When it comes to unstructured, human-centric processes, organizations do realize they can't (and don't) use business process management tools, yet many continue to rely on e-mail and office documents which are just as inadequate, said a New York-based vendor of human process management systems.
Ad hoc and unstructured processes -- like those that require negotiations and human judgment, or a change in structure or participants as the work progresses -- comprise about 80 percent of all business processes, said ActionBase's chief technology officer Jacob Ukelson.
It doesn't work to use e-mail and office documents to manage processes that are unstructured, said Ukelson, "because once it goes off into an e-mail stream, no one knows how it's going to complete, there's endless follow-up, telephone calls, extra e-mails."
Business process management (BPM) tools, on the other hand, best manage the types of processes that are well-thought out, packaged, and easy to model, explained Ukelson, and they tend to "handle the more structured kinds of processes that are relatively rigorous and sort of standardized across companies."
However, modeling human-centric processes can be tricky given they tend to change in a very fluid manner, he said. For instance, a human-centric process might entail various steps including a person assessing a situation, determining how it could best be solved, escalating the situation to others, gathering information, and engaging in negotiations. "And almost every time the process is invoked, in every instance, in some ways it's different than the one before," said Ukelson.
Modeling such a fluidly changing process would mean having to build rules that reflect every possible scenario and exception, said Ukelson, and "you'll end up with a humongous chart... somehow you'd have to build all that smarts into your system and that would be very, very difficult."
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