Selecting the right business process management and workflow automation vendors requires planning. Building a comprehensive request for information is necessary for developing a shortlist of qualified BPM vendors.
Regardless of how one defines business process management (BPM), this is a puzzle that includes many pieces. As enterprises seek a comprehensive process support strategy involving such factors as BPM, workflow and collaboration, they are faced with alternatives ranging from simple to complex. Sorting the possibilities requires an understanding of the market as a whole, as well as definitions of the specific requirements and their relative weighting to the enterprise, to fulfill the enterprise BPM strategy.
Selecting the Appropriate Subset of Requirements
Because BPM functionality is included in many applications — in such areas as process flow, workflow and collaborative support — selecting the appropriate subset of requirements criteria must be a higher priority than providing an exhaustive list of BPM requirements to vendors whose products may be outside the scope of the project. This is why it's important to understand each BPM vendor's overall process vision and its likelihood of achieving that vision, while evaluating products for the specific implementations at hand. Enterprises must do this without sacrificing future needs, such as evolution into a complete process suite.The Best Practice for BPM Implementations
No single BPM vendor meets every expectation for handling all process requirements — including collaborative, simplistic task and complex business-to-business (B2B) — within an enterprise. As a result, using a set of best-of-breed products, targeted to focused process requirements, is still the best practice for BPM implementations. Through 2005, 80 percent of large end-user organizations implementing applications to support BPM strategies will continue to have multiple products handling integration and task management.Care must be taken to avoid overextending a process tool (such as a BPM or workflow application) beyond its capabilities. Although it's possible, for example, to manage routing, review and approval of documents in an integrated document management (IDM) system to create efficiency and reduce handling costs, it's only practical to consider this process management to be part of the IDM application and not the hallmark of a larger BPM system. There is no room for "BPM light," except in focused deployments.
Who owns the larger process (recruiting, for example) that extends beyond the boundaries of IDM and involves other system dependencies? This is where comprehensive BPM is needed and where a "pureplay BPM" can make a difference. Hence, selecting the appropriate BPM vendor and solution depends on scale, scope, functional requirements and specific use.
Bridging Line-of-Business Management
Ironically, the most-important element in BPM implementation and acceptance doesn't relate as much to the technology as it does to bridging line-of-business (LOB) management with the IS organization. The bridge must give the owner of a process the ability to directly design, manage and change the process flow without too much support. Although gains have been made, the end state still requires intervention in most cases. However, the benefits associated with simply going through the exercise of defining a discrete process and then refining it after automation is enough to warrant a closer look at BPM for powerful return on investment (ROI), as well as short-term cost recovery in terms of efficiency gain.Sorting and Weighting BPM Requirements A review of the established environment can yield two benefits:
- Understanding what systems and applications have a BPM or workflow automation component
- Defining what the missing elements are and how to supplement them with the right products. The first benefit requires an IT asset inventory and review. To achieve the latter, we've divided BPM requirements into 10 categories for evaluation purposes:
- Support of business process flow for human-to-human-related tasks, rather than just system-to-system and human-to-system
- Ease of use in operation and administration
- Architectures, standards and platforms supported
- Performance and scalability
- Integration support — native, links and partnerships
- Business activity monitoring (BAM) capabilities
- Agility supported by business rule engines (BREs) or simulations
- Development environment
- Vertical template support
- Costing and pricing models
The following 10 areas of major BPM requirements, along with the associated details described in the sections that follow, can serve as a "jump start" set of criteria to help determine what's needed to address a particular process problem. However, these requirements only address the functional and technical starting points. Other areas — such as vendor viability, support channels and customer references — would be part of a comprehensive request for information (RFI).
Detailed Support of Business Process Flow for Human-to-Human-Related Tasks:
Workflow automation is a key factor that distinguishes better BPM tools. Although many application-integration-rich BPM tools handle system-to-system and human-to-system interactions, they haven't fulfilled the human-to-human requirements as effectively, and many may never support such efforts. Peer-to-peer (P2P) collaboration is a critical component of many business processes. Managing roles and tasks for routing, review and approval can be cumbersome in some systems. Exception handling and ad hoc changes by end users are standard checkbox items. Watch out for BPM offerings that perform system-to-system interactions poorly or do not have a partner to bolster this type of activity.Factors to look for in a Business Process Management System:
- Organizational model support, including reporting relationships
- Ability to define human workflow steps with detail
- Collaboration features that include recalibrating negotiated dates, policies, rules and procedures
- Escalation capabilities where late work or important events and activities occur
- Worklist support for human access
- Worklist customization
- Ability to include workers outside the BPM technology domain (for value and supply chains)
- E-mail integration — for example, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) — considered as adapter
- Thin- and thick-client access support, depending on user needs
BPM Ease of Use in Operation/Development and Administration:
This is an area in which the capabilities of BPM vendors varies significantly; however, it is a critical component of workflow automation. An "Achilles' heel" of business process flow automation is moving to the delivery stage without a scrap of design. This has been a major component of process implementation failures. Even if more scientific means of process design are ignored or omitted, there's a lot to be said for BPM's graphical representation of process flows for humans, who can "eyeball" the processes to find flow execution issues.Factors to look for:
- Rich graphical process designer
- Flow animation
- Separation of "power user" and professional developer features
