Workflow in the world of BPM at www.plesums.com

Workflow in the world of BPM
Are they the same?
From the Workflow Handbook 2005
©2005 by Charles A. Plesums,
Fellow, Workflow Management Coalition
Austin, Texas, USA
Workflow
"In the Middle Ages, monks sat at tables carefully copying thescriptures. The father superior would make the assignments, perhapsgiving the illuminated first page of a section to the most skilledartist, perhaps assigning the proofreading tasks to the elderly scholarwith trembling hands.
Little has changed in centuries – the process is established, workis assigned and tracked, performance is checked, and resultsdelivered.  Often it is done by manual effort of supervisors (eventoday).  Butautomated tools have emerged to assist.
Workflow Management
Document imaging emerged as a practical technology in the mid 1980s.When the images were stored in a computer system, there no longer wasany paper to drop in somebody‘s in-box – no natural way to assign andtrack the work. The initial simple workflow management tools routed thework to the person (or sequence of people) that needed to process thedocuments. The early workflow management systems were intimatelyassociated with the content – the document – that was being moved orrouted.
The workflow management tools evolved to assign priorities todifferent types of work, to balance the distribution of work amongmultiple resources (people) who could handle the work, to supportinterruptions in the work (I‘ll finish it in the morning), and tohandle reassignment (I‘m sick and am leaving now).
Not all work was associated with a document, so most workflowmanagement systems were adapted (if necessary) to process work that hadno documents, images, or attachments – pure process, without content.For example, renewing an insurance policy or changing a credit limit.
Not all processing steps required a person. Therefore most current workflow managementsystems support "straight through" processing or robotics. For example,
As part of a larger process, one person may enter data from an order or application. When the entry is done and necessary data is available, the workflow system may automatically requests a credit report from a system in another company. When the report is received, the manual or automated process continues.
The entire process may be automated. An address change may be detected (perhaps on the payment stub), so is automatically sent to an OCR process. If the address recognized from the form is a valid address in the postal database, the change is made, and a confirmation letter is sent to the customer. A person is only involved in an error – if the data cannot automatically be verified.
Thus workflow management systems are no longer just a simpleinventory of work to be processed, or a simple routing system, but havebecome sophisticated process management tools. They originally assigneddocuments to people for processing, so most products have specialstrength assigning longer tasks to people, with one or many attacheddocuments, but the viable workflow management systems have gone farbeyond their historical origins.
Business Process Management
Business has become more complex in recent years. Many processesextend outside the organization – even outside the enterprise. Some ofthe steps that traditionally were handled internally are now being"outsourced" to "business partner" companies or individual contractors.Suppliers of products and services can be more economical andpredictable when they are integrated into the larger process.
System tools have emerged to help analyze and design these complexnew business processes. Other tools, the invocation engines, run theprocess as defined. Specifically these engines invoke transactions onsystems both internally and across many organizations – suppliers,partners, and customers. Business Process Management – BPM – is born.
The new BPM tools have been defined "top down" rather than simplyevolving (like most workflow management tools).  The techniques used todefine the process are more rigorous – some people take pride in beingable to describe the mathematical foundation behind the varioustechniques. Graphical maps, modeling, and simulation are common toolsto define the process. In production, the invocation engines will usethe latest technology (including the Internet) to pass data and invokeprocesses on local and remote systems within an organization, betweendifferent organizations within an enterprise, and between enterprises.
Are BPM and Workflow the same?
Both Business Process Management and Workflow allow a process to bedefined, tested, and used. BPM originally focused on computertransactions - the large number of rapid business processes most oftenhandled entirely by machine. Workflow originally focused on contentthat required human judgment or processing, often distributed amonglarge numbers of people, with each process taking a relatively longtime, thus being subject to interruption. Both BPM and Workflow canhandle the entire range of business processes. The question is how welleach product works in each situation.
BPM is focused on defining the overall business process, andmanaging and tracking that process wherever it goes, often throughmultiple organizations, different computer systems, multiple locations,and even different enterprises. However, each transaction is normallyquick – the request to get a credit report may need to be queued untilmorning, but when run, the response is immediate.  There may be onlyone system that performs a particular transaction, and when it is run,it is rarely interrupted. Since processing is fast, most can beprocessed on a first-in, first-out basis.  BPM is optimized forprocesses that are automatic, not involving human interaction.
Workflow is focused on managing the process also, but often hascomponents of uncertainty and delay such as those associated withpeople. We may have to send the "work" to someone for approval, butthat person may be interrupted (suspending the work while they take aphone call, go to a meeting, or even return from vacation). There maybe many (even hundreds) of different processors (people or systems)that could handle that particular piece of work, and any one processormay be able to process many different types of work (but not the samecombination as the next processor). The total work must be equitablydistributed among the many processors.  Some of the processing may takemany minutes or hours, so more important work (the bigger deal or thebetter customer or the older work) may be given higher priority – beassigned first. The workflow is often modified as the person seeksadditional information (such as a lab analysis or a legal opinion) forthis particular case. Quality needs to be checked – not just is thesystem operating reliably, but are the people making mistakes.(Beginners may have 100% of their work checked, but an expert may onlyhave a few percent checked.) Most workflow products can invoke programsautomatically (without human intervention) like the BPM engines, butare optimized for the multiple processors and delays in the process. But many of the workflow products on the market today aren‘t (yet) asfocused on the cross-enterprise or inter-enterprise processes as theBPM tools.
