Jim Sinur

We are seeing cost savings efforts playing out before our very eyes and BPM is front and center in these efforts. There are additional side benefits such as time to market and agility benefits as the tempo of business changes. In addition, BPM is starting to change the people interactions going forward, but I think we are at the beginning of “the adapting to people” story for BPM. In fact, some organizations are only thinking about savings today. I would suggest that there are other things to look at in terms of engaging people and new information sources. Today processes are mostly modeled and structured for expected conditions, but there are dangers in pursuing that strategy exclusively.

I would propose we need to start thinking about unexpected exceptions and processes that are less structured (unstructured) to adapt to change and to include work that is more fluid. There are a whole lot of benefits in dealing with unstructured processes.

Unstructured Processes for Knowledge Workers

There is a huge opportunity for benefits in enabling Knowledge workers with collaborative and dynamic communications technologies that are tied to processes. Today Knowledge workers leverage structures process and collaboration technologies/features in a vacuum. There is little that brings these things together in a workbench pattern for job types. By combining snippets of structured activity and unstructured activity in a hybrid unstructured process, money can be saved enabling knowledge worker productivity.

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/01/15/knowledge-workers-and-unstructured-processes-go-together-like-wine-and-cheese/

Unstructured Process for Goal Attainment:

Process may have to flex as goals change, so coupling dynamic goals with dynamic and unstructured processes will allow the change of process composition, sequence and outcomes. This may be accomplished by management decisions supercharged by optimization technologies and decision platforms that learn toward a more real time nature. The decisions and goals could easily be affected by complex market events and management responses or a trend in an organizations collective customer/prospect base.

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/20/oh-process-how-do-you-flow/

Unstructured Processes for Examining Best Practices

By observing unstructured process, with technologies deemed as automated business process discovery focused, organizations can organically evolve best practices and change them dynamically. This is opposed to frozen best practices in purchased or built applications and structured BPM processes. This is a new area that is just starting to unfold, but I predict good growth as we migrate to unstructured processes.

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/03/12/automated-business-process-discovery-helps-visually-optimize-processes/

Structured BPM processes can play a part as a useful snippet of activity and the resulting cementing of certain best practices for those employing unstructured activity. This is a very exciting new area of growth for BPM.