Supporting Front Line Workers in Business Processes Jeroen van Grondelle Chris Lukassen When supporting front line employees, the required support is of a different nature than typical office work. In general, business processes delegate work to the most suitable person, defer execution if this person is not available and, in general, wait until all required information is available. This approach does not work when a single person has to deal with an externally triggered situation, typically on location and often even offline.
Characteristics of Front Line Business Processes Depending on the nature of services an organization provides, its business processes qualify more as administrative, to some extent plannable work or more as hands-on, externally driven, time constrained front line work. Obvious examples of the latter include the work of many employees in law enforcement and healthcare, but many of the business processes in technical maintenance, inspection services and also sales have similar properties.
In a series of research notes, Be Informed’s research director Jeroen van Grondelle shares his perspective on emerging challenges in the BPM field, and how they can be addressed by a paradigm shift towards declarative business processes. We welcome your ideas and suggestions on this subject. Please submit your contributions to the author at
[email protected].
Trade-off between Availability and Specialization Most front line work is time critical, in the sense that it has to happen ‘now’ and on the spot. As such, deferring work to a more convenient moment or delegating work to a colleague with more expertise on the matter is often not an option. As a consequence, many front line workers have to deal with less than ideal circumstances, where expertise or information is not available. As a consequence, the supporting applications should be able to deal with widely varying levels of expertise when supporting its users in the task at hand and allow users to improvise if data is not available.
Task Centric, while Situational Aware Most front line work is assigned and executed in a very task centric manner. There is a question or incident and the task consists of solving the immediate part of the problem. Dealing with the administrative consequences, and with the potentially subtle effects of other processes that are running for that same customer, is left to be dealt with later in the administrative processes in the office. That said, having situational awareness of what may be expected on location, including other problems or potential risks, is crucial and having insight into
A Dutch utility company has all his internal processes in place, including its asset management processes. When mechanics at the location discover that what was assigned to them as a failure is actually a case of damage by a third party, the fact that these are administered separately at the office prevents from solving the problem. They are forced to return to the office, revoke the failure and register a new damage in another system.
Jeroen van Grondelle and Chris Lukassen
this information is important. Supporting applications should therefore provide insight into related processes, but should not expose all functions and subprocesses to deal with these co-occurences on location.
A Dutch home care provider supplied all its home carers with a mobile device, that described their tasks for each client using the terms of professionals. They were only required to indicate whether everything went as expected, or in free text, why and what sort of improvisation was needed. The back end system automatically codified these tasks to multiple entries in the ever changing declaration schemes provided by government and insurers. Exceptions were dealt with manually by office employees and they updated the task to declaration mapping if needed. Apart from efficiency, the most important consequence was that it left the home carers the time for a short chat or cup of tea with their client, rare in a sector with increasing pressure to reduce costs.
Decouple Front Line Work from Office Reality Often, the administrative tasks that have become normal in many business processes, seriously hamper the front line workers to do their work. As a result, mobile knowledge workers who are supposed to be working on location on the next job, are convicted to desk work to administratively justify their last task. Classifying their expert solutions into the existing cost schemes and declaration systematics is not only a waste of their valuable time, but it also does not help them to do their job in a more cost effective or efficient way. Supporting applications should hide the administrative aspects of front line work, automatically codify their work into administrative vocabularies and schemes and defer any problems in this area to administrative workforce in the office.
Scoping Business Processes for Front Line Use When an organization has a mixed workforce of administrative and front line workers, smart choices must be made with regards to which part of the business processes is performed outside, and which part is handled in the office. Given the unique characteristics of front line work mentioned before, simply offering front line workers transparent mobile access to the complete business processes used in the office does not lead to proper support. In general, there are three criteria to select the work that needs to be offered as part of the front line work: • The activities that constitute the front line work that takes place on location, including the decisions and classification support needed to support the execution of those activities; • The registration of the information that will typically become relevant downstream, and that by asking them on location, will enable the majority of cases to be processed straight through downstream due to the up front availability of this information; • Potentially, the activities that are naturally performed outside, but do rely on the availability of information. Depending on the likelihood of offline working, whether it is acceptable if the front line worker makes assumptions or uses locally obtained information in these offline cases and/or the ability to take technical measures that 2
supporting front line workers in business processes
facilitate data access when offline, these tasks should or should not be offered as part of the outside process. Deriving such an integrated task from an existing business process should preferably be performed by computation. That way, organizations do not end up with even more complex business processes, with separate fragments for in office execution and for on location processing. Declarative, constraint based business processes1 provide excellent opportunities to derive task specific subprocesses that are offered standalone and submit their results into the full business process. Those results will meet all constraints in the subset, and only constraints not enforced in the subprocess may lead to extra work downstream in the full office process. The three principles listed earlier can be used to filter the complete set of constraints that underpins the full process. The resulting subset can be used to guide behavior like any other set, and as it is a limited set, it is more likely to provide the front line worker with the autonomy that follows from underspecification2 .