We could conclude that both workflow management products and BPMproducts manage a business process, so in that sense they are the same.These products may be very different internally – and thus thestrengths and weaknesses of those products in a particular applicationcan be very different.
Many workflow vendors have integrated BPM products into their workflow packages, but the degree of integration is sometimes limited – the product still is primarily a workflow tool.
Many BPM vendors have discovered the special needs of workflow, and have either integrated a workflow product into their BPM packages, or have built-in rudimentary workflow functions.
Embedded Workflow
Many computer systems, such as those that process orders oradminister insurance policies, have recognized the value of workflow.Therefore many of these systems have embedded workflow among thefunctions provided by their system. The good news is that this is afast and convenient way to get started in workflow. The bad news isthat it may only have a minimal set of workflow functionality – justenough to perform that specific application in an unsophisticated way.The workflow functions of a dedicated enterprise workflow system arelikely to be much more robust than those that are embedded within aspecific application.
One person rarely works with a single application all day, every day– some of their time may be spent substituting for a supervisor, orquality checking other people‘s work.  Some companies mix assignmentsbetween "back office mail processing" and "front office call center"work. Some time will be spent in training or even developing new workmanagement procedures. Work may arrive from the telephone, internal orexternal email, from the paper inbox, or from the workflow system.People do not do well balancing the work from multiple sources – whileworking on email, they will likely respond to all the email, even ifmore important work is waiting in the workflow system or inbox. Thisleads to an argument for a separate enterprise (or desktop) workflowsystems, that balance the work between multiple business functions andsystems.
Standards
The Workflow Management Coalition reference model, below, definesfive components of workflow – the five interfaces to the workflowenactment services (what BPM calls the invocation engine).Understanding the five components, represented by arrows in thediagram, helps distinguish between BPM and Workflow systems.

WfMC Interface 1 is the process definition. This is the startingpoint for BPM and the particular BPM component that has received a lotof analysis and development. Workflow products vary in the techniquesand tools used to define the process – some products use third partytools, if any, for analysis of the process, or use custom programs orsimply manually generated tables to define the business process for theprocessing engine.
WfMC Interface 2 is the client application – the program thatinvokes the workflow process. Workflow tools have a strong history ofhuman interface, so may be stronger in this aspect; BPM istraditionally focused on processes that require less human interaction,and may have a stronger programming interface.  Some BPM products haveno human interface at all – any human interaction must be customprogrammed.
WfMC Interface 3 is the interface to the programs invoked bythe business process. The first workflow systems presented documents topeople for processing in their traditional way (none of the processesto be performed by the people were automatically invoked). Workflowvendors quickly learned that they needed at least a minimal interfaceto expedite the process – start the right program for the user, even ifthe data all needed to be entered manually. Eventually most workflowtools evolved, and can invoke local and remote processes, but thatinterface must often be customized – it is an "add on" to manysystems.  On the other hand, BPM is built to automatically invokeexisting systems, using consistent, modern interfaces.  BPM productsgenerally excel here, except when dealing with archaic legacy systemsthat don‘t support the modern interfaces and tools.
WfMC Interface 4 allows one workflow system to talk toanother workflow system… to initiate work on another system (perhaps adifferent vendor‘s system in a different enterprise), to track thestatus (progress) of that work, to cancel the work if necessary, and toinquire or be notified when the work is complete. BPM invocationengines generally don‘t talk to other engines, but would invoke atransaction at another enterprise, and that transaction might, in turn,initiate a local process. Either approach gets the job done.
WfMC Interface 5 is for administration and monitoring of thesystem, including logging, monitoring the performance and backlogs, andadjusting the resources. Both BPM and Workflow have these functions.But this is an area that deserves attention.
Caution
One organization decided that their systems needed to be modernizedacross the entire enterprise, using new technology to link the homeoffice and regional offices to their vendors and customers.  Theselected a BPM product, installed all the system components, andtrained all the staff.
The first application dealt with processing documents, from thecustomer through several regional offices, to home office specialists. Their BPM product didn‘t naturally link to documents, but that could beadded. Their BPM product didn‘t have a user interface for the regionaland home office staff to query the status of their work queues, butthat could be built.  Their BPM product didn‘t have the ability tosuspend work, allow a supervisor to override the assignment of work, orto automatically prioritize work (some work was more urgent thanothers).
All of these requirements could be added to the platform provided bythe BPM product. But this process could have easily been implemented bymany traditional workflow systems, with little or no customization. TheBPM solution may have been the best overall solution for the company,but workflow tools would have been much better to solve this firstapplication.
In another environment the problem might have had minimal humaninteraction, electronic data rather than documents, and processes thatinvolve a more complex organizational structure. A workflow tool mayaccomplish the job, but BPM products might be easier to implement andperform better for this process.
There is no simple answer.  This certainly doesn‘t mean thatWorkflow is better than BPM, although it probably would have been forthe one business process in the first case.  Not does it mean that BPMis better than workflow, even though it might have been so in thesecond case.  It does mean that the business requirements need to behonestly identified, and both BPM and Workflow products need to beconsidered.
Conclusion
The key issue is the business process, and how that process worksfor the business users, partners, suppliers, and customers.  BPM andWorkflow are both technologies that manage the definition,implementation, and operation of the business processes.  One is notgood and the other bad, but they come from a different origin, and thushave different strengths.  The key is to look beyond the product name,and find the functions that will best serve the business.