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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BPM Based Workbenches: A Notch Above Portals?

by Jim Sinur  |  June 25, 2009  |  1 Comment

On one of my early BPM projects, we had to create specific workbenches by skill level. Initially we had specific workbenches for underwriters, advanced underwriters and underwriter managers. The idea was to aggregate and customize a workbench with all necessary work lists, applications and specialty content/tools easily available in predetermined areas on an interface. This gave the workers an ideal and consistent environment from which to complete their cases and daily tasks. This idea was so successful we had business folks asking for workbenches for the medical folks such as nurses and disease specialists and doctors.

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Of course, we had to hand craft those work benches back in the day. Today, of course, there are more alternatives. Two that come to mind are portals and BPM technologies. I would like to explore each of those alternatives.

Portal Based Work Benches:

Portals allow high degrees of customization including the look and feel. That look and feel can be packaged into patterns and propagated. Each individual can them customize their own environment. Portals are great aggregators of content from many websites and can notify the user of changing conditions that might impact their work environment. It is hard to argue that portals are not essential, so what’s missing? They treat each process and application as a separate entity.

BPM Based Work Benches:

BPM allows for the aggregation of several sources of work into one work list and allows individuals to track their work in one space, In addition, process cases/instances can be routed and work activities customized around skill levels of the individuals sitting at the workbench. Since the core work for an individual is likely to reside in one work list, resource optimization/schedulers can look in one place to find the present workload.

It’s not a zero sum game when it comes to purposed workbenches, but neither is sufficient alone. I would have settled for either, back then, but the combination would have put me in heaven. .

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Category: BPM Business Process Improvement     Tags: ,

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  • 1 The Drum Beat for BPM Usability Continues   October 14, 2009 at 1:23 pm

    [...] See a previous posting on the workbench experience :http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/06/25/bpm-based-workbenches-a-notch-above-portals/ [...]