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?

Hyland Software acquires Liberty Information Management Systems

Announced Monday, Hyland Software has attained Liberty Information Systems. The transaction was private. Hyland Software is a fast growing independent software vendor, and specializes in enterprise content management. Hyland Software’s current product, OneBase® Enterprise Content Management, is known as a standout product for meeting the transactional content management needs of both small and large enterprises by industry analysts.

Steve Lehrer, formerly Chief Solutions Officer at Liberty IMS, had this to say about the transaction:

Liberty IMS and Hyland Software share the same values. Both companies have remained focused on developing solutions driven by customer requirements and not industry hype. Bringing our two companies together will provide our customers and partners with an even broader set of capabilities with which to drive down costs and decrease inefficiencies while improving their business processes.

Source: Street Insider

Enterprise Information Management

In a recent blog post by Billy Cripe at Oracle, he discusses the importance of harnessing all the information that has the potential to get lost in the organization. In the future, Cripe states, it will be vital businesses to adopt an effective form content management.

Cripe believes that the wealth and importance of information often falls through the cracks, and information management will be the way to capture and use that data in the best possible way. With the ocean of information, humans swimming through often miss many of the important items because they note what they think is relevant to them.

It will be important for companies now, to be able to use an enterprise information management system that has the ability to capture all of these key tools: programmatic indexing, entity extraction, topical mapping, social inputs, sentiment and semantic awareness. Utilizing these tools will propel companies with their knowledge of information to the next level of business tools.

Mexican Telecommunications provider centers processes around BPM

At BEA, they give a great example of how BPM can power a business from the inside out. Tkonecta, a relatively new telecommunications provider in Mexico, set out with a goal to keep their staffing low while obtaining 15,000 new customers monthly with a guratnee of servicing them each within five days.

Tkonecta used BEA AquaLogic Business Process Management to center their efforts so all teams could communicate and provide service quickly to customers. By using the BPM features, they were able to automate and optimize high volume processes, down costs and improve the customer experience.

They used the services available to design the perfect BPM process for the situations they needed. The BPM was used to drive the processes, and since the program was being built from scratch, they could find the kinks before they became problems. They built programs that stream lined sales, operations and inventory, engineering, finance and customer service. They are also able to pull reports on their progress weekly.

The result in Tkonecta centering their business around BPM was meeting their service goals: service in less than five days and 15,000 customers a month with fewer than 500 people working for the company.

Green Hat and 1st Thought to Offer New Product

Green Hat in conjunction with 1^st Thought, a UK based firm, is offering a new automation product that is a testing platform for SOA and BPM. According to the news article found in Integration Developer News, the two companies are making it available only for TIBCO’s iProcess. Peter Cole, Green Hat President and CTO, made this statement regarding this product launch:

“Some of the world’s largest organizations are using BPM in conjunction with SOA to deliver maximum business value. Until recently, automation of BPM testing has always been a stumbling block,”

Nigel Winship, CEO of 1^st Thought, also had this to say:

“The ability that GH Tester now provides to drive the testing of a process end to end is genuinely ground breaking and we believe affords huge scope to drive down delivery costs for BPM projects.”

BPM Processes Not Always the best for Knowledge Workers

Most business process management tools are used in situations where a process occurs repeatedly over a long time. In a recent article written by Keith Harrison-Broninski at BP Trends, he takes time to look at how business processes need to cater to knowledge workers and their not-repeatable processes.

He begins the article by stating three problems currently shaping a new face in collaborative knowledge work:

1. Market globalization is forcing commercial companies to “compete smarter.”
2. Reduction in labor demand is forcing knowledge workers to “work smarter.”
3. Worldwide recession is forcing organizations to “cut costs smarter.”

Knowledge work is harder to adapt to a business process than many things. It can’t be planned in the future. Harrison-Broninski points out that it’s easier to adapt business process software with human centric processes more so than human-driven processes. So there is a drive to adapt software to the needs of the knowledge worker.

The factors listed above are responsible in pushing software to become better for a BPM software for human processes. With companies having to streamline the process because of the recession and therefore fewer workers, it’s crucial that software is adapted to aid their processes. This software must help with collaborative, adaptive and innovative software. These three things can only be addressed after it’s been determined by the knowledge workers what their responsibilities, goals, and commitments are.

Before the software can be effective, Harrison-Broninski has addressed the process for the flow of knowledge before it gets put into the system. His theory is called HIM (Human Interaction Management). The steps are: research, evaluate, analyze, constrain and task. With research, it’s critical to talk to those who know the information first hand, and turn it into personal knowledge. While in the evaluation stage, it is important to step back and review what you’ve learned. Know the information you’ve learned in and out. During the analyze process, it’s important to decide how to approach the problem. While in the constrain phase, separate the work in to intervals, and decide what order they need to be completed. And the final phase, task, involves disturbing the work.

KPN Chooses the Cordys BPM Suite

According to this news release on Realwire, a leader in telecommunications, KPN, has chosen to link Cordys Business Process Management Suite to help process online customer requests. The Cordys suite will be the link between activating and invoicing new services like internet, telecom, and multimedia which was released in the beginning of 2008.

The business process platform will enable KPN to cater to customer’s need faster and more effectively, now that customers can order services online. Reduction of costs is an added bonus to this automated system that KPN will put into place.

Jan Muchez, CIO of KPN mentions:

“Because of the intense time pressure we faced we were looking for a supplier who could not only provide a flexible application, but also has extensive knowledge of the subject matter so as to contribute to this strategic project.”