What is Workflow or Business Process Management?

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At the simplest level, business processes are single events - or collections of events actioned by individuals within an organisation (who have often been designated the task of completing the action(s)) - that result in a desired business goal. The goal can be represented by any number of metrics and straddle any number of organisational areas - but its typically deemed 'necessary' or 'desirable' to a companies functioning.

At the more advanced end of the BPM scale, business processes can be used not just to manage the current but to strategise and produce hypothetical business processes to test before deployment.This type of business modelling is less about the organisation as it stands and more about testing the current environment to identify improvements that could be made - but still falls under the banner of 'business process management'.

The management of Business Processes should not be seen as stand alone events and in many scenarios they are linked to any number of related business processes and in many cases business processes can be nested into larger overall processes that may or may not have co-dependence. This is particularly the case when looking at operational business processes such as in manufacturing - where processes are often inter related and co-dependant.

As a result business process management is considered strategically important to almost every organisation as its about remaining competitive and agile against changing environments both today and tomorrow.

From a Content Management perspective 'Business process management' is something that has historically been very much associated with (Enterprise) Document Management Vendors, as the execution of the processes often result in documentation or records for storage (often legistlative)

Even if they dont start out as including content management processes, they can often result in the production of electronic content that needs managing - hence historically the close relationship with Document and Digital Records Management vendors.

CMS vendors will often talk about 'workflow' as an alternative way of describing a business process. Arguably the core difference is that whilst business processes are able to exist independently of an application or software tool (they opt to call upon a tool or set of tools as steps within the process), for CMS vendors, workflows are typically intrinsic to their product or application and the business processes they represent specific to a task within the application rather than the organisation as a whole. For example a wofklow designed to manage the process of creating a web page from the author creating the page to the editors approving it and final automated release by the WCMS is a business process albeit one that does not usually live outside of the WCMS.

A Business Process Management cycle can be grouped into six core components that follow on from each other sequentially starting with: A process vision, A process design, A model of the process, its implementation, monitoring of its success of failure, and finally optimisation if required.

The process is not typically based on a single life cycle since once a process has been optimised it frequently returns to the vision stage to reflect the fact that the world is constantly changing and the processes need to evolve to incorporate these changes - so the process is being continually tested for effectiveness.

Whether you are looking at BPM as a wider topic beyond the CMS space - or trying to understand its relevance to the CMS products themselves - it would be prudent to ensure that in which ever context you are viewing BPM the underlying tools allow you to manage processes in a way that meets your organisational objectives.

Further Reading

Generic information that assists with understanding the basics of content management