E-mails Role in Business Process Management

This article discusses how e-mail, instead of being simply a supplement to BPM, has morphed into a tool that is increasingly taking up more and more of an employees time. The author, Ramon Padilla, quotes Ross Mayfield, President of Socialtext,

“(Employees) spend most of their time handling exceptions to business processes. That’s what they are doing in their inbox for four hours a day. E-mail has become the great exception handler.”

Padilla further expands by discussing reasons as to why e-mail has become time consuming in organizations:

1. [We are] Making it up as we go along
2. Not enforcing business process
3. Business processes that are not automated or automated with software that is outdated or doesn’t fulfill the user’s needs
4. Lack of communications within an application or integration with other communication mechanisms
5. Lack of communication alternatives besides e-mail

These points raise questions regarding organizations use of BPM. If e-mail is taking up much of an employees time as a way to deal with exception in BPM, does this mean that the company does not have effective business processes in place? Do you agree with the author’s points? Is there anything you would add or detract from the list above?

We're getting ready to launch a new blog that looks at the broader issues of Business Process Management, update your RSS feed now as we get it ready for our official launch: http://evolvebpm.blogspot.com/

Is BPM Automation Possible?

On Saturday Avinash Malik, an enterprise architect from Microsoft, wrote an article explaining his view on automated BPM, and how despite the “hype”, it can never be truly automated. His theory states that about 15 to 20 years ago, organizations started developing BPM, and working this new concept into their budgets. This led IT developers to develop unique languages, namely BPMN or BPEL, in order to create software His opinion is that people think that with these developments it would be possible to save costs and not keep any IT developers on staff. The problem with this thinking, as he states in the article is that,

“We can automate a small number of situations where coherent activities, in sequence, are performed entirely by computer. Certainly, we want these situations to increase. But the overall impact on the cost and quality of IT-developed software is minimal. And if we are not addressing the cost and quality of IT software... why even discuss BPM automation?”

Other experts have already added their opinions to the fray as can be seen by this post from Bruce Silver, who has a different opinion. Another post that discussed Malik’s opinion can be found here. What are your thoughts on the pros and cons of BPM automation?