To me there are two reasons to try and classify business processes this way – one is to help people to understand where their process is on the continuum, and use that understanding to choose the right tools for the task. Another is to use that understanding to create an ultimate process tool that can handle the complete continuum. The problem is that in the real world that just like with wave particle duality  – there is a duality of process. Every real world process is a mix of both structured and unstructured activities and tasks – it is just a matter of degree, and you’ll tend to see what you are looking for – which means that for real world processes you won’t be able to categorize them in neat silos within the continuum. Real world end-to-end processes are both structured and unstructured at the same time!

Personally I also think that there is distinction between what works for the structured part of a process, and what works for the unstructured part – both from a technology and methodology perspective.  Not that underlying technologies from structured processes can’t be applied to the unstructured processes – but not in a simplistic way.

At ActionBase we made the conscious decision to focus only on unstructured processes, which led us down a path complementary to, yet very different from the BPMS path taken by structured process vendors. We often get dinged for our lack of traditional support for structured processes – which is understandable if you look at business process from a structured process perspective. For example, we don’t enforce a workflow or do straight through processing.

But if you look at the world from a unstructured business process perspective – then you understand that structured process tools as they currently exist just can’t do unstructured, unpredictable ad-hoc human intensive processes (at least not in a way that anyone would use), but an unstructured tool can be used to execute structured process (though not without losing a benefits that a structured process tool can provide).

At ActionBase we feel we have taken the first step to bridge that duality –not by claiming that people should use our tool for structured process, but rather by enabling structured process tools a way to truly support unstructured processes in a usable way. We do that not by enforcing a structure on unstructured processes, but rather giving users a tool based on email and documents that provides manageability, monitoring and tracking that can use in conjunction with a structured process tool; without enforcing an inappropriate structure on the process and its participants.

1. BPMN is becoming more complex because it is primarily a tool for IT professionals. The technical desire to have the model rigorously define real-world processes has led to that complexity – and I doubt if it will change any time soon. Once it became a tool primarily for technical users there is no going back.

2. IT departments like the centralized control most BPMS give them. A good BPMS allows them to deliver to the business faster – but still enables them to be in complete control. Paraphrasing Phil Gilbert – it enables 1 Java programmer to control the productivity of 250 business users, and makes those business users completely dependent on IT.

3. This is reminiscent of the mainframe era in the 60, 70, and 80’s – which generated the client-server backlash of the 80’s, 90’s, and 00s. User’s got tired of the centralized DB’s that were never up to date, applications that took to long to build, lock of usability and IT bottlenecks. Once users (in this case knowledge workers)  were given tools that they could management themselves (office productivity suites) and together with the other tool under their control (email), they went wild and started handling most of their work that way.

4. IT, the CIO and most vendors hated that trend and tried to fight it. The more they fought it, the more people found ways to get around IT and use thhe systems that gave them back control.

Sorry for the history lesson (or at least my version), but I think we are in the same spot with respect to business process mangement. Both IT and existing vendors want to keep the tooling for the management of business processes in the hands of IT. On the other hand – both customers and analysts are starting to see that if that continues – there is no way that BPM will be able to handle the 70%-80% of process that are what Phil Gilbert calls “email and excel” processes.  Some BPM vendors are starting to add “Social BPM” capabilities to their products – but that doesn’t really democratize business process management (or put it under participant control)  - it just makes it easier to for the same subset of people that were doing process beforeto  become more efficient (that is a good thing, but not nearly enough to tackle the “excel+email” problem.

So where does all this leave us? I think that in 2011 we’ll start seeing business user backlash to BPMS – they will want more participant control over process, faster start up time, better end-user usability.  That will lead them to ACM (or to continue using email+excel).  It also probably means that the BPMS growth rate will slow.

I am not sure that is the reason they did it, but to me it sounds like a brilliant idea. Here at ActionBase we have been long time advocates of active documents (ActionDocs) that are not just passive objects in a process – but actually drive the process forward (for example have the checklist drive the process it describes) – and then have the process feedback into the document (e.g. checklist) on how a specific instance of the process is actually progressing.

If Google uses DocVerse to do this with Office and Wave – I think they will have made real progress in making Google Wave a real alternative to process oriented email in business, effectively making it an Adaptive Case Management system (and under the covers have Google be the  cloud based process warehouse and an alternative to SharePoint).