Collaboration/Business process management
The final area to cover in your requirements relates to how you need staff to work together to create documents and process transactions.
The requirements we identified in our check list in stage one were as follows.
| Function | Description | |
| 4 | Collaboration/Business process management | |
| 4.1 | Collaboration | |
| 4.1.1 | Calendaring/scheduling | Shared diary services for scheduling events, meetings etc |
| 4.1.2 | Whiteboarding | For freehand drawing and pen-based writing on handheld computers, tablets etc |
| 4.1.3 | Instant messaging | Real-time text based peer to peer communications over the Internet |
| 4.1.4 | Presence detection | The ability to see if others on a pre-selected list - are online concurrently |
| 4.1.5 | e-learning | An online education or training programme that can be on demand or set to a pre determined date and time |
| 4.1.6 | Knowledge management | Makes the institution's information and knowledge available to all wherever it is based – includes portals and other search tools |
| 4.1.7 | Digital asset management | Supports, storage, retrieval and reuse of digital objects and provides rights management facilities |
| 4.2 | Workflow/Business process management | |
| 4.2.1 | Business process modelling and building | Business process design and build tools to graphically model and redesign business processes and define them to the workflow engine |
| 4.2.2 | Business process management | A workflow/business process management engine which holds the business rules and controls the flow of each case or transaction through each step of the workflow/ business process |
| 4.2.3 | Business process administration | Tools for administering the workflow/business process including reporting and monitoring tools, audit tools etc |
As indicated in stages one and four you need to decide whether you want to procure a collaboration suite as part of your EDRM or Enterprise Content management procurement or whether your education organisation already has a preferred collaboration suite which your solution will need to interface with or whether you consider that at this stage you do not need a separate collaboration suite at all.
If you already have a collaboration suite then one of the challenges you face is trying to ensure that content and documents created on the collaboration suite can be tracked and declared and managed as records on the EDRM solution when required. The danger is that if you leave it up to staff to decide when they should transfer documents and content from a collaborative environment to an EDRM folder then it may never happen and records will be deleted.
Your education organisation will definitely need workflow/ business process management facilities but you need to consider again whether you wish to procure those as part of the EDRM solution or the Enterprise Content Management suite or whether you wish to purchase a third party workflow/ business process management tool or whether you already have access to such tools via your line of business applications.
The detailed requirements for workflow/business process management will come out of your analysis of business activity and your detailed review of current processes, particularly in your pilot areas. Some detailed questions to ask include:
Can the system record the temporary absence of staff to prevent work being allocated to them?
Does the system support sequential, parallel and conditional routing?
Does the system support split and rendezvous functions?
Can you use the system to prioritise tasks?
Can the system assign work to a user inbox based on user workloads?
Can the software provide progress reporting for individual cases?
This is an area where you need to be sure that you are acquiring the toolkit and the training needed so that in future your IS staff can design their own business processes and routing systems.
