Jim Sinur

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

Jim Sinur
Research VP
2 years at Gartner
42 years IT industry

Jim Sinur is a vice president in Gartner Research after a short stint with a BPM vendor. Prior to that, Mr. Sinur was with Gartner 15 years and helped establish the BPI/BPM areas at Gartner and is considered a thought leader. His research and areas… Read Full Bio

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The Challenge of BPM for Knowledge Workers

by Jim Sinur  |  September 23, 2008  |  4 Comments

Back in the late eighties and in a previous role, we tried to come up with a process that would take the work away from our doctors, who were used on complicated insurance policies in the underwriting process, and give it to less skilled employees. We spent some time trying to put a “doctor in a box” by leveraging business rules technologies, but BREs were not ready to handle our problems then. We also realized that knowledge engineering was very difficult and rules maintenance/management was very labor intensive at that time.

We then tried to create a process that was flexible to handle most of the policies, but became frustrated with the number of process paths and outcomes. The process technologies were rigid and deterministic, so we had to pre-plan and design all the outcomes and paths leading to those outcomes. This was an impossible task. BPM at that time did not exist, nor did the technologies at that time support flexible processes that supported the kind of collaborations that medical professionals liked to practice.

After having a two strike count, we decided to stop swinging at the fences (swing for the sixes for those who like cricket). We settled on processes that had flexible rules and an escalation process that protected the scarce and expensive resources (doctors and highly skilled nurses) and enabled lower skilled medical folks to make prudent decisions in our underwriting process.

I think today that the BPM, BRE and emerging rules management technologies (BRMS), that Gartner has documented are near ready for the knowledge worker and the kind of indeterminate processes that are implied by knowledge work. What do you think? I’m kind of excited about what is next here.

4 Comments »

Category: Business Process Improvement Business Rules     Tags: ,

4 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Nancy Shapira-Aronovic   October 2, 2008 at 7:49 am

    Jim,
    I blogged you last week. Wanted to know if you will be at the IT Expo in Orlando and if we can meet up?

  • 2 Jim Sinur   October 6, 2008 at 8:11 am

    Nancy,

    I will be at the IT Expo, but please use email for this kind of communication in the future. Thanks

    Jim

  • 3 BPM Enables People   June 2, 2009 at 8:21 pm

    [...] http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2008/09/23/the-challenge-of-bpm-for-knowledge-workers/ [...]

  • 4 Garth Knudson   June 5, 2009 at 11:51 am

    Jim, we’re seeing the same thing. The untapped market for BPM is where Knowledge Workers play crucial roles in gathering, reviewing and approving information.

    I’m guessing about 30% of processes follow formal business rules. Before process execution you know process participant role and responsibility as well as process policies and procedures. Everything can be modeled and designed.

    The other 70% of processes are unstructured. You may know how the process starts and ends, but the activities in between vary based on the source of the request and the people who can help answer the question. As a result you cannot really design an app that completely supports the process.

    So I agree with you that BPM needs to enable process discovery post execution. Give companies the ability to get started fast, then figure out the exact details later.