Business Processes: Making Sense of Ad Hoc Unstructured Business Workflows

By Dick Weisinger

It isn’t easy to model the processes used by knowledge workers in most business environments. As the business environment revolves more about the use and creation of knowledge, traditional repetitive business processes are being replaced with ad hoc ‘unstructured’ business workflows. Much like managing unstructured data in the world of ECM, ‘Unstructured’ usually implies ‘hard to manage’ or ‘hard to model’. Unstructured workflows have typically been considered outliers to processes that could be neatly organized and graphed on a flow chart. But ‘unstructured processes’ tend to be the norm rather than the exception. In fact, an estimated 60-70 percent of business processes are ad hoc or unstructured.

Because ad hoc workflow is so hard to model, it seems a bit odd that Gartner says that the adoption of BPM by companies will be ‘imperative’ for them to do before 2013. And the reason Gartner gives for this urgency is that knowledge workers need BPM to help them to deal with their ad hoc business processes. Clearly Gartner must feel that BPM vendors are close to a breakthrough on how to handle ad hoc business workflows. But modeling ad hoc workflows is anything but easy or clear. Today, vendors typically address an ad hoc workflow as a deviation from a well-known process — what is referred to as an ‘exception’. Exceptions occur at some point in a workflow when something unexpected happens. Exceptions usually cause the process to get diverted to an exception node where human intervention requries a decision to be made as to how to proceed next. But exceptions are just that, something that are out of the ordinary. Using an exception approach to modeling ad hoc workflows seems to miss the point that knowledge workers are continually confronted with different work tasks. BPM will need to become more innovative to truly be useful in modeling ad hoc processes.

But Gartner is optimistic. “We’re predicting that companies will finally begin to recognise that process management is not just about automating routine, repetitive, well-understood structured parts of work, but more importantly, about supporting knowledge workers whose work is much less structured.”

Gartner is scheduled to discuss the future of BPM in March at a seminar, and they’ve leaked their top five predictions for BPM in 2010:

1. BPM will become more agile and real time. It will be possible for processes to self-adjust based on the sensing of patterns in user preferences, consumer demand, predictive capabilities, trending, competitive analysis and social connections.

2. BPM will be ‘imperative’ for companies to use by 2013 to avoid a chaos of inefficiencies.

3. By 2014 businesses will be moving from standard business applications to ‘compositions’, custom applications that are built from components and services.

4. By 2014, Business Process Networks will be used in 35 percent of projects that involve multiple organizations.

5. By 2014, 40 percent of Global 2000 businesses will use comprehensive business process models for their daily work, up from 6 percent in 2009.

It sounds good. But it also sounds a bit optimistic in how quickly good predictive and agile BPM tools will be developed.