Human Process Management is the Key to Driving Higher BPM Business Value
November 10th, 2008 by Jacob UkelsonI was reading the latest Forrester BPM report on eBizQ and found it to be quite an interesting read - especially for the endorsement it seemed to give human process management as a required extension to BPM - without actually naming it as such. That was my only quarrel with the authors - they expect BPM suites to be extended to handle unstructured, ad-hoc, chaotic (their term) human processes. That makes it sound like handling those types of process is just a small feature of an BPMS, a small extension that BPM suites should add. In my experience that isn’t the case - building an system to manage these types of human processes is no trivial task, and don’t expect BPM vendors to be able to do it - it just requires a different type of thinking -especially since to get people to adopt it you need to unseat an entrenched “competitor” - email. Here are some of the quotes that relate directly to human process management:
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“in real life, processes change all the time; in fact, our interviews consistently show that processes never stop changing“
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“The outcome of a discounting decision may be captured in the BPMS by integrating or embedding a business rules engine, but the way the decision was made — the reason for the discount — is often recorded in an obscure email thread, if at all.”
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“But many real-world, people intensive processes are so rife with exceptions that it’s impossible to model all the permutations in a traditional process modeling tool. These ad hoc, chaotic processes are difficult to support even using today’s BPMS tools”
OK -so even for the most structured processes in an organization - the ones that have actually been implemented via a BPMS - even those processes are constantly in flux - which means that almost always the users are going to need to morph and change the process before the IT department can reprogram system - no matter how good the tools are. So how is this actually handled in the real world? - no surprise here, it is done via email. These above quotes from the paper make it clear that no matter how well designed the process implementation is - it can’t anticipate every nuance of the process, or every new context - there will always be the need for a tool that allows end users the flexibility to handle the ever changing requirements and demands of real life business processes without IT involvement - while still allowing for management, monitoring and optimizing. Email provides the flexibility, and HPMS built on top of email - provides the rest. If not - BPM initiatives will bring only limited business value.
So in short - even for companies embarking on enterprise BPMS - remember H comes shortly after B, and you’ll need a good HPMS to round out your BPMS.

