Listen to my podcast with Jacob Ukelson, the CTO of ActionBase. In this podcast we discuss Human Process Management: what it is, how it helps an enterprise, how it differs from BPM, as well as the future of Human Process Management.
Listen to or download the 7:43 minute podcast below:
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PS: can you first give me a little background on ActionBase and what you guys have recently announced?
JU: Sure. At ActionBase, we work on what we call Human Process Management. And the idea is to help organizations and people manage all of those unstructured ad hoc processes that tend to go on today using e-mail and documents. So what we do is we allow people to continue to work in e-mail and documents but add structure to that so that they can actually manage it, report, and track, and know exactly what's going on.
What we announced today is a way to integrate ActionBase into SharePoint so that people can actually use SharePoint together with ActionMail and ActionDocs, which are just extensions to Office and Outlook so that they can start managing, and tracking their unstructured ad hoc processes within ActionBase and using SharePoint.
How do you define Human Process Management and how does it benefit an organization today?
The way we define Human Process Management is effectively a way to allow people to continue to work and the tools that they're used to, which was e-mail and documents, in order to do their unstructured ad hoc processes or their people processes but to provide the layer of management on top of those tools. And with that allows people to do is effectively just continue to work in their normal environment, send e-mail, use documents, but management it and track it.
So for example, if I send an e-mail to someone requesting some activity to be done or some task to be done, I'm just going kick off a whole process. They may need to send this to other people, they may to delegate to a third party, they need to gather information from outside the organization, they need to have other people get them information, they add attachments, other people can add attachments, and this can actually be a cascading event of e-mail with lots and lots of stuff going on behind it.
Now, as the owner or the requestor of this process I have no idea what's going on. I have no visibility at all to what's going on in the process nor do the participants in the process themselves know what's going on. With Human Process Management, both the participants, the organization, and the owner can actually see what's going on in this process and have a way to track it, understand and make sure the follow-ups are done and all the activities are completed so it's a way to really manage these ad hoc unstructured processes that go on all the time in organizations.
How does Human Process Management differ from Business Process Management?
Sure. We feel very complimentary to Business Process Management. Business Process Management assumes that you're going to model the processes that you want to be able to execute in your BPMS or your Business Process Management Suite. And you go and you model the process, you figure out who are the participants, what they do, and you try to model it exactly as you can usually using some kind of tool like BPM.
Now, that's great for a process that is more structured and more heavy duty. In other words, if it's a process that's done a lot in an organization, and it's one that has the structure to it, in other words, it's done almost the same way every same time. BPM is great. You should use a BPM tool. We're talking about all of the different kinds of processes that aren't that heavy duty and that tend to change a lot from execution to execution.
One of the examples we gave is audits in an organization. Audits are processes that go on in every organization but they happen differently every time. It depends on who are the participants, what's being audited, and there's no way to actually create a model describing exactly how every audit should work and so people tend to fall back on the mainstays of unstructured process management which are spreadsheets and e-mail.
Can you give me some real world examples of how companies are actually benefiting from Human Process Management?
Sure. Well, there's an example I gave before which is audits. It can either be an internal audit, it can be a financial audit, it can be a compliance audit. So all of those processes tend to be done today using e-mail and spreadsheets. And the reason people use this is because they really are ad hoc and unstructured in the sense that audits go on, people know what needs to done on every audit but every audit is different. There's different participants, and different people to own it, different things need to done as a result of the audit. And so since they are sort of a classic ad hoc unstructured process, the main tool that people us today is e-mail and documents of various sort be it spreadsheets or Word documents.
Another example is fraud, and fraud escalation, and fraud investigation. We have telcos using us to manage the fraud escalation, which is -- there's various fraud systems and we work very complimentary to those fraud systems. But when a fraud is actually discovered, or at least suspected, people get into action. There are various investigators; there are various documents that got brought together so there's lots of work, human work, that needs to get done in order to investigate this fraud case.
And there's various telcos using us to manage that and to track those kinds of processes. Health safety environment, again, those have various kinds of activities associated. So there can be incidents, oil spills, people being injured. Again, very ad hoc unstructured since every case is different than every case it happened before and people are using ActionBase to help manage those things that they used to do in e-mail and documents.
Now, if you paid attention, I used the word "case" quite often and the reason I use that is there seems to be some idea in the industry that case management of an advance sort, not standard case management like you would see in healthcare or law but something we call "advance case management" and some people are starting to call this "augmented case management". So it's a kind of case management where there's lots of information that (indiscernible) in between people but it needs to be managed and tracked and that's very similar to what we're actually calling Human Process Management or certain kind of Human Process Management.
Now, what do you see for the future of Human Process Management?
I actually think that it's going to start becoming more mainstream in 2010 and 2011. And the reason is we're hearing a lot more about the need for collaboration in BPM. There seems to be a bifurcation of the word with the process tools and then there's collaboration tools. And what we're really talking about is something that bridges the gap between the two because organizations in both process and collaboration that happen together in order to get the job done.
And so what I think is going to be happening is we're going hear more and more, again, under different names people will be calling it unstructured process management, some people will be calling it ad hoc structured management. Some people will be calling advance case management but we're going to see a lot more emphasis both on the BPM vendor side and on the collaboration vendor side to talk about things that we call Human Process Management.
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