I author a monthly series of business process management (BPM) feature articles highlighting different BPM-enabling software trends. Recently those articles have included a look at case management in BPM, the intersection of BPM and accounting as well as a look ahead at BPM in 2009. An article was posted on May 15 on "BPM in the Cloud."
For June, the subject is process discovery, which I am interpreting loosely as anything you are doing as a supplier or a user to simplify and streamline the development and deployment of BPM solutions. Maybe you make a better magic marker for use on the whiteboard? Hopefully we'll find something things more advanced than that. Certainly this will include modeling tools of all types and -- although I'm not aware of any -- things that get the power user into the BPM world. Send me everything you got!
If you sell a part of your BPM offering for help in process discovery as I defined it above (and/or sell discrete products that do what I described) send me an email at dennis@ebizq.net to be included. I'll do some secondary research on your offering and meet up with you for an interview. Even if you have recently completed a survey for one of my earlier feature articles, please send me an email highlighting your process discovery features.
The article on BPM Process Discovery is tentatively scheduled for release in mid June 2009 so whether you are a user or a supplier, contact me by Monday June 8, 2009.
Thanks
-- Dennis Byron
Dennis,
The easiest way to do process discovery would be though some automated system that looks at what people do (both on their desktop, servers, and through their communication channels)and use that to ferret out the implicit processes in their normal flow of work. That is of course (besides being extremely intrusive)is impossible.
The next best thing would be to use email correspondance to try and ferret out the unstructured, ad-hoc, human processes done via email and then codify the processes that were uncovered. Besides the privacy issues, doing it this way is also very difficult (if not impossible using today's technology)including issues of natural language understanding.
At ActionBase, we think using a human processes management system could bridge the discovery gap -enabling an organization a way to easily start managing their unstructured, ad-hoc, email processes and using the system of record in the human process management system to analyze and understand those processes "in-situ".
I wrote a couple of posts about this type of in-situ discovery:
http://blog.actionbase.com/in-situ-process-discovery
and
http://blog.actionbase.com/actionbases-third-way-using-an-hpm-to-easily-turn-an-organizations-practical-intelligence-to-explicit-knowledge