Interactive Intelligence’s Remarkable New IPA (Interaction Process Automation)

There are many examples of business processes that occur in any organization, regardless of industry: Human Resources (involving processes such as change-of-address, employee onboarding, termination, departmental transfers, etc.), IT (involving help desks, change management), Finance/Legal (new partners, equipment purchases, new customers, expense approvals), Sales/Marketing (lead management, campaign management, collateral publishing, proposal management), Service/Support (RMAs, support ticket processes, etc.) and so forth.

There are also examples of business processes that are specific to a particular industry: Insurance involves processes relating to PIN changes and claims processing. Healthcare involves processes relating to patient access and revenue cycles. Financial services involve loan origination and credit fulfillment processes. These are all people-powered processes. And when people are involved, latency and human error occur.

This led Indianapolis-based Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) to take a step beyond conventional ideas regarding Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) to develop a new concept, Communications-Based Process Automation (CBPA) and an accompanying product, Interaction Process Automation (IPA), to be generally available in Q4 of 2009.

CBPA and its embodiment, IPA, provide the automation of core, people-centric business processes using existing, proven communication technology and yet is not all that complex, requiring less customization than legacy business process management suites. With its ability to ability to prioritize, route, escalate, and track each step of the process flow, CBPA eliminates latency in processes, minimizes human error and delivers the hard ROI long-sought by unified communications developers.

Interactive Intelligence is well-known for its Customer Interaction Center (CIC) IP application suite. Since the company is a master in the contact center area, their IPA solution takes the functionality that deals with interactions in a CIC-based contact center and applies those tools to automate business processes in a centralized manner, thus moving beyond simple UC and leveraging advanced functions so as to have a quantifiable effect on their business. It uses contact center-style queuing and routing provide a flexible distribution of process work. It uses presence to indicate availability for a work assignment to speed processing time, and it has real-time supervisory monitoring to provide visibility into the step of each work process. VoIP provides location-independence, and everything is recorded for compliance and regulatory purposes.

Is there a viable link between communications and business processes paradigms?

Joe Staples, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing for Interactive Intelligence, says, “In a recent poll by IDG Research, 88 percent of CIOs and IT people interviewed agreed with the statement: ‘The biggest return on investment from business process automation comes from eliminating latency in processes and minimizing human error.’ Then they asked them what best described the relationship between UC and business process automation. 50 percent said ‘I see where communications technology could be used to automate business processes,’ and 37 percent said ‘I see where it could be incorporated into process automation applications.’ So 87 percent show a nice link between UC and business process automation, something we also found encouraging.”

“So we think we’re on the right track when it comes to benefits of the solution that we’re working to provide,” says Staples. “It comes down to making the process more efficient, eliminating latency in the process, minimizing human error, and ultimately helping companies do more with less required resources. That delivers the ‘hard ROI’ that unified communications has sought from its beginnings.”

Staples and Interactive Intelligence may be onto something. As the Yankee Group (News - Alert) published in its report, “The Coming Shift from Contact Center Server to Anywhere Enterprise Business Process Controller” (January 2008): “We envision that business processes will be integrated into communications processes so that communications servers actually manage and control the process itself.” Or, as Jim Burton (News - Alert) of UC Strategies says, “The automation of key business processes is where enterprises will find the UC ROI they are looking for.”

Or, as Joe Staples says, “We’ve now developed a technology product that actually provides the automation of core people-centric business processes. We utilize proven communications technology that we’ve developed over the past 15 years, and we’ve also taken an approach that is much less complex, requires less customization than some of the legacy business process management suite products that require hoards of consultants and big design sessions and has really been a stumbling block because they’ve been so expensive to implement.”

As examples, Interactive Intelligence shows how their CBPA-inspired IPA could reduce the time required to process an insurance claim from three weeks to one week; decreased the time it takes for a sales lead to be distributed to a sales person from 28 hours to two; or reduced the cost of on-boarding a new employee from $800 to $200.

It looks like Interactive Intelligence’s idea of CBPA and its incarnation, Interaction Process Automation, provides the hard ROI that UC has lacked. It squeezes costs out of critical business processes, reduces human error and decreases the time it takes to complete any given business process.

Richard “Zippy” Grigonis is Executive Editor of TMC (News - Alert)’s IP Communications Group.

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