Workflow in the world of BPM
Are they the same?
From the Workflow Handbook 2005
©2005 by Charles A. Plesums,
Fellow, Workflow Management Coalition
Austin, Texas, USA
Workflow
"In the Middle Ages, monks sat at tables carefully copying the
scriptures. The father superior would make the assignments, perhaps
giving the illuminated first page of a section to the most skilled
artist, perhaps assigning the proofreading tasks to the elderly scholar
with trembling hands.
Little has changed in centuries – the process is established, work
is assigned and tracked, performance is checked, and results
delivered. Often it is done by manual effort of supervisors (even
today). But
automated tools have emerged to assist.
Workflow Management
Document imaging emerged as a practical technology in the mid 1980s.
When the images were stored in a computer system, there no longer was
any paper to drop in somebody‘s in-box – no natural way to assign and
track the work. The initial simple workflow management tools routed the
work to the person (or sequence of people) that needed to process the
documents. The early workflow management systems were intimately
associated with the content – the document – that was being moved or
routed.
The workflow management tools evolved to assign priorities to
different types of work, to balance the distribution of work among
multiple resources (people) who could handle the work, to support
interruptions in the work (I‘ll finish it in the morning), and to
handle reassignment (I‘m sick and am leaving now).
Not all work was associated with a document, so most workflow
management systems were adapted (if necessary) to process work that had
no documents, images, or attachments – pure process, without content.
For example, renewing an insurance policy or changing a credit limit.
Not all processing steps required a person. Therefore most current workflow management
systems support "straight through" processing or robotics. For example,
- As part of a larger process, one person may enter data
from an order or application. When the entry is done and necessary data
is available, the workflow system may automatically requests a credit
report from a system in another company. When the report is received,
the manual or automated process continues.
- The entire
process may be automated. An address change may be detected (perhaps on
the payment stub), so is automatically sent to an OCR process. If the
address recognized from the form is a valid address in the postal
database, the change is made, and a confirmation letter is sent to the
customer. A person is only involved in an error – if the data cannot
automatically be verified.
Thus workflow management systems are no longer just a simple
inventory of work to be processed, or a simple routing system, but have
become sophisticated process management tools. They originally assigned
documents to people for processing, so most products have special
strength assigning longer tasks to people, with one or many attached
documents, but the viable workflow management systems have gone far
beyond their historical origins.
Business Process Management
Business has become more complex in recent years. Many processes
extend outside the organization – even outside the enterprise. Some of
the steps that traditionally were handled internally are now being
"outsourced" to "business partner" companies or individual contractors.
Suppliers of products and services can be more economical and
predictable when they are integrated into the larger process.
System tools have emerged to help analyze and design these complex
new business processes. Other tools, the invocation engines, run the
process as defined. Specifically these engines invoke transactions on
systems both internally and across many organizations – suppliers,
partners, and customers. Business Process Management – BPM – is born.
The new BPM tools have been defined "top down" rather than simply
evolving (like most workflow management tools). The techniques used to
define the process are more rigorous – some people take pride in being
able to describe the mathematical foundation behind the various
techniques. Graphical maps, modeling, and simulation are common tools
to define the process. In production, the invocation engines will use
the latest technology (including the Internet) to pass data and invoke
processes on local and remote systems within an organization, between
different organizations within an enterprise, and between enterprises.
Are BPM and Workflow the same?
Both Business Process Management and Workflow allow a process to be
defined, tested, and used. BPM originally focused on computer
transactions - the large number of rapid business processes most often
handled entirely by machine. Workflow originally focused on content
that required human judgment or processing, often distributed among
large numbers of people, with each process taking a relatively long
time, thus being subject to interruption. Both BPM and Workflow can
handle the entire range of business processes. The question is how well
each product works in each situation.
BPM is focused on defining the overall business process, and
managing and tracking that process wherever it goes, often through
multiple organizations, different computer systems, multiple locations,
and even different enterprises. However, each transaction is normally
quick – the request to get a credit report may need to be queued until
morning, but when run, the response is immediate. There may be only
one system that performs a particular transaction, and when it is run,
it is rarely interrupted. Since processing is fast, most can be
processed on a first-in, first-out basis. BPM is optimized for
processes that are automatic, not involving human interaction.
Workflow is focused on managing the process also, but often has
components of uncertainty and delay such as those associated with
people. We may have to send the "work" to someone for approval, but
that person may be interrupted (suspending the work while they take a
phone call, go to a meeting, or even return from vacation). There may
be many (even hundreds) of different processors (people or systems)
that could handle that particular piece of work, and any one processor
may be able to process many different types of work (but not the same
combination as the next processor). The total work must be equitably
distributed among the many processors. Some of the processing may take
many minutes or hours, so more important work (the bigger deal or the
better customer or the older work) may be given higher priority – be
assigned first. The workflow is often modified as the person seeks
additional information (such as a lab analysis or a legal opinion) for
this particular case. Quality needs to be checked – not just is the
system operating reliably, but are the people making mistakes.
(Beginners may have 100% of their work checked, but an expert may only
have a few percent checked.) Most workflow products can invoke programs
automatically (without human intervention) like the BPM engines, but
are optimized for the multiple processors and delays in the process.
But many of the workflow products on the market today aren‘t (yet) as
focused on the cross-enterprise or inter-enterprise processes as the
BPM tools.
