Human-Facing BPM

For the last couple of years, the Gartners and Forresters of the world have been pointing out that traditional BPM offerings don't handle people nearly as well as they handle systems. This is generically called "the people problem" for BPM. And, one way the analysts described this was by saying that the BPM offerings weren't "human-centric" enough.

Lo and behold, what do all the traditional BPM players start doing? Saying their products are, in fact, "human-centric." Then they point to all the ways you can depict human involvement in processes, etc. In this manner, they basically took ownership of the analysts' own way to describe their shortcoming to hide the fact that they still have that very same shortcoming. Nice trick.

So, what I'd like to do is talk about Human-Facing BPM instead of human-centric BPM...since the industry has pretty much obliterated the meaning of human-centric. But, that begs the question, "What exactly do you mean by Human-Facing BPM?" Well, I'm glad you (I) asked...

Human-Facing means exactly that: the part of a process that actually faces the person or people engaged with a process, and including the very interfaces they use to accomplish their tasks. This is vastly different from human-centric which essentially defines the fact that there needs to be a person or people involved -- and to be fair, sometimes even includes the characteristics of that involvement -- but doesn't actually contain fully functional ways for people to accomplish the involvement.

For a BPM tool to be truly holistic, it really needs to go that next step and provide appropriate user interfaces -- in multiple channels of communication, not just a proprietary web portal -- based off the definition of the step that requires human involvement. And, in order to do that, it almost certainly requires a fundamental re-architecting for any BPM tool that wasn't built with that in mind in the first place, because it involves state management, session management (which some do) and also flexible and abstractable interface generation (or "rendering") which almost no viable commercial offerings can do.

So, when thinking about which BPM tool might be right for what you or your company is trying to do, make sure you think about the real human-facing aspects of your processes and see if the tool(s) being considered really can give you a leg up by automatically providing a wide range of rich, consistent, and user-friendly interfaces in all the different channels people are using these days: web pages, VXML/IVR systems, mobile devices, social media, and beyond.