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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Collaboration is Where BPM Should Shine

by Jim Sinur  |  December 2, 2008  |  5 Comments

Today BPM is gleaning significant benefit for straight through processing and for heads-down process workers. I believe that there are still benefits available in these gold veins for organizations. I also believe that these areas are ripe for organizations, going forward, to pull themselves up by their boot straps as we work our way out of the economic challenges we are presently facing. Anytime an organization can automate portions of a process to complete without human intervention, the benefits are great. In addition, if organizations can super-charge process workers with BPM, the benefits are also rich. These are both good areas of focus and traditional in nature, but I think there is a bigger fish to fry.

Enabling knowledge workers with BPM aids is a new and burgeoning area. Because the cost of knowledge workers is high, the benefits are much greater. However, it is not easy to automate their work with a fixed process, so the emergence of collaboration and indeterminate processes are happening at just the right time. I am seeing an ever increasing amount of BPM vendors including dynamic indeterminate processes as well as slick collaboration features to enable knowledge workers. As we watch best practices emerge by discovering the work knowledge workers do to complete a mushy set of tasks, we can learn to apply BPM in a new way. Watch this space in the mid range for emerging case studies.

5 Comments »

Category: BPM Business Process Improvement     Tags: ,

5 responses so far ↓

  • 1 Anatoly Belychook   December 26, 2008 at 12:14 pm

    Jim

    Very good point indeed.

    Some names from the list of “increasing amount of BPM vendors”, please?

  • 2 Jim Sinur   December 26, 2008 at 5:32 pm

    We will be writing rsearch notes on this topic going forward that will identify those vendors that have unique solutions. of course, Microsoft is in play here as well as those vendors that leverage Sharepoint qualify.

  • 3 Column 2 : Bad analyst blogging technique   December 29, 2008 at 10:50 am

    [...] a post about collaboration, of all things, a Gartner analyst shows how not to interact with his blog’s readers. If [...]

  • 4 Jim Sinur   December 29, 2008 at 11:00 am

    I did drop a big hint however, that folks should look to vendors who surround Microsoft’s SharePoint. I think I walked the line between free information and where Gartner makes it’s money. We all have to eat you know

  • 5 Roeland Loggen   January 4, 2009 at 2:40 pm

    Well, a group of people from Capgemini and the Dutch university of Utrecht is researching this topic for a while now.
    Sharepoint I would position as a fairy static data driven tool, which may support collaboration (we can find the same content and edit it), but does not enable that much process support.

    We currently have our eyes on (among others):
    HumanEDJ, Thingamy, ActionBase, ResultMaker, HandySoft, ActionTech, AgilityHouse, PNMsoft, Singularity. in addition we are looking at the more “traditional” BPM vendors, such as BEA. Also interesting is SAP’s Eventus.

    If there are other (BPM or other) vendors that are delivering a solution focused on improving productivity, visibility and compliance for the work of knowledge workers (what we call Human Centric Processes), I would be happy to be informed! And probably Jim as well…

    Regards,
    Roeland dot Loggen at Capgemini dot com
    process-transformation.blogspot.com