Automate With Ease

by Lowell Rapaport

Nottingham University, a British liberal arts, science, engineering and medical school, was having trouble with its hiring procedures. The process of hiring a new faculty member began with a department head who filled out a form.

From there, the form followed a fairly conventional workflow as it moved up the administration ladder for approval. However, traditional workflow wasn't sufficient for the university's needs.

"We wanted the hiring process to check with the finance department for the availability of funds and to go to the human resources department so they could begin the process of finding candidates and scheduling interviews," says the university's senior IT support officer, Mike Polak.

These functions required that the proposed workflow be integrated into the university's financial systems, and with the repositories in use by human resources.

"At first we tried to use the workflow tools built into Groupwise," Polak says, referring to the messaging and collaboration system from Novell. "But the Groupwise workflow tools proved to be insufficient for what we needed to accomplish."

Polak turned to Metastorm e-Work, a business process management system. E-Work is a four-year-old workflow product that integrates with groupware systems including Groupwise and Outlook/Exchange. Unlike systems that simply move documents from one user to the next, the e-Work business process management system follows a business activity, activating enterprise systems, providing information to users and initiating processes in support of the original goal. Business process management also integrates with other systems so that many different systems in an enterprise can hasten the completion of a task.

The latest release of e-Work, Version 5.2 introduced in November, adds integration with Microsoft's Biztalk server, support for mobile and offline users, and biometric authentication. Integration with Biztalk supports use with enterprise applications including legacy applications. Mobile and offline support is aimed at users who access the enterprise from home offices and portable computers while traveling. It also supports handheld Palm and Pocket PC devices. Biometric security is important for e-Work users handling sensitive material such as employment and medical records and financial information, and it is even more important in supporting mobile users.

Integration with content management and messaging systems lets e-Work bring up relevant information for users automatically. "An e-Work business process incorporates 'actionable items' that are customized to the user and stage at which a business process stands," says Metastorm CEO Avi Hoffer. "The actionable items are customized to the user's position and limited to their role in the business process."

According to Eric Austvold, research director at AMR Research (www.amrresearch.com), Boston, Metastorm covers the four basic requirements of business process management: modeling, brokering, managing and monitoring.

"The next arena of development for Metastorm and other business process management vendors will be to coordinate processes involving multiple enterprise business systems," says Austvold. This means integrating e-Work with systems such as ERP, content management and collaboration technology.

The importance of integration is underscored by Nottingham University's experience. The institution looked for integration with its various e-mail, financial and administrative systems. This included an Agresso finance system and the user-name library in the Novell network. The university also plans to integrate the hiring process with the procurement system and the facilities system so that new employees will have basic necessities such as a desk, a telephone and fresh supplies waiting for them as soon as they start work.

Polak says the e-Work software took a few months to install and set up. Metastorm provided a consultant and training on how to create work processes. While the e-Work system cost the school about $42,000, Polak says its efficiencies have resulted in long-term savings. "We also hope to use the system to manage help desk requests and the research grant application process," he adds.

Hoffer of Metastorm says version 6.0 of e-Work, set for release midyear, will support Lotus Notes as well as Microsoft's .Net Web services environment.

Support for .Net will enable e-Work to integrate a much wider variety of enterprise applications that analysts such as Austvold consider to be important for the future of business process management. However, .Net integration will put Metastorm squarely in competition with Microsoft's Biztalk.

"Metastorm has an 18-month lead in development against Biztalk," says Austvold. "It will take at least a year until Microsoft will have effective business process management systems."

This will give Metastorm time to perfect its product which, according to Austvold, still has weaknesses in monitoring processes. It will also give Metastorm time to work on the next thorny problem: exception management. Effective exception management will let business process management systems automate more tasks that currently have to be handled manually because they involve many variables and complex decision-making.