- Wizard-like assists for power users
- Capability to support adaptive workflows — rules for exception management
- Ability to modify inflight workflows — terminate, update and suspend
Architectures, Standards and Complex Flows Supported:
The concept of "playing well with other systems" is a critical factor in a successful implementation. In the future, new applications integration and the architectural implications of Web services will play a key role in BPM development.Factors to look for:
- Industry standards, as well as such specifications as Wf-XML and, most importantly, XPDL because of the momentum behind it
- Directory integration, including Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) and Microsoft Active Directory (AD)
- Delivery of advanced BAM capabilities that are entirely portal driven and don’t require changes to the underlying model to allow business users access to any data
- Delivery of composite/micro flows and legacy application integration support
- Openness to multiple channel capabilities, such as mobile computing
- Service-oriented architecture (SOA) support
- Enterprise Platform that is proven in large and small organizations
- Extensible Markup Language (XML) process definition storage
- Web-centric architecture
Performance and Scalability of BPM Software:
Typically, BPM software is put into production to solve a single business problem and then is extended to other uses. If the software can't manage multiple, complex processes or work well in a distributed environment, the problems will overwhelm the benefits.Factors to look for:
- Support of long-running business events
- Ability to have compensating or reversal transactions
- Scalable process engines — interconnected, multiple instances
- Load balancing among process engines
- Queue management facility
- Support and integration of business rules
- Support for distributed process management
- Ability to have multiple versions of the same workflow running at once — version control
Management:
Reducing reliance on IS personnel to manage a system that is intended to support multiple LOBs requires Web-browser-based end-user access to many administrative functions. As many of the management functions as possible should be addressed through a Web client, including ad hoc rule changes by end users.Factors to look for:
- User group administration
- Role-based access to management functionality
- Rule changes
- Reporting and administration
- Security
- Support for roles and resource mapping
- User administration
- Metrics definition via Portal
- Metrics Analysis and new rules definitions via Portal
Business Activity Monitoring Capabilities:
The ability to review system and human performance is a key factor in leveraging the technology. Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is the provision of real-time access to critical business performance indicators. BAM systems deliver alerts and short-period summaries of business events and metrics in something close to real time. BAM offers enterprises the ability to do the following:- Increase the efficiency of their processes and, in some cases, monitor shifts of priority between conflicting goals (such as minimum cost and maximum customer engagement) in real time
- Increase customer satisfaction by improving the continuity of service, as well as product and service quality, and providing timely status information
Factors to look for in BAM implementation:
- Process engine communications facility
- Business intelligence/online analytical processing (BI/OLAP) support for event analysis
- Data/information/event aggregation facilities
- Algorithms and pattern matching
- Event-filtering features
- Policy support, constraints and tolerance support
- Metric Definition
- Comprehensive end user analysis and publishing to dashboards
- Business process instance monitoring
Agility Supported by Business Rules and Simulation:
After analysis and design, the results usually end up in a buttoned-down flow solution that represents a best practice and a balanced business process flow to optimally support business. Implementing and maintaining a best-practice business process flow can generate significant benefits and maintain the cost savings gleaned in the analysis and design steps. It's easy to lose the benefits of the design over time or for the balance points to change. This is why adjustable business rules, which do not require a development environment and are easy for business professionals and IS personnel to change, are important. These are found in advanced BPM tools or BREs and provide the agility needed in the current business environment.Factors to look for:
- Roundtrip feedback loop to process analysis and simulation tools or embedded capabilities
- Business scenario and contingency supports
- Rule and event management capabilities
- Rule collision and overlap detection
- Rule tracing
- Rule collaboration supports
- Flow, rule and case instance versioning
- Goal Driven Simulations with Recommendations and notifications of exceeding thresholds
Design Environment:
Beyond flow design, role and task assignments, and event and rule management, the system should be capable of becoming a centerpiece of the applications architecture. Service-oriented development of applications (SODA) requires designing for application integration while the applications are being built. This eases the burden of after-the-fact integration and has the potential to reduce integration costs by a factor of 30 percent or more. Through the combined use of SOA and SODA, enterprises can build a foundation for agility that catalyzes a movement from monolithic systems to flexible, easily integrated solutions.Factors to look for:
- Segmentation of flow, services and rules
- Service location support
- Service assembly capabilities
- Service composition
- Service orchestration
- Test simulation with or without service stubs
- Well-defined, documented programmatic interfaces for all major system components
- Fully defined application programming interfaces (APIs) to underlying services
Vertical/Horizontal Template Support:
Many BPM vendors and systems integrators (SIs) focus on specific verticals, such as financial services, healthcare or manufacturing, and have built a large catalog of process flows, which can be reused by new enterprise clients with similar needs. Such vertical experience is worth considering as part of the selection criteria.Factors to look for:
- Predefined template or "out of the box" flows for such industry processes as supply chain, discrete manufacturing control, mortgage approval or claims processing
- Predefined template or out-of-the-box flows for standard processes, such as compliance, Six-Sigma, ISO, quality assurance and IT processes (including distributed change management)
Costing/Pricing Models of BPM Software:
Pricing is based on the capacity of the underlying system (typically the server tiers, rather than the users).Factors to look for:
- Reasonably priced starter packages
- Availability of bundled BPM training
- Availability of bundled BPM services
- Near-industry-standard annual maintenance fee