• VentureBeat reported that mobile app usage increased 35 percent between 2011 and 2012 and that they plan to invest more in the years to come.
• Morgan Stanley survey of CIOs showed that 72 percent of company leaders purchased tablets for their employees in 2012 – a 19 percent increase from the previous year. Additionally, the percentage of survey respondents who said they would buy tablets for their work​ teams in the next 12 months increased from 64 to 75 percent between 2011 and 2012.
• Gartner predicts that by 2015, mobile application development projects targeting smartphones and tablets will outnumber native PC projects by a 4-to-1 ratio.
• Strategy Analytics’​ Global Mobile Enterprise Business Application Revenue Forecast 2011-2017 showed that revenue​ associated with mobile workers using enterprise business apps on smartphones and tablets is expected to nearly double between 2012 and 2017. The number of mobile employees using business apps and the number of programs available will also grow rapidly.

“The consumer mobile experience has taught mobile workers to expect, even demand, access to information and applications from anywhere using mobile devices,” Strategy Analytics spokesperson Mark Levitt said. “Mobile workers have moved beyond just mobile email and messaging to include other collaboration apps such as conferencing, productivity apps such as content authoring and business process apps.”

Mobile solutions are changing the way business operates. The trends clearly indicate it is more important than ever to add a mobile component to most business processes.

According to the new Magic Quadrant report,

Business managers and knowledge workers today … are being asked to make faster and better decisions and to “do more with less” in an ever-changing business context, but cannot do so without improved visibility into their operations and environments. To meet this challenge, leading organizations are seeking to make their business operations more intelligent by integrating analytics into their processes and the applications that enable them. Gartner has identified … a new usage scenario for a business process management suite (BPMS) — a scenario that Gartner calls “intelligent business operations” (IBO; see “The Trend Toward Intelligent Business Operations“). To meet the needs for IBO, a BPMS must be enhanced with new capabilities. Accordingly, Gartner has evolved its definition of the business process management (BPM) market to reflect the IBO usage scenario and to introduce the next generation of BPMSs, which we identify as intelligent business process management suites (iBPMSs).

This is part of a growing trend from multiple fronts to extend BPM technologies beyond their traditional uses. Integrating support for social, analytics, complex event processing, and mobile has allowed these tools to deliver a new level of value creation potential. Whether the trend is labeled “Dynamic,” “Adaptive,” “Intelligent,” or something else, organizations that have captured the majority of the benefits from traditional BPM technologies will see additional value from deploying this newer breed of integrated technologies into their business processes.

Gartner has identified 10 core capabilities of an iBPMS:

• A process orchestration engine to drive the progression of work in structured and
  unstructured processes or cases
• A model-driven composition environment for designing processes and their supporting
  activities and process artifacts
• Content interaction management to support the progression of work, especially cases, based
  on changes in the content itself (such as documents, images and audio)
• Human interaction management to enable people to naturally interact with the processes they are involved in
• Connectivity to link processes to the resources they control, such as people, systems, data,
  event streams, goals and key performance indicators (KPIs)
• Active analytics (sometimes called continuous intelligence) for monitoring activity progress, and analyzing activities and changes in and around processes
• On-demand analytics to provide decision support or decision automation using predictive
  analytics or optimization technology
• Business rule management to guide and implement process agility and ensure compliance
• Management and administration to monitor and adjust the technical aspects of the iBPMS
• A process component registry/repository for process component leverage and reuse

Or, for the more visually minded, iBPMS features are described in their November report, BPM Suites Evolve Into Intelligent BPM Suites with this figure:

You can find Gartner’s full report at Magic Quadrant for Intelligent Business Process Management Suites. (Login may be required to access reports linked in this post.)

It has also brought excitement at play. In the Trestle Gravity downhill biking series at Winter Park, I raced to 5 podium finishes including 4 first places to capture the overall series champion for my category. Lots of fun and good comrade. And, some good amount of commitment, focus and fine tuning of skills.

I’ve always believed that success requires dedication. Passion makes the dedication fun. So, I’ve been working hard on both these passions and having fun doing them. Success can only be judged by the results achieved.

What are your passions worth dedication?

• Undocumented
• Unmanaged
• Unmeasured
• Time Intensive

Alternatively, they are supported with custom development that makes changes and upgrades difficult (often in addition the above issues.)

