Let me tell you about an organisation whose workflow implementation demonstrates stability, flexibility, interoperability, stringent service levels and consistent vendor support. Thorough joint analysis and design (JAD) customer sessions and a culture of organisational acceptance towards workflow were key.
Best of all, the organisation in question - a large financial institution - experiences 99.5% uptime, while the other 0.5% is devoted to running necessary administrative processes on the system.
Does this sound too good to be true? Actually, it shouldn`t, because many major companies, in countries around the globe, are experiencing these and other benefits from similarly successful implementations of workflow within their organisations.
As a business grows and develops, its requirements in many areas become a whole lot more complex than was originally the case when starting out. The situation becomes complicated because with multiple people involved, more sophisticated factors become important to the smooth operation of the organisation. These include customer preferences, loyalty, service and relationships, and many other things, such as multiple suppliers.
As businesspeople, we are all looking for the `silver bullet` that will allow us to predict our customers` requirements and simultaneously achieve that elusive goal of customer satisfaction.
Processes exist because organisations do. In plain terms, they `are the way things get done`. Business processes touch everything in an organisation, from the customer to the back-office, through the supply chain and finally to the financial transactions involved.
The market has realised that the easiest way for organisations to be competitive, manage costs, be viable, flexible and responsive, is to understand and improve the structure and execution of their business processes. And that deploying an independent process layer is key to achieving this.
Essentially, this is what has become known as business process management (BPM) and is the key to IT delivering on its promises to business.
As such, workflow is being used extremely successfully in a number of vertical industries, especially in the financial, insurance, utilities and telecommunications markets around the world today.
Gone are the days of so-called `box-dropping` by workflow vendors. Today, the implementation of a workflow system within an organisation, such as the case mentioned above, is approached as a partnership with that particular enterprise - and not a once-off occurrence. Within the last couple of years in particular, vendors such as Staffware have formalised this approach into partnership programmes.
The key to remember is that the introduction of workflow into any organisation represents the undertaking of a mutually long-term relationship between vendor and client. And, as with any other relationship, if the ground rules are not established carefully, strategically and with the appropriate amount of thought and preparation, there is every chance that problems will develop down the line.
Translated into workflow terms, this basically would mean a poorly managed workflow implementation. In other words, if the vendor and client do not both invest the necessary time and effort in initial JAD and scoping sessions, the requirements of that particular business will probably never be met by the workflow system.
Furthermore, the organisational culture should also be carefully studied - again, by both workflow vendor and the client purchasing the system - and a programme worked out whereby users within the business can be properly trained and also their attitudes and mindset effectively gauged and managed; in order to bring about pervasive user acceptance of the workflow system.
If all the steps in the workflow implementation process are adhered to, businesses very quickly see why workflow has earned itself the reputation of being the single most successful factor in giving organisations the ability to extract business logic from their applications, and map this to everyday organisational processes and integration points.
A final important point to bear in mind is that the success of a workflow system, and its implementation within any given business, should be evaluated bearing the importance of a thoroughly undertaken implementation process in mind.
To do this correctly, one should not allow peripheral issues such as unrealistic expectations, corporate or vendor politics to mar the huge potential benefits that workflow can bring to the business.
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