www.consultant-news.com  28.01.2009

One of the two great gifts of consultancy to the world, the other being the 2x2 matrix, has been the elucidation of the concept of the business process. It’s so central to the practice of consultancy that I often forget that, out in the real world, “business process” is a phrase that rarely passes anyone’s lips and often has to explain it if casually dropped in conversation.

So I was intrigued when ActionBase, a small Israeli company, followed up on a piece I wrote on developments in business process management (BPM) and software development to suggest that I was ignoring an equally important part of the picture —human process management (HPM).

Human process management—in ActionBase’s view—is required to manage all the interactions that occur outside the carefully structured world of the business processes.

“It’s a bit like the structured/unstructured data issue,” explains ActionBase’s Chief Technology Officer, Jacob Ukelson. “Just as the world came to understand that most data is unstructured so there are structured and unstructured processes—we believe that human process management will be used to manage those unstructured processes.”

In comparison to the regular and structured processes that are often embodied in heavy duty IT systems, human processes tend to be dynamic and ad hoc and involve relatively lightweight IT artefacts such as emails and Word documents.

“People start these processes but then the requirements change, the external environment changes,” says Ukelson. “You may be working across various different teams and silos, or you may need people from other departments and organisations who won’t have the tools.”

It’s a concept that’s initially hard to sell to those who believe that everything in an organisation can be captured, for instance, in an overarching ERP system.

“They find it hard to understand why we say that 80% of the processes are outside the system,” says Ukelson. “For them if it’s not in the system, it’s not a process.”

In fact, Ukelson believes that some level of HPM is entirely complementary to—and essential for—the smooth running of BPM and the systems that embody it.

“Once you have found out what your processes are, then if it is regular and structured enough, you may want to use BPM for it—and you should,” he says. “But if it’s not like that, it’s very hard to implement in a BPM system and will probably fail.”

The link between the two approaches comes when the BPM system identifies something unstructured and intermittent.

“The system generates an email and people will deal with it,” says Ukelson. “It could be very complex but it is lost to the system until someone comes back and inputs the result.”

This notion of a process being “lost” to an organisation while it works through the human world of emails and documents is key to ActionBase’s approach, which is essentially to enhance the basic Office products that people use every day so that they can be used to initiate and monitor processes.

“They can’t dictate how people execute the process but they can manage and monitor, so that people will be nagged automatically,” says Ukelson. “It helps make sure that things get done and aren’t lost between the cracks.”

The enhancements are simple but very powerful. Rather than a project’s progress being scattered across multiple chains of emails, a collaborative email or ActionMail gathers all the threads together to make it clear who is supposed to be doing what and whether they’ve done it or not. Similarly a passive document, such as the minutes of a board meeting, can be used to initiate and monitor multiple processes.

“The way people have used email has evolved to be good for certain things, but email breaks down when you try to run a process through it,” says ActionBase vice-president for business solutions Eyal Sherman. “It allows the process to flow but doesn’t manage it. Similarly, the process context tends to be missing from document management systems. There are lots of things for structured processes and lots of things for collaboration but very few that merge the two.”

From a consultancy viewpoint, the outputs of a running HPM approach may be as interesting as its initial implementation.

“You get an audit trail—you can look at how that process runs through the business and who is doing what,” says Sherman. “There’s no easy way of doing that with just email—there’s no easy way to glue together all those emails without some amazing artificial intelligence—which doesn’t exist—or asking everyone. Now we can look at how the actual process runs, not how we would like it.”

Clearly a system like this is applicable in many contexts, but ActionBase say their plan—which will involve a major push into both the US and Europe this year—will be to exploit vertical applications and niche markets.

“Vendors that have a particular niche understand it very well,” says Ukelson. “So, for example, does someone involved in fraud escalation—because if things get lost, he’s the guy who gets screamed at.”

Other uses that ActionBase has already seen are in internal and external audit, and the managing of tenders and contracts, as well as in verticals such as engineering, environment and utilities where there are stringent compliance requirements. But the possibilities are unlimited, and the company is keen to work with channel partners in as wide a number of contexts as possible.

“Because HPM deals with all the stuff that goes on outside their systems they can position it as a value added to that product,” says Sherman.

The approach can also be easily used to document and transmit best practice in those human processes. “At the moment they are all lost to the organisation,” says Sherman. “They find it very hard to struggle for best practice because they have no idea what’s going on.”


All views expressed in this article are those of Mick James and do not necessarily reflect the views of Top-Consultant.com and Consultant-News.com.

Contact Mick with your views or suggestions at: mick.james@top-consultant.com.