This need cries out for something that is easy to use like email, but addresses its deficiencies. Adaptive Case Management (ACM) holds out the hope of solving this need, but I’m not sure anyone has yet met the vision and been able to deliver on the promise. I’m not even sure there is agreement on the title (Advanced, Dynamic, or Adaptive) let alone what the promise is.

Forrester recently Waved Dynamic Case Management (DCM). After a long discussion of what DCM is, they evaluate vendors (mostly incumbent BPMS providers) on only six capabilities:

1. Design
2. Development environment
3. Capture, CCM, and ECM support and security
4. Case handling and guidance
5. Case-centric application support
6. Automation and event management

More enlightened definitions, I think, come from practitioners a little closer to the field:

Keith Swenson lists six characteristics of an Adaptive Process:

1. simplified deployment: the case templates do not need to be designed in advance to fit the situation.  You deploy an uncustomized system into the organization, and then it is adapted by the case managers themselves as needed.
2. exercise: The system is not “designed” by a central planner, but instead it is trained by exercising it.  Those parts that get the most use, and have the most need of improvement, will get the most effort.
3. learning: the system as a whole learns how to support the organization.  Instead of designing for a theoretical idealized business case, it learns from the real business cases, with the real people working on them.
4. practice: the training is accomplished by doing the work, and without the need to make an abstract theory about the underlying mechanisms.
5. stability: the system can be extremely stable because it senses and responds to perturbations automatically. The case managers themselves can shift behavior as needed, without waiting for programmers or other specialists.
6. optimized: each part of the organization can optimize use to their particular needs, for their particular part of the business, and their particular employees and skills. This level of optimization can only be achieved through self-modification.

Max Pucher simplifies and then expands these ideas (I encourage all to read the full content of all posts referenced here.) He uses three criteria to define an Adaptive Process:

1. Adaptive Process is a productive system that deploys not only the organization and process structure but through backend interfaces becomes the system of record for the business data entities and content involved. All processes are completely transparent as per access authorization and fully auditable.
2. Adaptive Process enables non-technical business users in virtual organizations to seamlessly create/consolidate structured and unstructured processes from basic predefined business entities, content, social interactions, and business rules to achieve verifiable goals.
3. Adaptive Process moves the process knowledge gathering in the life cycle from the template analysis/modeling/simulation phase into the process execution. The AP system collects actionable knowledge – without intermediate analysis phase – based on process patterns created by business users.

He then goes on to catalogue increasing levels of ACM that deliver these capabilities:

He concludes by emphasizing that, “The ACM platform must allow each business and department to work as they see fit to achieve customer outcomes and avoid the failure demand and increased costs that process standardization would cause.”

Who will deliver on any of these ideas is still up for grabs in my estimation. Some social tools are starting to hit close to these promises, but none have quite hit the mark . Let me know who you think gets close.

Cycle Time is one of my favorite measures. It is at the heart of Lean and forms a basis for improvement that is typically at the center of good customer experience and process agility. In my opinion, any process not tracking this measure cannot be meaningfully improved.

Cycle Time is defined as the total duration for a process to complete. This includes all time from a customer’s perspective to transform inputs to outputs including wait, process, transport, inspect, and other value add and non-value add time.

Cycle Time (CT) is easily measured for any process. You could measure it directly by starting a clock when a work item enters a process and timing until the process is completely finished with an end product. Of course, you’d have to allow for different exception paths that may take longer than the happy path on some repetitions of the process. The neat thing however, is that on average, Cycle Time can be calculated using two other readily available metrics. Cycle time is equal to the work in process (WIP = work that has started the process, but is not yet finished) divided by the capacity (Exits = output of the process over a period of time.) That is:

CT = WIP / Exits.

Consider a bank line. There are 10 people in line in front of you for the teller. You notice that one person is finishing on average every 2 minutes. How long will you wait in line – what is your bank line cycle time? WIP = 10 people in line. Exits = 1 person/2 minutes = 0.5 person /minute.

