The new information worker

Business in the 21st century moves more information around in one day than was generated by the whole of mankind up to the end of the 19th century. The need to process these vast volumes of information in and out of our businesses’ core operational systems is overloading information workers and reducing their efficiency and effectiveness.

Revolutionise and globalise….According to Phil White, CTO at WCI, the tools we provide to our information workers have to adapt quickly to keep pace with the commoditisation of ‘old world’ information worker tasks and operate within an ever more globalised environment that offers new ways of working, such as out-sourcing, co-sourcing and home-sourcing.

What is an information worker?As modern economies have become information dependent, more and more occupations have become information based. The term information worker refers to all those who use technology to process information as part of executing business processes e.g. an accountant using financial applications and spreadsheets to generate reports, a doctor entering patient information and generating a prescription, and a sales representative using a laptop to create a customer report.

What are our information workers doing today?
In a nutshell, today’s information workers spend 90% of their time pumping information in, out and between core ‘line of business’ IT applications. Despite investments in Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) products, these business systems (Finance, HR, CRM, Manufacturing etc) still segment our enterprise data into independent silos. Despite the limitations imposed by these silos, core operational business processes have had to evolve and adapt to a rapidly changing and globalising marketplace.

So we have a disjoint between the pace of change of business processes and the ‘cross communication’ ability of the IT systems that underpin their operation. The information worker has been bridging this gap between process requirement and IT integration capability by manually shifting information in and out of our business systems.

IT strategists have always known the importance and challenge of application integration. This prompted investment in EAI products in the late 1990’s and post millennium period. However; key to successful integration of applications is interoperability which required common standards and protocols. What solved this problem was cross industry adoption of the internet standards, XML and SOAP based web services and their application within an IT strategy called ‘service orientation’.

How will service orientation help information workers?
Service orientation is an IT strategy for accessing and re-using enterprise functions that have traditionally been ‘buried’ within line of business applications. It is the first step in a wider business led strategy to componentise the business functions, allowing flexible and agile reconfiguration of the business process. This takes the design of the business processes away from the application vendors and returns it to the Business Analyst and emerging Business Architects.

Analysts can work within a Business Process Management Suite (BPMS), which allows them to directly configure the service components and design the business process.

Pursuing a Business Process Management strategy will position information workers as key resources for improving and interacting with business processes.

To see how the role of an information worker progresses from ad-hoc to business process driven, let’s look at a fictitious scenario….

Goodbye Mr Smits!
Mr Smits is due to retire from our organisation in a few weeks time. To ‘process’ Mr Smits on to retirement we need to make sure that our organisation is prepared for the transition. We need to know when Mr Smits’ sixty-fifth birthday is, what his final salary will be, his bank details and his home address. We also need to know that he’s completed a handover of all his customer accounts to another member of his team and that we have an archive of all his electronic communications and files, in case we need them in the future. Lastly, we may need to advertise for a new recruit to fill Mr Smits’ position.

So, within our scenario we are covering a number of considerations about and for Mr Smits, including HR, Finance, Sales & Marketing and IT services. In most organisations, each of these considerations would be handled by a specific department. Coordinating the activities of each department, would be the responsibility of information workers.

As the information workers progress with their individual pieces of Mr Smits’ retirement ‘process’, they interrogate their departmental applications (HR person looks at the HR system etc) and extract information into Microsoft Office applications (Word and Excel for example) ready to send or share it with other information workers via Microsoft Outlook or SharePoint. So we have a combination of application data and documents being processed and communicated between information workers.

Although information sharing is a good thing, a lot of time would be wasted due to a lack of a cross-department view of activity on the overall ‘retirement’ business process.What we would ideally like is a ‘business process’ that sits across and above Finance, HR, Sales & Marketing etc that coordinates the various information worker activities involved in Mr Smits’ retirement. We’ll get back to this later, but wouldn’t it be nice if that business process was as efficient (or ‘lean’) as possible?

Service orientation and the information worker
In our example, our information workers were accessing various business applications trying to extract and shoehorn data into Microsoft Office, so they could then move and share the Office based content with the other information workers involved.

Recalling our earlier discussions about service orientation, the IT industry has adopted a set of standards that allow us to ask questions of our systems in a common way (the web services stuff) and extract this data into a common data format (the XML stuff). In parallel with the broad adoption of web services, Microsoft Office has fully embraced the concept of storing ‘document’ content in XML.

