Beyond predictable workflows: enhancing productivity in artful business processes.

INTRODUCTION

In most companies, managers are under pressure to reduce costs and improve productivity. In this paper, we give a practitioner's perspective on some of the challenges of improving workforce productivity and offer some emerging technical solutions that can be used to support an activity-centric approach to managing work.

Industrialization of information work

Businesses have made enormous investments in enterprise applications from vendors such as SAP AG and Siebel, Inc. We begin by discussing the role of these solutions in enhancing productivity and the limits of their capabilities.

In a complex business process, each actor performs only some of the steps, and few people fully understand how the entire process works. Enterprise applications codify and compartmentalize the steps to guide users through the task at hand.

Although very expensive to implement, enterprise applications are commercially successful. They are used by a great number of companies and are considered to be mission-critical.

We consider processes managed by enterprise applications to be industrialized when they are formalized enough to achieve consistent results that are largely independent of the users. An enterprise application can furthermore achieve economies of scale in a process when the benefits it delivers increase with the number of employees involved in the process. (Other important functions of enterprise applications not directly concerned with employee productivity, such as rapid supply chain communications, regularity, and compliance, are not considered here.)

Prescriptive, highly formalized process applications have enjoyed great success. There are, however, definite limits to this approach. One immediate problem is how to enable business people to use enterprise applications. To extend their value beyond a core group of highly trained users, companies implement self-service user interfaces that enable employees to quickly accomplish routine information-processing tasks without intervention by specialists. Many human resource (HR) processes, such as hiring, promotions, and performance reviews, are candidates for self-service because they require the participation of individual employees and the transmission of personal information.

To support the delivery of self-service user interfaces, IBM enables users of IBM Lotus Notes * to access processes in SAP and other systems, (1,2) and IBM WebSphere * Portal Server (3) can also integrate a variety of systems, including SAP and Siebel. Microsoft is now working with SAP to bring processes into the Microsoft Outlook ** client. (4) These initiatives show that it is possible to significantly broaden access to enterprise applications.

Limits on the industrialization of information work

As laudable as these efforts are, profitable use of enterprise applications for enhancing productivity has its limits. When the cost of formalizing a process is too high, an alternative approach is needed. Some of the factors that limit the industrialization of information work are scale, risk of lock-in, dependency on incumbent systems, and artful processes. We discuss them in the following subsections.

Scale

Because of the high cost of entry, some companies, especially small ones, cannot adopt enterprise applications. In an organization of any size, the cost of implementing a particular process may outweigh the productivity benefits for the users affected. Thus, at least when considering productivity goals, the complexity of the process and the size of the workforce involved need to be considered.

Risk of lock-in

Many companies, regardless of size, choose not to move certain processes into an enterprise application because of the dangers of locking in a process determined by a third-party vendor. For example, rather than use a job-posting module that comes with an enterprise application, a company might use a more efficient online service, such as Monster.com, competing on the open market for new employees and saving costs at the same time. As more compelling online services become available, this consideration becomes more important. On the other hand, the need to differentiate an aspect of customer service from that of competitors may also lead a company to avoid a standard solution and develop a more custom approach. (5)

Dependency on incumbent systems

Most large organizations have many incumbent legacy systems. Because some processes depend on legacy systems that are too costly to replace, the processes cannot be moved into the preferred enterprise application, even if managers wanted to move them. Furthermore, many processes cut across IT system boundaries. For example, to bring a newly hired employee on board can involve such activities as transactions with the HR system, an account request into the systems administration group, bookings for education and training, and communication with the hiring manager. Again, such processes may be too expensive to reimplement.

Artful processes

Aside from the issues of scale, lock-in, and dependency, certain types of work simply cannot be formalized well enough to safely entrust to an enterprise application. The goals and methods of some processes change too quickly over time; for example, the process of designing high-technology products. In some processes, it is primarily the content in each process instance--rather than the process itself--that determines the outcome; for example, a request for proposal (RFP) process. (6) Most important, many highly specialized processes are developed or refined locally at the individual or small-team level such that the process cannot easily be separated from the specific people who perform it; for example, managing client relationships in professional services firms. While the framing process may be stable at an abstract level, the key details are not. They depend on the skills, experience, and judgment of the primary actors. We denote these kinds of processes artful in the sense that there is an art to their execution that would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to codify in an enterprise application.

Long tail of business processes?

In certain industries, such as professional services, artful processes are clearly the norm. (7,8) However, artful work is not always easy to detect. When enterprise applications were first deployed to automate the sales process, over-reliance on the formalized aspects of the process sometimes caused major business failures. With hindsight, no one disputes that there is an art to selling that cannot be captured in a process application. More generally, there are many difficulties associated with accurately modeling business intentions in enterprise applications. (5) Perhaps more work is artful than is readily apparent.

Indeed, we wonder if there is a long tail of business processes (Figure 1). In certain statistical distributions, "... a high-frequency or high-amplitude population is followed by a low-frequency or low-amplitude population which gradually 'tails off'. In many cases the infrequent or low-amplitude events--the long tail--... can cumulatively outnumber or outweigh the initial portion of the graph, such that in aggregate they comprise the majority." (9) Were it possible to create a distribution of business processes ordered by the amount of resources invested in them, we wonder if the total investment in the many less formalized processes far outweighs those implemented in enterprise applications. If so, a renewed focus on enhancing productivity in these kinds of processes is surely imperative.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Claims of the existence of a long tail of processes have in fact been made before, (10,11) although we have not found any published data to support the claims. This is an important area to address in future empirical research. Meanwhile, one point of evidence supporting this view is that enterprise application vendors are actively seeking to make their systems more accessible to a larger proportion of the employee base. It suggests that most employees today do not directly interact with enterprise applications, and it suggests that the processes the employees are executing are apparently largely unsupported by the enterprise applications.

Outline of our current research

As artful work is clearly central to many businesses, we propose that productivity will be increased by supporting and enhancing artful processes rather than by stripping them down to highly formalized industrial methods. The focus of our research is to find ways to improve productivity by enabling the primary actors--regular business people--to define and continually improve their processes rather than follow a centrally planned model. We call this shift the democratization of process. It means creating new decentralized IT architectures that enable business people to more easily exploit a web of existing and emerging IT services in their diverse daily activities. In the remainder of this paper, we present our research into ways of achieving that result.