Analyst Connie Moore devours 12 BPMS vendors across 215 criteria to understand the renewed trend towards Human-Centric business processes.
She segregates Business processes today into 4 major groupings:
- Integration intensive
- Order fulfillment, HIPAA transactions, Supply chain mgmt
- People intensive
- Employee on-boarding, Claims processing, Handling exceptions
- Decision intensive
- Mortgage loan origination, Underwriting, Retail inventory mgmt
- Document intensive
- Accounts payable, Contract mgmt, Proposal mgmt, SOX and other compliance processes
Given that most vendors play across these groupings and have offerings that could be classified under more than one group, she observes that the processes themselves are either
- Human-centric processes
- those that require people to get work done by relying on and interacting
extensively with business applications, databases, collaboration tools, and documents - ex. claims processing, loan approvals, accounts payable, and customer
service
- those that require people to get work done by relying on and interacting
- System-intensive processes.
- manage interactions between packaged applications, custom applications,
external applications - typically involve millions of transactions per day that are handled
on a straight-through basis with no to minimal human involvement and few exceptions - ex. trade reconciliations, supply chain management, and line provisioning
- manage interactions between packaged applications, custom applications,
Just as web application development in the late 90′s and early 2000′s went from a heavily data-centric (ERD’s) to application-centric (J2EE, .NET) to finally user-centric design(Flash, Web 2.0, RIA) and architecture, the BPMS market seems to be headed towards the users of the tools.
Its the user. As long as the application caters to the user’s needs, and allows him/her to do his/her job better and that tad bit easier, and can beat that nasty commute back home [or hopefully tele-commute], the application will be a success. It does not matter whether you built the application using J2EE, .NET, Oracle, Weblogic, Websphere, Lombardi, Savvion, PRPC or peppered it with the jargon flavor of the day – AJAX, SOA, Mashups, Web 2.0, CRM 2.0, BPM 2.0 etc., What matters is that the user feels comfortable using the tool, and feels that it has increased his/her productivity.
When you factor this into your design, and place the user and his/her actions at the center of your design .. and model the application to handle the processes that emanate from this core… you will have effective design. you will have an application that is intrinsically usable.
and in order to place individuals at the center of process analysis, Forrester suggests:
- Make the individual or small team the design point; focus on people in the process, rather than removing them from the process.
- Identify people/information-intensive processes
- Focus on the processes that are broken
- Think about what percentage of the IT budget is dedicated to empowering people vs. automating rote processes
All this focus on the user and people at the core of these processes, will surely interest vendors and IT departments that have been focused purely on automation and straight-through processing.
The result? Lombardi Software, Pegasystems, and Savvion lead with comprehensive suites that foster rapid, iterative process design
The message? the next wave of process optimization lies in empowering people.
the vendors evaluated : Appian, FileNet, Fuego, Fujitsu, Global 360, HandySoft, Lombardi, Metastorm, Pegasystems, Savvion, TIBCO, Ultimus
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