We could conclude that both workflow management products and BPM
products manage a business process, so in that sense they are the same.
These products may be very different internally – and thus the
strengths and weaknesses of those products in a particular application
can be very different.
- Many workflow vendors have integrated BPM products into
their workflow packages, but the degree of integration is sometimes
limited – the product still is primarily a workflow tool.
- Many
BPM vendors have discovered the special needs of workflow, and have
either integrated a workflow product into their BPM packages, or have
built-in rudimentary workflow functions.
Embedded Workflow
Many computer systems, such as those that process orders or
administer insurance policies, have recognized the value of workflow.
Therefore many of these systems have embedded workflow among the
functions provided by their system. The good news is that this is a
fast and convenient way to get started in workflow. The bad news is
that it may only have a minimal set of workflow functionality – just
enough to perform that specific application in an unsophisticated way.
The workflow functions of a dedicated enterprise workflow system are
likely to be much more robust than those that are embedded within a
specific application.
One person rarely works with a single application all day, every day
– some of their time may be spent substituting for a supervisor, or
quality checking other people‘s work. Some companies mix assignments
between "back office mail processing" and "front office call center"
work. Some time will be spent in training or even developing new work
management procedures. Work may arrive from the telephone, internal or
external email, from the paper inbox, or from the workflow system.
People do not do well balancing the work from multiple sources – while
working on email, they will likely respond to all the email, even if
more important work is waiting in the workflow system or inbox. This
leads to an argument for a separate enterprise (or desktop) workflow
systems, that balance the work between multiple business functions and
systems.
Standards
The Workflow Management Coalition reference model, below, defines
five components of workflow – the five interfaces to the workflow
enactment services (what BPM calls the invocation engine).
Understanding the five components, represented by arrows in the
diagram, helps distinguish between BPM and Workflow systems.
WfMC Interface 1 is the process definition. This is the starting
point for BPM and the particular BPM component that has received a lot
of analysis and development. Workflow products vary in the techniques
and tools used to define the process – some products use third party
tools, if any, for analysis of the process, or use custom programs or
simply manually generated tables to define the business process for the
processing engine.
WfMC Interface 2 is the client application – the program that
invokes the workflow process. Workflow tools have a strong history of
human interface, so may be stronger in this aspect; BPM is
traditionally focused on processes that require less human interaction,
and may have a stronger programming interface. Some BPM products have
no human interface at all – any human interaction must be custom
programmed.
WfMC Interface 3 is the interface to the programs invoked by
the business process. The first workflow systems presented documents to
people for processing in their traditional way (none of the processes
to be performed by the people were automatically invoked). Workflow
vendors quickly learned that they needed at least a minimal interface
to expedite the process – start the right program for the user, even if
the data all needed to be entered manually. Eventually most workflow
tools evolved, and can invoke local and remote processes, but that
interface must often be customized – it is an "add on" to many
systems. On the other hand, BPM is built to automatically invoke
existing systems, using consistent, modern interfaces. BPM products
generally excel here, except when dealing with archaic legacy systems
that don‘t support the modern interfaces and tools.
WfMC Interface 4 allows one workflow system to talk to
another workflow system… to initiate work on another system (perhaps a
different vendor‘s system in a different enterprise), to track the
status (progress) of that work, to cancel the work if necessary, and to
inquire or be notified when the work is complete. BPM invocation
engines generally don‘t talk to other engines, but would invoke a
transaction at another enterprise, and that transaction might, in turn,
initiate a local process. Either approach gets the job done.
WfMC Interface 5 is for administration and monitoring of the
system, including logging, monitoring the performance and backlogs, and
adjusting the resources. Both BPM and Workflow have these functions.
But this is an area that deserves attention.
Caution
One organization decided that their systems needed to be modernized
across the entire enterprise, using new technology to link the home
office and regional offices to their vendors and customers. The
selected a BPM product, installed all the system components, and
trained all the staff.
The first application dealt with processing documents, from the
customer through several regional offices, to home office specialists.
Their BPM product didn‘t naturally link to documents, but that could be
added. Their BPM product didn‘t have a user interface for the regional
and home office staff to query the status of their work queues, but
that could be built. Their BPM product didn‘t have the ability to
suspend work, allow a supervisor to override the assignment of work, or
to automatically prioritize work (some work was more urgent than
others).
All of these requirements could be added to the platform provided by
the BPM product. But this process could have easily been implemented by
many traditional workflow systems, with little or no customization. The
BPM solution may have been the best overall solution for the company,
but workflow tools would have been much better to solve this first
application.
In another environment the problem might have had minimal human
interaction, electronic data rather than documents, and processes that
involve a more complex organizational structure. A workflow tool may
accomplish the job, but BPM products might be easier to implement and
perform better for this process.
There is no simple answer. This certainly doesn‘t mean that
Workflow is better than BPM, although it probably would have been for
the one business process in the first case. Not does it mean that BPM
is better than workflow, even though it might have been so in the
second case. It does mean that the business requirements need to be
honestly identified, and both BPM and Workflow products need to be
considered.
Conclusion
The key issue is the business process, and how that process works
for the business users, partners, suppliers, and customers. BPM and
Workflow are both technologies that manage the definition,
implementation, and operation of the business processes. One is not
good and the other bad, but they come from a different origin, and thus
have different strengths. The key is to look beyond the product name,
and find the functions that will best serve the business.
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