Jeroen van Grondelle and Geert Rensen. Towards webscale business processes. Be Informed, 2013 1
Jeroen van Grondelle. Declarative Business Processes: The Unification of BPM Approaches. Be Informed, 2013 2
Developing Mobile Enterprise-grade Apps Supporting front line workers in their tasks requires support for mobile devices for obvious reasons. The task-scoped process fragments discussed earlier very naturally map to the typical granularity used in mobile apps. Instead of a big app offering complete business processes, a number of smaller, task specific apps can be offered, which of course communicate and synchronize with the in-office processes when they are used.
Mobile Application Development Platforms The worldwide adoption of consumer mobile devices has created a huge number of different form factors and a turbulent landscape of mobile operating systems. Supporting substantial user groups in Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) environments is further troubled by the fast pace of innovation and fragmentation created by the various players. This phenomenon is countered by a number of players in the Mobile Application Development Platform (MADP) landscape3 . Most solutions are based on a hybrid technology where native device capabilities are exposed to an HTML5/JavaScript environment. This augments the inherent cross-platform execution and visualization capabilities of HTML5 with features such as access to device sensors, but also with additional security, availability and functionality that can not be achieved with a mobile website.
Ian Finley et al. Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms. Gartner, 2013 3
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Jeroen van Grondelle and Chris Lukassen
Enterprise-grade Security The use of mobile computing platforms inseparably means that (a part of) the application is executed outside of the walled garden of the traditional IT environment. While significant attention is typically paid to security of on-premise and cloud solutions, the deployment of company business processes to mobile devices introduces security considerations of at least equal magnitude. To reduce the risk of theft or loss of company data stored on a large set of devices, heterogeneous in platform, software and versions, MADP suppliers typically add functionality to address these risks: USER INTERFACE OFFLINE RULES
BUSINESS PROCESS INFERENCER
SENSORS + CONNECTIVITY + OFFLINE DATA
• Support for enrollment of devices into the network, and their safe removal, through for instance remote wiping, if a device is no longer trusted. • Support for Deployment, Provisioning of Apps, typically building a chain of trust to the enterprise infrastructure ensuring data access is fine-grained and controlled. • Authentication of users; this is typically supported by providing additional secure encryption functionality to ensure a safe ‘vault’ on the device, independent of the operating system (version).
Availability of Data and Rules
ON/OFF
DEVICE AUTHENMANAGE- TICATION MENT
BUSINESS PROCESS INFERENCER
DATA VIEWS
ONLINE RULES
Figure 1: A Typical Mobile Enterprise Architecture
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Despite the promise of “always-on”, front line workers are often confronted with offline situations. For mission-critical processes, in for instance healthcare or law enforcement, or for processes that regularly are performed at remote or isolated locations, such as maintenance and inspections, having a strategy for availability that deals with connectivity outages is crucial. MADP typically handle the synchronization and push critical datasets to devices, to be used when there is no connectivity. The transactions that are performed during outage are synchronized to the Enterprise infrastructure when connectivity is restored. This allows business to continue, within certain constraints of freshness of the offline data of course. When pushing non-trivial process tasks to a mobile device, that typically includes complex classification rules, on for instance risk assessment or diagnosis, or that include complex validation of the data entered as part if the task. Therefore, availability of the rule execution capability is as important as the availability of data. Although these rules are usually implemented using complex rule engines, of which the deployment is only realistic on the heaviest of mobile devices, Be
supporting front line workers in business processes
Informed is actively researching strategies to push small, contextualized sets of rules to the device, prepared for lightweight inferencing.
Conclusion Mobile apps can be a powerful extra tool in supporting front line workers who have to act situationally, on location and potentially offline. Instead of just exposing complete office business processes on a mobile platform, the apps must be highly task centric. By smart scoping of the business process into tasks, and consequently apps, the resulting transactions in the office will have a low rejection rates, as they are guaranteed to be within constraints. Safe deployment of enterprise applications in BYOD environments requires an enterprise-grade strategy for device management, authentication and offline access to data. For non-trivial apps, rules are needed as much as data, guiding front line workers in choosing the best course of action, and to guarantee the consistency and correctness of data obtained in performing this task. These rules need to be integrated into the frameworks in place for proactively pushing information to the device, to guarantee limited inferencing capabilities remain available in offline situations.
References [1] Jeroen van Grondelle and Geert Rensen. Towards webscale business processes. Be Informed, 2013. [2] Jeroen van Grondelle. Declarative Business Processes: The Unification of BPM Approaches. Be Informed, 2013. [3] Ian Finley et al. Magic Quadrant for Mobile Application Development Platforms. Gartner, 2013.
About Be Informed Be Informed is an internationally operating, independent software vendor. The Be Informed business process platform transforms administrative processes. Thanks to Be Informed’s unique semantic technology and solutions, business applications become completely modeldriven, allowing organizations to instantly execute on new strategies and regulations. Organizations using Be Informed often report cost savings of tens of percents. Further benefits include a much higher straight-through processing rate leading to vastly improved productivity, and a reduction in time-to-change from months to days.
Copyright © 2013 Be Informed BV All rights reserved. Nothing in this publication may be duplicated, published or transmitted, using any means or in any form whatsoever, without the permission of Be Informed. Report no. BIRN-2013-04 Version 1.0.1 October 15, 2013
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