Hello again, this is Vance McCarthy, Program Director at Integration Developer News with another in our series of Expert Voices talking about top issues in SOA, BPM and Enterprise Architecture. Today I'm pleased to be joined by Scott Kirkland, Vice President of Product Management at Global 360.

Scott, thanks for being here.

Over the last five years, BPM has really grown and evolved. Many folks have really considered BPM as that set of technology that helps them to address process improvement. Over the last year, it's became apparent that really BPM has addressed just the tip of the iceberg. In the landscape of processes, nearly 80 percent of processes within these businesses are unstructured or have not been automated with BPM technology, and that leaves a huge opportunity as we move forward.

But you've got to look at some of the other drivers. We've seen that today, business productivity is really at a historic low. We found that many folks see about 35 percent of their time being unproductive, so about 16 hours out of a 45-hour workweek is perhaps less than productive.

Likewise, as we talk to folks, we really want them to understand what's really killing their productivity. We found that 40 percent of workers are ignoring company rules because candidly they found a better way to get things done. As part of that, they see that there's an exorbitant amount of time that's wasted. In fact, in some scenarios, there's 85 percent of their day, or at least portions of their day, that may be wasted by not having access to the right information at the right time.

So that means there's an absolute huge opportunity for us to leverage BPM technologies as well as many of the skills that exist within the IT community today to be able to improve how work's really getting done.

So we've connected the dots here between BPM and IT. Now we're going to take that one step further, Scott. Describe for me how Global 360 is architected to enable IT professionals to take advantage of these opportunities.

We are built from the ground up on the Microsoft stack of technologies, leveraging the operating system, the database and other platforms like SharePoint and Lync (formerly known as OCS, that can foster communication). So really the spirit of this is to ensure that IT professionals can take advantage of the skills and the knowledge they currently have on the technology to be able to improve the way that work gets done.

So as I think about that, as you really look at ways to leverage the [Global 360] BPM suite, it's about not only addressing the first process improvement initiative, but then continuing to improve the way that work is done within the organization by taking advantage of the elements of this extensible platform.

This is such an interesting conversation because I think that IT people, depending on what groups or what departments or what silos they work in, will automatically gravitate to one or more of these definitions you spelled out.

So let's spend a couple of minutes going through these. First one, Persona-based BPM, that sounds like role-based. But my sense is that you really mean it to be a lot more than that.

Absolutely. While many vendors focus on two communities, those such as the IT professional (which are extremely important) and business managers (those responsible for actually managing the operations). When we address those, there's some other constituents that we must consider as we're deploying the solution, including participants (often known as end-users), as well as the end customers, so the customer perhaps the Global 360 customer.

Now as we look at ways folks can improve the way that their business is operating, it's really understanding at a deeper level of detail how these individuals interact with the technology and with the business solution.

You alluded to a few moments ago that [Persona-based BPM] just sounds a bit like role base. Roles are one element of a "persona," but there's much more than that. Let me just say as a caveat that oftentimes the "role" is really synonymous with user access rights within a system. Personas in addition to the role, is understanding what are the goals. So, what are the actual things that incent these individuals? What are what we call the task flows? So how do individuals really work through on a daily basis from logging into the system, to searching for their work to actually automating or improving something? In other words, dispositioning a piece of work to continuing throughout their days.

One of the fundamental tenants of our Persona-based approach is delivering a user experience that addresses their needs and includes that smarter way to get work done.

Absolutely. As we look at our BPM suite, one of the areas we did focus on is ensuring that we really addressed the needs of that Builder group as you referenced. As we thought about it a very high level, many of the folks that sit within that category include perhaps those that are beginning with those process-improvement initiatives such as business analysts, transitioning to those developers or those IT professionals that are responsible for building, deploying and maintaining the system.

So each of those individuals often has unique needs and perspectives. We need to ensure that the BPM suite, the technology we provide, really allows them to be more efficient and more effective at designing, deploying and then managing a solution.

Scott, as we move on, with your trends, it seems like Case Management is a pretty popular one in BPM. Maybe take us through that.

As you mentioned, Case Management is a very hot topic in the broader spectrum of business process management. When I look at the landscape of many of the business processes that exist for various companies, oftentimes we can address those or evaluate those based on what I call the nature of work. There often exists on a continuum all the way from highly structured, repetitive processes that lend themselves better to straight-through processing, to the other side of the spectrum which more relevant or more prevalent in terms of unstructured processes. That's where perhaps a knowledge worker is evaluating a case and a case may exist that includes various information, documents, tasks, things of that nature.

So this individual, then, is able to evaluate this information and make informed decisions based on that concept of a case. And lends itself very well to adaptive case management.

I see in the architecture slide you brought with you, it seems like you really emphasize not just visibility into a case, but actually encouraging each role, each department, each hand-off point to push that case along to conclusion.

Yes, that's right Vance. And what I'd like to do is talk a little bit more about that in the context of a customer example.

I wanted to share just a few minutes about Intuit, and specifically a division of Intuit known as Innovative Merchant Services. IMS has been leveraging the Global 360 technology to attack one of the primary challenges they had just a couple of years ago. As you can imagine, their business problem is really handling a large volume of disputes from credit card transactions coming in from issuing banks and cardholders.

They needed a way to really be able to eliminate those paper-based and manual processes, but still had to comply with a lot of the various industry regulations. They were able to deploy a comprehensive solution for their service request processes with the Global 360 solution. Again minimal development required, leveraging the best of the platform we've talked about to really eliminate the paper-based hand-offs between department and to make sure that they really improved a resolution of those calls and resolution of those cases.

Social and collaboration are certainly additional trends that we're seeing, and they really span throughout the process lifecycle. As we've looked historically at the way that organizations have really a driven processes and process improvements, they've really focused on many of the things that you see in terms of business transactions. Perhaps they focused on articulating that data model, identifying the specific roles and really ensuring compliance. While these are all extremely important, we're seeing from a social or collaborate perspective is that really participants are changing the way that they're getting work done.

Given the way that many of us are leveraging social capabilities within our personal lives, it's bleeding over into business aspects of our life as well. So people are looking for personalization of their user experience. They're looking for the ability to leverage social networks. To really take advantage of some of the mentoring capabilities, and perhaps some of the knowledge base exists in their environment today

Mobile process application, they're extremely prevalent in BPM today, and that's perhaps one of the hotter trends that we've talked about. As we had the chance to really work with many of our customers and those in the broader landscape of business process management professionals, we find that folks are using very different devices and form factors to be able to get their work done on a daily basis. And it's oftentimes we find that perhaps it's those managers or those folks that need to get visibility or to track status or get notification, they're doing a lot of that via their smart phones while on the go.

Likewise, we find other professionals that are perhaps using the tablets to be really be able to provide input or to receive information as they're out servicing customers in the field.

It absolutely does. These four trends are very highly interrelated is one way of thinking about it.