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Redefining the New Workflow	June 14, 2011

Redefining the New Workflow

BPM: Improving the Way You Process
By Jim Minihan

Etymology is the study of words and their history. For a society to function, words have to have meaning that can be consistently used to convey our thoughts. Work and flow are two different words that became the compound word "workflow" with regards to manufacturing activities and the operation of production lines. In this use, the reference focused on how an item was produced through a series of value-added steps at various job stations until it was completed. Manufacturers are very focused on gathering data along a production line so that they always know what the performance is at every point. This is essential to determining not only cost but knowing where your bottleneck is when it comes time to ramp up output.

When document imaging systems came along, it became necessary to manage the image objects to account for what was being accomplished vis-à-vis the transactions these documents were used to initialize. The marketing machines were cranked up, and workflow as a software application class was the hot item you wanted to be associated with. Suddenly, everything was workflow. The compound word with a long history was becoming meaningless, so much so that the real workflow applications (the ones that accumulated performance metrics) had to flee the term and move on to the now popular "process management" to differentiate themselves from the now-diluted term.

Recently, I have started following a new type of software application that is focused on gathering data about the use of a PC workstation by a person during the course of the workday. While doing so, I started to think, Is this workflow of a different sort? While the creators of these products present them differently, the intent of these applications seems to go beyond simply following the activities of the worker for security purposes and understand what amount of time is expended using which applications available to them. The typical office worker has dozens of applications at their disposal, and some cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars per seat. It is not uncommon for an organization to have as much as 30% of the software seats they have purchased for a given application completely unused...

Read more of Jim's article at DOCUMENT Media.
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