Jim Sinur

Being somewhat of an artist, I think visualization is an extremely important life force. Most people learn faster visually and rarely groove on “text only” learning. With my visual biases confessed, you can maybe understand my passion for this blog. With that said, I am convinced BPM needs to take on better visualization.

There is plenty of opportunity for BPM to improve it’s visual pop and set the bar for visualizing the work of organizations and play a part in visually acting out the results of decisions made by organizations. Let’s start with modes of visualization.

A Static View:

Static views are helpful when visually studying and analyzing the progress and results of processes. Staring dashboards looking for trends, problems and exceptions is typical for BPM and is an inherent view provided by business activity monitoring (BAM) today. This won’t go away, but there is much more.

A Dynamic View:

Watching periodic updates in a timed fashion, either push or pull, is certainly a move up the visualization ladder. Active searching for good and bad behavior and instantly pointing it out leveraging  tolerances and constraints will be an expectation going forward. Attracting ones eye to these events or set of events will be crucial as the speed of business increases. This is a necessary step in attaining great time to market results.

An Interactive and Animated View:

We will have to go past twinkling lights to a more interactive mode of process management. Processes will notify process participants of emerging patterns visually and allow decision makers to visually “try responses” before they commit to a response, repetitive or not. Aspects of gaming will creep into process management over time.

In order for BPM to do a makeover, one must focus on the areas the eyes hit the most in process work and decision actions. Below are most common areas for attention by organizations and providers.

Process Work Loads:

Visualizing individual process instances/cases progress towards completion is the minimal level here and good. However, visualization that shows over all work inventories with classification (on time, late or becoming late for example), “happy path” compliance, exceptions caught in the process, and risky sets of activities is more of what’s needed.

Process Work Environments:

Dynamic and customized work environments that wrap themselves around job roles is an important trend here. These are sometimes called workbenches (traders workbench, underwriters workbench, customer service workbench) and have significant visualization aimed at speciality roles even if these roles cross processes, systems, information sources and collaboration opportunities. This implies the ability to not only change the look and feel, but the nature of the workbench based on carrying multiple roles by individual resources.

Process Progress Towards Goals:

While looking at individual process instances/cases for progress towards conflicting goals is important to visualize, work portfolios have to be visualized along with the deltas by time boxed goal sets. In a world of dynamic process, rules and goals, the effect of change of outcomes linked to change waves will be important for decision makers. This may be done ahead of time by modeling the effects of decisions and consequent rule changes, in real time or after the fact.

Process Resource Utilization:

Today’s world is now aimed at resource utilization as a crucial factor in raising organizational, country and regional productivity driven revenue/GDP. Getting more out of resources is an important drumbeat that can’t be ignored, but we can’t break the resources without consequences in the long run. Visually monitoring resources in a holistic fashion will be the need going forward (inter and intra process).

Process Context:

Processes can’t run in a vacuum. The context of the process is more important than the context of the resources supporting them. Looking at the markets, geographies, value/supply chains and business scenarios plus their effects on individual processes will be important going forward. Looking for patterns in this context will be an evolving and important skill going for forward.

I really think there is great opportunity to add significant amounts of visualization to BPM and I am expecting the vendors to step up to the challenge. See http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2010/08/25/its-time-for-bpm-vendors-ante-up-with-better-visualization/

BTW: I do want to apologize to the ladies for not being able to find a fashionable male counterpart to post here for your pleasure as well

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Category: Applications BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Cloud EA ERP Green IT Governance Optimization Simulation Social Strategic Planning Virtualization     Tags: BPM, Business Process Improvement, Business Rules, Decision Management, events, Green, Optimization, Process Improvement, Process Management, Simulation, symposium

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