Automating Uncertainty: Transcending the Limits of BPM

At its core, business process management (BPM) is a basic sequence of activities characterized as having measurable inputs, added value, and measurable outputs. The activities, which can cross organizational boundaries, are repeatable, definable, and predictable.

Because of its ability to deliver on cost reduction, increased productivity, higher customer service levels, and a respectable return on investment, more and more organizations are recognizing the value that BPM provides.

For a class of applications, however, business processes must be flexible enough to incorporate uncertainty and human judgment into the process the first time around. It’s this point—agility—that is uncovering the limitations of traditional BPM.

The limits of BPM

Dynamic is hardly the word used to describe most process applications, primarily because the very heart of BPM lies in repeatable, definable, predictable tasks. Yet industry analyst Forrester says that organizations are seeking “dynamic applications” in order to gain the most benefit from process applications. Dynamic is more than a catchphrase here: It’s an absolute necessity for accommodating uncertainty and human judgment, combined with the ability to adapt to change quickly.

The problem with traditional BPM is that many processes require human intervention when decisions cannot be modeled by a rules engine. Yet precisely the opposite occurs when humans interrupt a business process: Costs can rise and responsiveness can drop dramatically—a tried-and-true recipe for creating unhappy customers and investors.

Human intervention has a way of morphing a straightforward task into a complex web of changing business rules, shifting external factors, and potential business risks to handle situations that simply don’t fit into defined, repeatable processes. Most BPM products cannot elegantly synchronize complex situations. Yet many organizations use interactive processes that demand tight integration with decisions from knowledge workers combined with ad hoc collaboration and decision-making.

For example, in the financial, insurance, pharmaceutical, and health care industries, where governmental regulations can drive daily business decisions, compliance issues can create exceptions that must be addressed on a case-by-case basis. It’s imperative that an organization be agile enough to deal with these exceptions in a regulated way. For these exceptions, a new process approach is not only desirable but necessary.

A new approach: case processing

That new approach is case processing, also known as case management. This is a pattern of work in which processes can be sequential, nonsequential, manual, and/or automated as well as standard and ad hoc in nature. You can’t get much more dynamic than that.

Case processing differs from BPM in several ways:

• The case offers a central point of control and containerizes multiple documents, data, tasks, and discussions related to the matter at hand.
• It provides deep flexibility for “on-the-go” process changes by taking into account all potential outcomes of a given step within the case.
• It allows nondeterministic workflows in which activities can be performed in different ways depending upon the details of each case instance.

Unique aspects of case processing

In any given case, there are one or more points where different continuations are possible, and the workflow depends on the details of each case. Case processing, then, depends most on human decisions concerning specific facts of the case.

Perhaps the most unique aspect of integrated case processing is that it is simultaneously knowledge worker and data intensive. Groups of people—both internal and external—can collaborate on a case, even when the case is ad hoc in nature and still changing during a process. This collaboration is achieved through a user-defined configuration approach instead of a developer-oriented coding approach: Users can manipulate the process as needed to optimize their access to information, make decisions, and create resolution.

What’s needed is a convergence of technologies designed to support the knowledge worker: allowing people to process information with an accelerated approach and to easily collaborate in nondeterministic workflows.

Because case management is such a highly dynamic process, it becomes BPM at its most effective: repeatable and agile. Risks created by ad hoc handling of issues, such as those presented by compliance or governance demands, untimely follow-through, or client expectations, are substantially reduced. Even though each case follows its own processes, the team still tracks and reconciles it to ensure conformity where required.

The repeatability in flexible situations offers the blueprint for success in case management. It can: lower costs; require fewer resources; reduce risks associated with compliance/governance issues; and, increase productivity. In today’s economy, all these elements require thoughtful consideration.

Conclusion

Case management is critical to expanding the use of BPM into more strategic and knowledge driven processes. Although BPM is certainly a must-have, it’s inevitable that higher-order processes will require human judgment, collaboration, and document management that BPM cannot provide independently.

Driven by market demand to build case-based solutions better, faster, and at a lower cost, EMC created the Documentum xCelerated Composition Platform (xCP). Configuration-based with the user in mind, it combines processes, people, information, customer communications, and compliance into a single comprehensive yet integrated application composition platform.

Documentum xCP further differentiates itself by providing an application composition platform which enables customers and partners to build case management applications with minimal project risk. With Documentum xCP you can reliably automate your most important processes and reduce operational costs, delight your customers, and cut organizational risk.