Fantastic write-up on the new features of SharePoint 2010 relative to Enterprise Content Management can be found at 8 Reasons SharePoint 2010 Looks Like a True ECM System.  Greg Clark did his homework both before the release (what it would need) and now what it has.

I continue to espouse that Content Management is not nearly as powerful without a healthy dose of functional workflow (that SharePoint 2010 doesn’t yet provide).  Jeff’s observation that the audit trail isn’t there in 2010 is yet another reason to use a SharePoint Workflow System like ours.  Tracking of check in / out, approvals, etc. is all done and provides a level of assurance that out-of-the-box 2010 ECM doesn’t provide.

I read with a lot of attention the Connie Moore’s (Forrester) write up on the current state of BPM Suites (BPM Suites: Picking Up The Pieces The Day After).  Absolutely no mention of SharePoint or Microsoft’s workflow tools.

Yes, a lot of buzz has been generated over the Lombardi and Savvion acquisitions.  However, I maintain the SharePoint will be the long-term portal for mainline business processing, and hence the need for BPM on SharePoint, which these vendors support in a non-integrated way.  It’s no wonder (actually correct) that Microsoft wasn’t mentioned.  They aren’t focused on BPM specifically, leaving the market open to these other vendors. 

The provides a great opportunity for third party vendors such as us to provide the agile tools to enable BPM on SharePoint.  The market has a long way to go, but in the long run, tools such as these will be highly successful.

For all of you business process management experts out there who are looking for reasons to justify your existence, look no further.  I’ve compiled a list of what I believe are great reasons why organizations should become, what we call, Process-Driven Enterprises.

Interspersed in the discussions is my own slant on this from a deployment technology focus (SharePoint/ShareVis), since we believe these provide the best overall solution when cost, adoption, ubiquity, rigor, and ease of implementation are considered. But more importantly, if your defined processes never see the light of day, your days as a BPM practitioner at your organization are numbered.

Here’s the list.  Please provide feedback on the LinkedIn BPM Forum.

#10.  Identify business activities that add to or detract from organizational value creation.  It’s important not to “pave the cow-paths” and make a dysfunctional process run faster.  Instead, the right analysis needs to be done to determine the most efficient process before implementing it as a workflow.

9)  Communicate who and what drives value, and how they do it.  Having a process firmly known and able to be communicated to the business is an easy way for everyone to fully understand the value that each department or individual produces.  This drives mutual respect and cooperation, which improves worker satisfaction and, ultimately, worker efficiency.

8) Institutionalize best practices.  As we research client processes, we invariably unearth great practices that individuals have developed.  These can be integrated into the process and normalized across the business in the resulting workflow.  Using SharePoint, more collaboration and discussion about those best practices can be promoted using discussion boards, furthering a sense of process-orientation and excellence.

7) Determine customer touch-points that are critical to long-term relationship building.  When you step back and think about business, it always comes down to making a sale and delivering value to the purchaser.  Taking a long, hard look at the business from this high-level process allows you to determine where the business is coming from, why this is the case, and what can be done to nurture this channel, as well as look at other channels that should be producing sales, but are not. 

6) Determine specific business rules by which your organization operates.  Rather than communicate rules verbally about, for example, who has what purchasing authority, it is far better to enforce these rules in workflows.  Workflows provide an automated way of moving information forward based on agreed to business rules such as “VPs can purchase up to $20,000 without CEO approval, as long as they don’t exceed their annual budget.”  Publishing these rules in SharePoint document libraries is a good practice, but making them an automated part of the business is far better.

5) Improve cross-departmental collaboration and cooperation.    If you operate as a process-driven enterprise wherein your decisions are recorded based on the information you had on hand at the time, everyone wins.  There’s a record of the decision, the amount of time it took, why the decision was made, etc.  These are things that aren’t recorded if you’re simply using a collaboration site on SharePoint or any other portal technology.  This data is gold when continuous process improvement initiatives are needed.

4) Drive business intelligence for intelligent business decisions.  With all of the decisions recorded, as well as the meta-data on those decisions (such as  department, amount, gl-code, etc. for a purchase order), it becomes very easy to derive business intelligence in the form of throughput (#POs outstanding, etc.).  This enables even better decisions since one process (invoice approval), can use data from other processes (PO approval).  To do this, forms that drive data into databases (or SharePoint lists) are needed.  But rather than using expensive forms servers, use of ShareVis allows this to be done with very low cost.

3) Innovate more quickly and reliably.  With increased efficiency in making decisions, products can be scuttled or moved forward to production much more quickly.  Using a stage-gate process implemented as a series of workflows is an excellent example of driving innovation quickly and repeatedly, influencing the top line results in the months and years to come.

2) Continuously improve the enterprise.  With process cycle-time, throughput and other process-specific data, it becomes far easier to determine where existing processes need to be altered (more bandwidth, different activities, etc.), and other new sub- or related-processes need to be developed.  These lead to a culture of continuous process improvement, driving the company to higher maturity and ….

1) Increase profits.  All of the aforementioned reasons lead to what we all want:  more profits, which brings larger paychecks, and happier shareholders. 

References: 

(1) Five Reasons To Invest in Process Management

According to a recent IDG survey, 62% of CIOs indicated that SharePoint has already become a critical component of their technology portfolio.  Beyond this, most organizations are going to take SharePoint to the next level in 2010, by expanding in areas such as business process management (63%), records management (40%), web content management (39%), and application development (35%).

However, because SharePoint has been managed as, one of our client executives put it “a wild wild west”, there has been Insufficient workflow processes (44%), disorganized content (40%) and Lack of an over-arching site creation strategy (38%).  Beyond this, search multiple SharePoint sites and duplication of content (document or record/lists) have created numerous usability issues.

Free SharePoint workflow prototypes from your business processes.

SPS Workflow’s take on this is the same as when we published the Wild Wild West article almost two years ago.  Organizations need defined business processes and resulting SharePoint hosted workflows to manage content on SharePoint.  However, far too many organizations are waiting for IT to develop workflows using cumbersome methods and tools such as Visual Studio, rather than focusing on both the streamlining, design, development and deployment of business processes using tools such as the SharePoint Workflow Designer used by our SharePoint Workflow Factory, or using the factory directly and focusing more on process definition.

The cost of either approach is considerably lower than internal programmatic approaches, while business process agility is greater and time-to-deployment  is faster.  If you’re interested in the data supporting these assertions, attend on of our Rapid Deployment of SharePoint Workflow Webinars to find out more.

I’ve been focusing a fair bit on financial business processes lately, and thought it was time to give human resources their fair due.  One of the simplest but perhaps most important workflows that HR can have is managing absences by employees. 

The business rules across all of our clients tend to be very similar:

• An employee submits a time off form on SharePoint (developed in InfoPath and converted to a web form).  The form has dropdowns for the type of time taken (vacation, personal, illness, jury duty, etc.), the from/to dates, number of days taken, and comments.
• Their manager (automatically assigned based on their login id) approves or rejects the request.  The form presents to the manager how many days remaining of the class of time off they have (looked up in the HR system).
• If approved the request goes onto HR for approval (really a double check, some of our clients don’t do this).
• The form is deposited in a repository on SharePoint tagged by the employee id for future use, along with the approval history.
• The days are automatically deducted from the HR system through SQL calls.

While this type of workflow works well, more and more clients are considering getting away from a separate HR system and doing everything inside of SharePoint.  Duplication of effort, storing of documents in different places, and the additional cost of the HR system are not justified.  SharePoint, along with HR business processes expressed in workflow (like Time Off, Hire/Fire, Corrective Action, etc.), provides everything necessary for running HR inside of a company.