With blogging becoming such an innovative way to communicate, it only seemed appropriate for Ingenuus to enter the fray. For me personally, it is a great exercise in discussing topics I find relevant.

For those who know me, I am always ready to offer my views on process automation specifically and technology in general. I rarely agree with the pundits and analysts, preferring a more "pure" analytical approach to looking at what we know and extrapolating that into the future.

In the realm of process automation, there is much hype and little substance. But the promise of process automation is real. It is just harder to realize than many vendors make it sound. That is why we are here. We want to make it easier. Not easy. I doubt that it will ever be easy. Process automation means change of some sort, and change is never easy. But I personally believe that it can, and should, be made easier.

For instance, I read a recent article where the author was worried that the rigid contraints of process automation would dampen corporate creativity and flexibility. Funny that this comment can even be made since almost 90% of all corporate processes are not even written down and are still basically paper based. What company, or group of companies, were polled to reach such a conclusion?

Although it is true that many so called automated processes are rigid and difficult to change once implemented, it is not the goal of the current business process management (BPM) vendors to be so rigid. All of them desire and work toward making processes automation flexible and responsive to business needs. It might be true that some products are more flexible than others, but it would not be accurate to paint a picture that insinuates automated processes are "rigid".

In fact, the opposite might actually be true. By automating a process, a company is forced to understand the process, document it, and then map it. This exercise alone would be of great value. Placing the process into software that makes it "live" and collecting metrics, etc. as the process executes over and over provides valuable information that cannot be collected in any other way. Using this information from the actual process, companies can make improvements. As long as the software supports after-implementation changes, you are way ahead.

But because most processes are not even documented, companies are left in the dark. They truly "don't know what they don't know". No amount of simulation, or planning, or process re-engineering, or anything else can take the place of simply automating a process and then collecting actual usage data. If you don't know what the heck you are doing, then how can you improve on it by being creative and flexible?

Duh.