step for analysis and notification. The monitoring solution sends an alert if KPIs are missed at an individual process or process group level.

·         Process Simulation- Simulation is an abstraction of the view of the real process based on certain process-based assumptions. This step helps test the business process under different scenarios and generate reports on inconsistencies/bottlenecks in the process, with improvement recommendations. Helping refine the process, this phase provides users the ability to set process parameters to establish break points, thresholds etc., to carry out the simulation.

·         Process Improvements- The solution provides the ability to implement improvements at various levels based on the simulation analysis and recommendations (including process automation).

·         Process Automation- A process improvement technique, most process automation involves implementation of a Business Process Management System (BPMS) package, which has the ability to implement human-centric, system-centric and document-centric workflows. In addition, it provides the ability to define and configure dynamic business rules.

Conclusion

Organizations looking to leverage BPM implementations to enhance business value will not realize all potential benefits unless they focus on developing a framework for the efficient management of business process performance that allows continuous evaluation and improvement.

The art of efficient management of business process performance boils down to the structured cycle shown in Figure 5.

An organization must:

1.DISCOVER- Know and understand processes so to Discover which of them enhance the organization's true business value.

2. SET METRICS- Understand the performance targets and set the KPIs or Metrics for process performance.

3. ANALYZE- Identify improvements with respect to the overall process performance by Analyzing the process.

4. IMPROVE- Implement process Improvement initiatives based on the analysis from a holistic perspective.

5. MEASURE- Measure the process performance.

Once a process is discovered, the steps from 'Setting the Metrics' to 'Measure' are a continuous improvement cycle to achieve optimal performance out of a business process.

This is where Infosys - with its comprehensive solution framework on Process Visibility, Control and Continuous Improvement outlined in this paper - can help customers jumpstart this journey of implementing the base framework to manage their existing business processes performance.

About the Authors

Manaskumar Sarkar is a Principal Architectwith the Infosys Enterprise Solutions group and heads the Technology Council for the BPM-EAI business unit. He has led many client engagements for strategizing and implementing SOA/EAI solutions for large-scale IT programs. He can be contacted at Manaskumars@infosys.com

Praveen Kumar is a Lead Consultantwith the Infosys Enterprise Solutions group and is part of BPM-EAI business unit. He is associated with many BPM-EAI implementations and consults with various clients from different verticals. He can be contacted at praveenkumar_pj@infosys.com