While, on the surface, moving from hardcopy to electronic records appears to be a goal of many organizations, changing how records can be managed typically cannot be done without changing or affecting business processes. Understanding how workers do their work (e.g., their piece of a specifi c business process) and how the e‐records they create, use, access, and share interact with the processes cannot be done in isolation.
Improving the management of electronic records must involve BPI. But remember, it gets
“personal” when you are changing how a worker handles their own e‐records.
implementing a change in business processes on a smaller scale, such as a pilot project involving only a handful of individuals is a preferred approach.
CHAPTER SUMMARY:
KEY POINTS
■ a business process is a sequence of work activities carried out by both auto- mated systems and people to produce a desired result within an organiza- tion.
■ Generally, efforts to streamline and improve a business process must be ad- dressed prior to changing how records are managed or before implement- ing an ERM system.
■ Processes cannot change without considering the “people factor”; business process improvements require a change management effort to train and convince workers of the business benefi ts of the new process.
(Continued)
(Continued)
■ Most early re‐engineering efforts forgot about people.
■ improving the management of electronic records requires examining the business processes they are a part of.
■ change management, especially preparing the individuals involved for a change, is paramount in the success of your project.
■ Business process improvement (BPi), when combined with ERM, not only streamlines processes, but also improves access to information and greater awareness of what else exists.
■ communicate frequently and consistently during the BPi initiative.
■ two of the most commonly utilized techniques for documenting processes are (1) developing a process narrative and (2) creating a fl owchart of the targeted process.
■ creating a process narrative often becomes an iterative process where more detail is added as more information is gathered and shared during inter- views. Process narratives can get drawn out and depend on the writing skills of the interviewer.
■ Flowcharting graphically depicts process steps and decision points in order of occurrence within a business process for visual inspection.
■ Workfl ow software moves and routes fi les and folders through a series of work steps in an automated way.
■ often the perceived resistance is not because of the age of the worker, but more a matter of the employee being comfortable with a current process.
■ Proper project defi nition and avoiding scope‐creep must be kept in mind.
■ improving the management of electronic records must involve BPi.
■ implementing a change in business processes on a smaller scale, such as a pilot project involving only a handful of individuals, is a preferred approach.
■ it gets “personal” when you are changing how a worker handles their own e‐records.
Notes
1. Peter Fingar and Joe Bellini, The Real‐Time Enterprise: Competing on Time with the Revolutionary Business S‐Ex Machine (Tampa, FL: Meghan Kiffer Press, 2004).
2. W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), Chapter 2, 22–28.
3. Larry English, “Six Sigma and Total Information Quality Management,” Information Management, July 18, 2008, www.information‐management.com/issues/20041001/1011016‐1.html.
4. “Utilizing the Six Steps to Six Sigma,” Motorola University, 1992, as cited in C. Sengstock, Jr., Quality in the Communications Process (Chicago: Motorola University Press, 1997), 11.
5. Peter Pande, Robert Neuman, and Roland Cavanagh, The Six Sigma Way: How GE, Motorola, and Other Top Companies Are Honing Their Performance (New York: McGraw‐Hill, 2000), 5.
6. Ibid., 4.
7. Brian Hindo, “At 3M, a Struggle between Efficiency and Creativity,” BusinessWeek, June 6, 2007.
8. Michael Hammer and James Champy, Reengineering the Corporation (New York: HarperBusiness, 1993).
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C h a p t e r 10
Workflow and
Business process
Management Software
T
he processes deployed in all organizations define the culture of that entity, they are what differentiate it from other seemingly similar entities—they define the corporate backbone and are, quite simply, “the way things get done around here.”Needless to say then, they are pretty important and need to be managed and exploited just like any other corporate asset. Therefore, to maximize the true efficiencies that are gained in implementing an electronic records management (ERM) program, improvements in redesigned business processes must be supported by information technology (IT) that automates and speeds processing, reduces errors and manual in- tervention, and improves auditability. (For more information on how to redesign and improve business processes, see Chapter 9.)
This much‐needed technology can be defined under the banner of process‐
enabled technology. Process‐enabled technology is often divided into two catego- ries: workflow automation or business process management. The two technolo- gies have a significant amount in common. Indeed it is fair to say that a good deal of the technology that underpins business process management concepts has its roots in the late 1980s and early 1990s and stems from the early efforts of the workflow com- munity. The need to automate and manage processes is not new. Business software has long supported major business processes. What has changed is the realization that business managers need to understand and improve those processes. Getting a handle on the myriad processes that exist in all organizations is the easiest way to become a more competitive, adaptable, and responsive organization, while managing costs. Us- ing process‐based software is the key to achieving that.
Workflow software and business process management systems (BPMS) soft- ware are designed to improve business process efficiency by routing files and folders at electronic speeds, and they are capable of eliminating bottlenecks and work‐step redundancies.
Despite the fact that the two types of software are often lumped together as being essentially the same (even in leading texts), there are key distinctions.
BPMS is often referred to as “workflow on steroids,” but it is much more than that—it provides a complete and integrated operations platform upon which many other technologies can be deployed—and this is an even more important capability when technologies such as the cloud come into play. So BPMS provides a much more robust and complex set of functions to support the automation and optimization of business
Jon Pyke and Robert Smallwood
processes, including more extensive modeling of the full end‐to‐end process rather than the self‐contained departmental fl ow maps associated with workfl ow.
Also, BPMS (often) includes process simulation and analytics. (There is an open question as to whether simulation is best tested by a tool included in a BPM suite, or by a third‐party simulation tool, since those included in the BPMS may be biased or skewed in their results).