Implications for Recordkeeping in Organizations
that are Redesigned around Business Processes, Commitments and
Customer Satisfaction
Senior Vice President and Chief Scientist
Challenges of Organizations
in the 90's
- Before:
- Control
- Productivity measured as
output per hour
- Today:
- Quality -> customer satisfaction
- Decreasing time-to-market
-> managing cycle time
- Customized offers -> manage
more business processes
- Productivity measured as
the capacity to fulfill commitments and produce satisfied customers
-> new work metrics
Today's Problems for Organizations
- Tracking the commitments that
have been made to customers by various individuals.
- Managing the completion of work.
Knowing what is done, what is not done, and where work is.
- Communicating changes about projects,
tasks and events to all parties involved.
- Initiating and managing repetitive
projects and the completion of all associated project tasks.
The World of Enterprise Processes
The World of Enterprise Processes
Information vs Coordination
What is a Business Process?
- From the perspective of
Information:
(dominant
common sense)
- Sequence of activities or tasks
- From the perspective of
Coordination:
(emerging common sense)
- Network of commitments to produce
customer satisfaction
A Workflow: the basic unit of Coordination
Elements of a Workflow
A Business Process Is:
Work Coordination Deals with Concerns in Different
Domains
Delivering on Work Coordination
Technology to Manage Information
- Radical increase in the speed
and capacity of the computing equipment.
- Organizations records in
data bases.
- Storage of images, documents
and forms in electronic form.
- Gave birth to database, imaging
and document management technologies and "industries".
- Technology for full text
indexing and search engines.
Technology to Manage Information
- Now I have access to all
these electronic images, documents and files...
- What do I need to do?
- Gave birth to workflow industry
- Workflow industry focused
on flow and not on work
Workflow vs. Work Coordination
- Workflow comes out of the Imaging
or Digital Paper Processing Heritage
- Focuses on moving things to
automate or accomplish tasks
- Is Fundamentally a Document
Centric Approach and Thing Oriented
- Views it's role as Work Task
automation
- Emerges out of Messaging &
Groupware with a Communications Heritage
- Focuses on coordinating processes,
activities & people to make decisions
- Is Fundamentally a Process
Centric Approach and People Oriented
- Views it's role as the Process
management mechanism
Workflow vs. Work Coordination
- Concerned with automation, clerk
ware
- Focused on documents, images, forms
- Views processes as sequence of tasks
or activities
- Project management as project planning.
- Concerned with coordination to produce
customer satisfaction.
- Focused on managing commitments
- Views processes as networks of commitments.
- Provides a reinterpretation of project
management.
Organizational records to keep
- Business process and workflow
instances
- conditions of satisfaction
- roles and individuals
- transactions
- status (completed, satisfied, declined,
etc)
- Commitments
- made
- pending
- completed
- satisfied
Questions to ask
- Who did what and when?
- What do I have to do and
by when?
- What commitments are pending
for me?
- What commitments are pending
in the organization?
- What commitments are pending
in my team?
- Are we completing our commitments
on time?
- Where are we consistently
late?
- Are we producing satisfaction
to our customers?
Reinterpretation of Organizational Records
- Footprints of actions and
commitments
- Accounts payable
- Accounts receivable
- Payments
Business Process Redesign in Government Organizations
- Clark County Department of
Business Licenses
- New Applications and Renewals of
Business Licenses
- City of Las Vegas
- Enterprise-Wide Work Management
Application to Streamline City's Land Development Application
Process
- Sandia National Laboratories
- Human resources administrative processes
for 1000 employees
Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC)
- Standards for workflow systems:
workflow servers/engines and workflow applications.
- Meta language for process definitions.
- Programming interfaces for workflow
applications.
- Interfacing with other systems.
- Interoperability of workflow
systems.
- Audit data records.
WfMC
Audit Data Standard
- Process instance
- Activity instance
- Work item