Workflow/business process management (BPM)
As we move towards electronic business or e-business, education organisations need to have all their vital corporate information (data and content and documents and records) available electronically and they also need software to model and control and automate the way staff and systems operate to effectively run their core business processes.
Traditionally education organisations would document their processes in procedure manuals and staff would be trained to follow those procedures and supervisors and junior managers would be employed to ensure that staff followed the procedures and that work flowed through the processes.
The "work" usually entered the process in the form of a paper document - an order form, an enquiry, a complaint, an application for a place on a course, an application for a job etc. It was then tracked through all stages of the process by manual record keeping or computer software.
Such systems were very labour intensive to track and work had to be processed in a linear way as the paper document could only be in one place at one time.
The advent of document capture and EDM systems meant that the "work" could be digitised and hence could be accessed by multiple staff simultaneously if required.
To build on this and help staff cooperate more effectively to manage business processes, suppliers developed a range of collaborative software.
You can identify a hierarchy of process management or collaborative software products starting with e-mail and moving up to collaborative software and then to workflow management systems which are themselves evolving into a new range of business process management software.
Business process management software is used where organisations need to control complex processes that involve the cooperation of different users and systems and multiple steps or tasks which need to be carried out in a particular sequence and in a consistent way to achieve the required business objectives.
Here is one definition of a business process management system:
"Integrating people, data and enterprise applications in efficient, adaptable and automated processes".
Most education organisations will use business process management software to redesign and automate their business processes to manage change and ensure that their processes better meet business objectives. They will start with a strategy; define their business objectives; select the processes to be improved and automated; model and redesign or improve those processes to better meet those business objectives; enact them using business process management software; measure the results; analyse the results and then go back and further improve the processes or reconsider the strategy.
The software needed includes process modelling software and the business process builder; the engine which is the enactment software; administration software to track the workflow/business process and create reports and the user interface software which determines how users interact with the business process management software.
The process modelling software ranges from diagramming tools such as Visio through to sophisticated simulation tools and software that allows you to cost certain design decisions, etc. The engine increasingly stores the business rules in a standard relational database engine.
A business process is defined to the business process management system as a procedure made up of a series of steps, each of which comprises a number of tasks. Each time the procedure is invoked a case or work item is created. At any time there are hundreds or thousands of cases being processed and each case will be at its own point in the procedure and will have its own status.
The administration software facilitates the task of tracking cases and producing reports to show new work entering the system and work completed, etc. Important features include the ability to set priorities or deadlines for cases and alarms to alert you to the fact that certain cases are in danger of not being processed within an agreed service level etc. In order to initiate tasks on a time rather than an event basis triggers can be defined to start execution of a task at predefined or calculated times. Chasing or sending reminder letters is a case in point.
As indicated above, most business processes involve the creation or use of documents or both. Hence, many business process management systems are designed to interface with EDRM systems. Many EDRM suppliers bundle some business process management software in with their products but these tend not to be as powerful or flexible as some of the leading third party products.
The EDRM process management software is geared at "document/content-centric" processes such as collaborative authoring; sending out draft documents for approval; publishing content to a web site, etc. The production business process management products will tend to offer more sophisticated tools to interface with business administration systems and support parallel processing.
