There are innumerable ways to manage the daily, human-driven processes upon which most businesses rely.
These tasks - which often have prescribed best practices but occur in different ways depending upon the players involved - make up an estimated 60 to 80 percent of the work done in any given company.
If left to their own devices, employees are likely to manage these processes via e-mail or Microsoft Office applications, on paper or through verbal updates, none of which enable managers to track the steps of business critical actions and ensure positive outcomes.
Ad-hoc tasks, by their nature, defy the confines of structured solutions like business process management.
However, that doesn't mean that businesses need to accept the operational risk inherent in unmanaged or mismanaged processes.
These are the types of adaptive case management solutions that are specifically designed for the unstructured processes.
They consist of gathering information, collaborating with others, managing individual workloads and making decisions that are dependent on the knowledge, judgment and experience of the participants.
This technology can be a standalone solution, or can be embedded in familiar MS Office environments, making it intuitive for users and simple to incorporate into day-to-day use.
So what might those day-to-day uses include? Operational risk management issues created by unstructured human processes exist in every industry, and run the range from tactical process risk through strategic process risk.
The audit process itself is a classic example of an unstructured human process.
Audit processes consist of a number of sub-tasks - e.
g.
, defining an audit plan, gathering information and defining findings, creating the recommendations based on those findings and finally, the follow-up and tracking of recommendation implementation.
Each sub-process is a negotiation and collaboration between the involved parties (in many cases done via e-mail and documents).
For illustration purposes, let's focus on the recommendation-tracking and follow-up sub-process.
Let's say an audit finds a safety issue in a plant that needs corrective action.
An auditor e-mails a plant manager, alerting him to the safety issue and making recommendations for addressing it.
The plant manager then delegates the task (also via e-mail) to an employee, and explains the corrective actions.
They will most likely engage in e-mail conversation about the specifics of the safety issue: What is the problem? What needs review? What are the next steps? In discussing the answers to these questions, the parties will likely go back and forth a few times.
Depending upon the specifics, they may involve more team members to correct the issue.
These exchanges are not unusual in the auditing process, but because they are ad-hoc and unstructured, the auditor (and management) has no real visibility into the problem-solving activities, let alone an ability to manage and track the overall process lifecycle.
An audit is just one way human processes are used for regulatory compliance.
In today's dynamic regulatory environment, new regulations and greater regulatory supervision are the norm for many industries.
In most cases, the process for handling these regulations are human-centric and unstructured until the organization familiarizes itself with the regulation and it consequences.
Over time, the organization may decide to codify the handling of compliance through a structured process supported by IT, but until then, most companies will handle it through a human process, probably executed via e-mail and documents.
For example, the new "breach notification" provisions of the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act is a healthcare regulation that has just been enacted.
The regulations require HIPAA-covered entities to promptly notify affected individuals, the health and human services secretary and the media of any breach affecting more than 500 individuals.
Since this is a new regulation, one possible way to handle compliance is to assign someone as the breach-process owner.
Her first act will most likely include sending out instructions on how to handle the breach.
The first step in handling a breach might be sending an e-mail to the breach-process owner when a problem is discovered.
At that point, the company would need to organize a response to the breach, making sure to meet the regulatory requirements and any relevant internal processes.
That means ensuring affected individuals are notified, and, if needed, that the government and media are notified.
The company may also launch an internal investigation of the breach.
Without adaptive case management, all of these steps will probably be done via documents and e-mail - making it impossible to manage, track and audit compliance with the regulations.
Enabling the monitoring and tracking of unstructured processes through e-mail and documents also provides a complete system-of-record for execution, an invaluable asset if problems arise and an audit trail is needed.
For example, let's assume you have a customer overseas, and you need to verify that a large order can be shipped to that particular country.
The sales manager in charge may have received an e-mail from the controller notifying him of this requirement (i.
e.
, checking with export controls), but given the nature of e-mail, there is no way for the controller to know that the manager actually took the appropriate action; it may have fallen through the cracks, or gotten lost in the flood of e-mails received by the sales manager.
Until your business has visibility into these unstructured activities, you are not managing the bulk of the work in your organization.
If these processes should be tracked for compliance reasons, then this lack of visibility poses significant risk.
Consider your regulatory and compliance processes - people-intensive tasks that begin as a result of an external regulation.
Think of how many e-mails and documents are generated by these processes.
Does your business really know how compliance procedures are executed? Or where each of the currently running compliance processes stand? These changes occur on a case-by-case basis, and people tend to rely on documents and e-mail to deal with them.
However, since these actions entail some type of penalty if not completed on time, IT must provide the ability to manage, track and monitor these ad-hoc actions.
Given the way most people work and the current infrastructure in most companies, the best way to do this is by enhancing e-mail and documents with adaptive case management.
It makes sense that IT first tackled the less complicated problem of handling rote actions that occur in the same manner over and over again.
Business process management and similar products have ably automated oversight of those predictable tasks.
Now, technology has advanced enough to handle the significantly more complex matter of action tracking changeable work.
Adaptive case management makes it possible to monitor ad-hoc processes from start to finish in a manner that eliminates risk and increases visibility.
Given the importance of these tasks to organizations in virtually every industry, the cost of not managing them is too great to consider.