CT = WIP/Exits = 10 person / (0.5 person/ minutes) = 20 minutes

Want cycle time to improve? Reduce the WIP. If 5 people leave the bank line, you’ll wait half as long. Same process, half the CT. Or, improve the process capacity. With a second teller working, the Exits increase to 1 person/minute and again you wait half the time. Best yet, make the single teller twice as productive. Again, Exits double and CT is cut in half.

These same concepts apply easily to processes improvement. Usually, we can control the WIP in a process. Pull or Kanban systems are set up to do just this. Once the established WIP level is reached, no new inventory enters the process until another item exits. Generally, work should stay in its most unprocessed form until there is demand and capacity for it. Why is this important? When WIP is reduced all kinds of good things happen:

1. Reduced Investment. WIP represents an investment that has not yet paid off. Reduce WIP, and you reduce the capital needed to run a process. Or, for service processes, think of reducing the investment in unbillable work “laying” around the office.
2. Less Waiting. WIP that is waiting to be worked on is potentially wasted. Specifications and demand can change and WIP can get damaged and decay causing rework, excess and waste. Even for items that don’t need preserved, it is helpful to think of WIP has rotting any time it is in a queue.
3. Less Storage. If WIP is not in the process, it does not need to be stored on the floor, in warehouses, or in file cabinets and desks.
4. Easier Logistics. Unless you’re a long haul railroad, it is easier to schedule and move smaller loads.
5. More Focus. If work gets stuck in the process, it is much easier to find the bottle neck or constraint and take corrective actions.

In general, WIP should be reduced to just enough to cover the bottle neck activity. Consider our 3 step loan approval process of: Capture, Approve, Fund. If Approve can process only 10 loans a day while Capture and Fund can do 20 per day, marketing should generate demand for only 10 loans per day to meet a 1 day cycle time. Any more, and the cycle time will increase to over 1 day. Want to be able to handle more loans each day at the same CT –  you’ll need to improve capacity (Exits) at the bottleneck. To process 20 loans at 1 day cycle time, you’ll need to double Approval processors or make them twice as efficient (normally using a Lean technique to focus on value add or Six Sigma technique to reduce errors and variability.) The Capture and Fund processors already have that capacity.

Looking at improvement from another perspective, as cycle times are reduced, capacity (Exits) increases proportionally. That is Exits = WIP/CT. A fifty percent reduction in cycle time at the same load means capacity has doubled.

Measure and focus on Cycle Time improvement to maintain customer satisfaction, reduce costs and improve capacity.

1. Volume
2. Cycle Time
3. Efficiency
4. Quality

I’ll be exploring these over a series of blog posts on Measures starting with this post on Volume.

Volume seems like a simple measure. At its root, it is concerned with how many. Lets consider a simple a simple loan process and dig in a little deeper.

First, should I measure the number of loans, or the $ value of the loans processed? Is there another weighting factor that affects the process that I should measure?

The loan process has two types of loans. Do I need to measure volume separately for each type or jointly? What if there is different process requirements for each type?

Our process has 3 steps: Capture, Approve, Fund. There is drop-off after each step, so that volume at the first step will be different than subsequent steps. How do I account for this? If there are dependencies, and parallel steps, they may also need to be accounted for. Volume measurement gets more interesting as transactions become longer running. Over what period do I measure? Do I care about:

• The number in each step (how many loans need funded),
• The number that passed through each step (how many loans got approved today and may or may not yet be funded regardless of when we captured the loan), or
• The number that got converted through the process steps (of the loans captured this week, what percent were approved, are funded)

I have multiple processors at each step. Do I want to measure volume separately for each processor, or is jointly OK? What if the processors are more specialized or have different levels of approval authority?

Volume measures can get complex very quickly. So, be sure to understand how volume measures are being used. Depending on what level of visibility is required and how it impacts management or the ability to optimize processing, there can be many dimensions to how volume gets tracked and reported.

Here is a link to my presentation materials on the Business Value of BPM. I look forward to follow up discussions in the comments below or on the course discussion forum.

“While BPM products tend to focus on repeatable, structured processes, case management applies to more dynamic, unstructured, ad hoc processes.” And so, a new wave is born in Q1 2011. Forrester now separates DCM from traditional BPM with a separate wave. The usual suspects make up most of the leaders. Some interesting up and comers also make the short list of vendors profiled. Their explanation of Dynamic Case Management is worth a read of the full article.