When dealing with a business process, the natural inclination is to try and model them using a business process management system. They are designed for repetitive, structured flows and not for tacit, dynamic situations. The modern idea of BPM stresses a well-defined business process as the starting point.

BPM had always had a tough times dealing with the humans. Humans are unpredictable, unstructured, and that is why implementing a business process that requires human interaction is so darn difficult. BPM solutions impose rigid structure and flow, but what if there is no structure or predicted workflow? For instance, handling an external audit report including findings and recommendations? In such a process, there are many tacit decisions, work distributions, and task assignments that are all ad hoc and still part of the process.

This is a collaborative process by nature that spans across the organization and requires managerial visibility and control since it is crucial to the organization. Still, the only way to manage this type of process today is through meetings, e-mails, and Excel lists. Some would argue that BPM simply needs a better way to manage exceptions using rules that will allow the process to be more dynamic and less rigid. Not that I don't think external rules will be a valuable addition to BPM toolkits; it's just that they won't solve the problem of ad-hoc, evolving, human-intensive business processes now being managed through meetings, documents, and e-mails. I believe managing those types of processes will require something very different than what is available in today's mainstream BPMS.

Without the proper framework for efficient human process management, people naturally turn to e-mail, spreadsheets, and plain documents to manage lists of action items and process deliverables. E-mail has literally become our day-to-day anchor for initiating, tracking, and completing dynamic work. It is the universal way to communicate process action assignment, status updates, and information sharing. The reason people chose e-mail for human process management is its familiarity, flexibility, and ubiquity.

CIOs are looking today into how to effectively bridge the gap between the collaborative and process spaces. While BPM solutions offer structure, workflow control, and process visibility with limited collaborative capabilities, collaboration and productivity tools offer a simple and ubiquitous means to communicate and share information with no structure or manageable workflow.

The main challenge is how to take the best of both worlds while leaving behind the limitations and obstacles.

Today, people write e-mails, documents, and spreadsheets and set up a variety of mechanisms to try and keep track and govern human work. Human process management is an attempt to bring order, tracking, and management to these situations. Managing such processes involves intercepting and storing any process-related information, whether it's e-mail, documents, updates, change in schedules or subsequent actions and steps carried out during the process lifecycle. In traditional BPM, IT, or a business analyst model the process for the business user and any change requires IT intervention. This is why BPM fails in a dynamic environment of human processes. This is the Holy Grail of many BPM vendors - to have end users defining their own workflows. In HPM it is the business user that drives the process, from modeling to initiation to follow up without any IT intervention - the entire process is end-user driven.

The process consists of the following ingredients:

• Actions - the "what"
• Responsibilities - the "who"
• Flow - the "when"

Any process participant who is assigned an action can set up their own subsequent processes / actions as part of the working process. The original process owner can view these subsequent actions and processes being carried out. Process information is stored in a centralized location so process owners have full visibility, tracking, and governance capabilities to the process stakeholders. The system orchestrates the process flow and governs routing, notifications, alerts, and escalation actions.

Human processes are all around us; they account for around 80 percent of our daily work as we collaborate with other people in the process. While traditional BPM is good for system-to-system workflows and rigid business processes, they fail to capture tacit, ad hoc processes where the human factor plays an important role. People use e-mail and documents to manage these types of processes but these are unstructured and decentralized systems that lack the visibility and control required over these processes. A human process management system will require innovations in order to provide a semi-structured means to collaborate on processes while providing structured and central storage to process information - making it both visible and searchable. This way, even the most complex and tacit processes like audit, investigations, research, and claims can be effectively managed along with the many other day-to-day processes that account for 80 percent of our daily work.