RE: "BPM Suites: Functional, Cross-functional and Dysfunctional"

Two reasons where I have seen companies slow to adopt process automation efforts are:

• In the process discovery phase, they (the company's business process champions) cannot agree on what the process is and/or how it should operate
• There are too many exceptions that are part of the process and the BPM/workflow tool they are using is not able to easily and quickly account for the numerous exceptions.

One could even argue that fully discovering a business process before entering the automation phase is not compulsory. Rather, the defined and mapped business process best serves the "majority" of the routing situations, and the BPM tool should then be flexible and open enough to allow for unexpected and/or unhandled routing situations. An ideal BPM solution should allow for:

• Any step in the business process to be activated ("jumped to" from any step in the process)
• Any step in the business process to have defined recipients and "ad hoc" recipients (in the case the defined recipient is not available and the task at hand is urgent and needs immediate attention)

At the very minimum, a business process should not be able to be bottlenecked because of any one person not being available to work on the task itself or a company's staff mindlessly pushing tasks through people's inboxes just to get the task at hand to the right person on the right step. In these cases, the automated process is actually a detriment to the company compared to the original manual process. The ability to quickly enter into the process automation phase, but also not risk process chaos because of the possible immaturity of the process, is "phase" of business process evolution where classic business process discovery and initial business process automation actually overlap. Moreover, once the business process has been utilized for some time, through round trip automation, live results of the business process can be compared with the initial modeling efforts of the process to determine how much or how many unexpected routing situations occurred. Meaning, the answer to the question "How different was the modeled process from the executed process?" reveals itself.

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Chris Adams
VP Product Marketing and Management
Ultimus