Jim Sinur

One of the things that differentiates between workflow and the BPMS, besides real time visibility through activity monitoring, is agility. Agility is recognized by the ability to think and draw conclusions quickly to exercise nimble movements easily. This could be in response to real time monitoring and/or policy changes needed by management and/or behavior changes required by clients. BPMS technologies are instrumented to be agile therefore allow for rapid response to business conditions.

BPM Agility Comes in Several Flavors: (Aiming at Agility)

The BPMS has features that allow it to exercise agility. First of all, BPMS allows for agility in the process development phase in that it can leverage SOA. BPMS capabilities have the ability to search directories for reusable process snippets and/or business/technology services.

Secondly BPMS platforms have the ability to externalize rules, generally in business rules engines, to allow for dynamic changes in the execution of processes. An example would be to change the limits on the size of a loan that would require extra underwriting steps in light of tightening credit market and better risk underwriting practices.

Thirdly the sequence of flow can by dynamically determined and late bound. This could be the dynamic creation of a composite flow by combining unrelated existing process snippets and/or services based on the needs of the knowledge worker directing the processes or and intelligent controlling heuristic.

Policies/Rules are Central: (Applying the Forgotten Ingredient).

Rules have a significant impact on the agility of a process and permeate many aspects of a business change friendly process. The ways rules can have an effect on process include the following:

• Process Flow Control

• Variable Tolerance Levels

• Goal Representations and Constraints

• Recognition of Relevant Events

• Recognition of Complex Events

• Recognition of Optimization Opportunities

• Guidance for Optimization Outcomes for Processes, People

• Complex Decision Assists

• Recognition of Emerging Business Scenarios

• Suggestion for Policy Changes

• Service Orchestration Order

• Service Logic

• Composite Application Flow

• Legacy Application Control & Leverage

• New Scenario, Policy and Rule Rollout

Exploiting the Strength of Explicit: (Ascending to Proactive Management).

There are two ways to exploit the strength of explicit processes, rules and services. One is in a reactive way where the need for changes are recognized, evaluated and implemented in quickly and can be handled as they occur. The implication here is that knowledgeable process managers can anticipate the impact of change and not cause cascading effects.

For organizations and/or process managers that are proactive by nature, there are techniques for anticipating conditions and scenarios. By linking policies and rules to likely scenarios, managers can have predetermined courses of adjustment waiting in the wings for the right set of conditions. Sophisticated organizations might want to create scenarios around strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOTS).

Leveraging Agility for Advantage

If your processes are quite fixed and oriented to straight through processing, you may not need the agility afforded by BPM suites. Even the most stable of companies seem to be affected by the swings of a world market and the resulting economies, so I think these kinds of situations will become rare over time. If you suspect that change is headed your way, the agility afforded in today’s BPM suites will become a welcome friend. Be prepared to declare your management style for agility, but it will likely include both reactive and proactive methods over time.