Now that both our application and document data is in XML, we have the opportunity to unify the information worker’s experience of handling the data. Our information workers should now be focused on fulfilling the stages of the ‘Mr Smits’ retirement’ business process, without worrying about line of business systems or how to get data from them.

This is not a new concept; it’s just a piece of a wider solution known as a ‘business process management suite’, or BPMS. The theme of this white paper is to show how information workers can leverage Microsoft Office as a key part of a BPMS. Having described an environment within which an information worker can progress Mr Smits’ retirement process, we can look at how we can progress towards this ‘business process’ driven view of the world.

Business process management suites
Business process management is a current hot topic for IT strategists and is a natural next step for organisations following a strategy to ‘service enable’ their line of business systems. Once a fabric of web services has been layered across line of business systems, the services can be aggregated and used within processes workflows. Such workflows are defined by business process analysts, using notations such as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), rather than IT system developers. The business analysts implement the ‘macro’ business logic, whilst the developers maintain the ‘micro’ logic.

Although we still rely on the web service enabled line of business applications to fulfil the actual business operations (e.g. tell me what Mr Smits’ home address is), the macro business logic layer provides a high degree of flexibility for changing processes as and when demands change. It is this prize of business flexibility that analyst driven development promises.

To progress these macro business process steps, our information workers will ideally use an environment that presents a single view of ‘data’ and ‘documents’. Information is then updated, either manually or automatically to progress it through the stages of the business process.

So, our business operations will comprise analyst defined processes that are progressed by information workers. We look to the IT vendors to provide an ‘analyst driven development’ capability, together with a unified working environment for information workers to interact with business processes.

Major IT vendors such as Microsoft, IBM and Oracle are positioning their offerings against a notional BPMS framework. For the information worker, each vendor offers a web browser based, ‘portal’, driven user interface onto business processes. However, of these vendors, only Microsoft has an opportunity to present its ubiquitous Office platform as a natural information worker environment for progressing business process steps that combine data and document information.

Microsoft Office within a business process management suite
Whilst a full BPMS capability requires many user interface elements (designing process workflows, monitoring state and throughput etc), the most important one from the information worker’s perspective is that it’s used in the day to day progressing of activities.

An information ‘process’ worker will need (amongst other things) an in-tray of work to be done, broken down by business process and priority, a method of selecting one of the pending pieces of work and a user interface for undertaking an item of work. Visualising these items for an information worker requires a rich user experience, which is best served by a SmartClient approach (i.e. one that uses the resources of a PC, rather than just the restricted HTML resources of a browser).

Microsoft has spent a number of years aligning their Office system of products to use open standards such as XML and web services. Combined with an ever more capable set of Office-automation developer tools, there is an opportunity to use information worker favourites like Outlook, Word and Excel as the key user interfaces onto a business process management enabled enterprise.

Office is progressing into a new phase of use. Combined with Windows and custom SmartClient capabilities, we see Office as a key user interface for information worker interactions with the tasks required to progress business processes.

If we look at Office as having had two main phases of evolution between the original Office 97 suite and the current Office System 2003 we see the transition from an individual productivity capability into a cross-user collaboration platform. With the next-generation of the 2007 Office System, we are seeing a third phase of evolution that enables business process-driven information working. 

Combining business process and technology expertise
We have greatly simplified the strategic proposition of service enabling an enterprise and delivering this new capability to information workers. However, it should be apparent that we need two sets of capabilities: to be a leader in this new world of business process enablement, an organisation must offer expertise in both technology and business processes.

A lot of Microsoft partners have in-depth expertise in Microsoft technology. Very few also have the capability to apply process-level consultancy. And of these, only WCI can claim both a long partnership with Microsoft and a strong background in ‘leaning-up’ production, supply and information processes.

This unique combination enables us to leverage deep knowledge of the Microsoft platform with our proven expertise in bringing ‘lean’ processes to fruition across a range of sectors including pharmaceutical, construction, services and manufacturing.Tackling the challenge of service enabling your organisation, implementing lean business processes and empowering information workers will position organisations to do business within the continuing trend of globalisation in the 21st century.

For further information please contact: info@wcigroup.com or call 023 9226 8133