Leveraging Your Communications System to Automate Your Business

By Dr. Donald E. Brown

Processes are what make organizations tick. If you think about it, what is an organization but a set of processes and the people who implement them? Some processes are very horizontal — they apply to many different types of organizations. In most cases, how well an organization implements its key processes plays a huge role in determining its overall success. Unfortunately, even well-run organizations often implement important processes informally, mainly relying on knowledgeable employees to make sure things run smoothly.

How can we reconcile the importance of these processes, the potential for saving money, and the lack of effort to streamline or even automate them? The answer — it's just too hard. Yes, it would be possible to hire a huge consulting company to come in, interview the key players, design a system, develop it, deploy it, and train everyone to use it. But how much would that cost? How much time would it take? How long before changing business conditions would render the whole thing obsolete? Horror stories abound regarding ambitious automation projects that were cancelled after hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars were wasted. That's why the spreadsheet remains the most common basis for business processes today. It's cheap. It's simple. And it works — up to a point. However the inefficiency this more or less manual approach to process implementation leads to can become a drag on profitability. As the organization grows and must handle more leads, orders, returns, reviews, etc. — more people are required in order to run the processes. And as more people are layered on, the potential for expensive mistakes increases. Perhaps even worse, processes take a long time and even then are unpredictable at best. What if Fritz takes a few days off? In many cases, his work just stacks up, wasting time and untold amounts of money. So what is a business to do?

A Process Automation Platform
In some ways, the situation is analogous to the state of the world before the relational database. In the old days (the author has only read about those days), there was no easy way to store and search complex data. People kept innumerable lists. If they needed to relate an item in one list to other lists, they had to conduct time-consuming searches. But with the creation of the relational database, everything changed. Vendors began to produce database servers (Oracle, MS SQL Server, and many others) that systematized the storage and retrieval of well structured information. Now even small organizations can easily create and maintain huge collections of data and make them available to people and applications. Clearly, what's needed is a similar approach to process automation. What if an organization could deploy a single system capable of providing everything needed to easily automate just about any common process?

Now various types of process automation tools have been around for years. However, they've had three strikes against them right from the beginning. First, they're complex. They generally require extensive training and third-party implementation services. That is, don't expect your process experts to just learn the tools and use them. Second, they're expensive — not just the tools themselves, but the system integrators who need to come along to do the consulting, analysis, design, and development. Third, they don't involve people. What's that? How can a tool that purports to automate key business processes not involve people? After all, people are at the very heart of every non-trivial business process. Even more than the complexity and the expense, it's this last strike that knocks current process automation tools out of the game. You see, these current tools have no effective way of involving people because they have nothing to do with the organization's communications systems. At best (and it's not very good), they can inundate people with e-mail.

Communications-Based Process Automation
So now we've gotten to the crux of the issue. If we had a process automation engine analogous to a database server that were capable of intimately involving people by communicating with them in ways other than e-mail, we'd be cooking, right? Wait, isn't that exactly what some analysts and communications vendors are talking about with "communications-enabled business processes" (CEBP)? Well, not quite. You see, CEBP is just what it says — processes that are communications-enabled. When you dig into this subject more deeply, you find that it's really nothing more than allowing applications to use communications systems to kick off notifications. Certainly this falls well short of the comprehensive process automation engine we've hypothesized so far. So if CEBP is too lightweight, exactly what do we need in order to provide comprehensive process automation of the sort that organizations can actually use? Logic would suggest that what we're really talking about is communications-based process automation (CBPA). Let's parse that phrase and see what it means.

Obviously the core of what we're after is process automation. In contrast to CEBP, we're not talking about just enabling existing processes (or applications) to generate phone calls or e-mails when something interesting happens. Instead, CBPA centers on how we automate processes in the first place. It proposes that we use well established communications notions that have been in use for decades as the foundation for process automation. You see, call centers have leveraged concepts such as queuing, skills-based routing, presence, recording, real-time supervision, and many others for years in order to systematize the handling of millions of telephone calls. In fact, the same technologies have been extended in recent years to handle not only phone calls but e-mails, text chats, and other types of interactions.

Imagine being able to apply these advanced technologies to process automation. Just like customer calls, processes involve work that needs to be queued and intelligently routed to the right person. Supervisors need to be able to track in real time what's going on and who's doing what. And many processes take place in regulated industries and public companies subject to various compliance mandates. Being able to record each step in a process even to the level of screen activity is just as necessary as in a contact center. Now hopefully it's clear why communications-enabling existing processes is different from automating processes using communications-based technologies. The former is a nice but incremental improvement. The latter is revolutionary. It involves taking an entirely new approach toward process automation. And as we'll see, the benefits are many.

The Benefits of Communications-Based Process Automation
Before trying to articulate the benefits of the communications-based approach toward process automation, let's make it clear that we're not talking about taking communications technology, adapting it for process automation, and using it separately. That approach would leave us with separate systems — communications technologies for use in the contact center and the adapted technology for use in process automation. That would certainly provide some benefit, but to really achieve the Nirvana we're after, we need to extend communications technology so that it can encompass process automation. In other words, the communications system becomes the process automation platform for the company. At first this may seem too wild to believe. The phone system runs the business? But if you think about it, it starts to make sense — especially if by "phone system" you mean an all-in-one IP communications platform complete with sophisticated contact center technology. What one system does every single employee in the organization have access to from anywhere in the world? That's right, the communications system. If we could really base process automation on the communications system, we could instantly make it available anywhere at any time to every employee. Just think of the possibilities:

• Contact center-style queuing and routing become essential for accurate and flexible distribution of multi-step workflow processes.

• Presence becomes "process presence" indicating availability for a work assignment to speed processing time.

• Recording becomes an essential part of compliance for business processes.

• Real-time supervisory monitoring provides visibility into every step of the work process including supervisory, audit, and reporting functions.

• VoIP provides complete location-independence, enabling employees to participate in businesses processes from anywhere in the world.

Where is the ROI?
This is where CBPA really becomes interesting. Far exceeding soft ROIs, based on improved personal productivity, CBPA allows the organization to minimize human latency and human error in its core business processes. If by removing latency, a process can that used to take three weeks to complete can now be completed in one; that is an ROI that is quantifiable. Now, multiply that over hundreds or thousands of employees and dozens of processes. Think about that sort of savings day after day. Consider the impact on important customers and prospects. Now you start to see the true value of CBPA in the context of unified communications. When these technologies can be employed in formal processes, they save money. That's why they've been used for many years in contact centers — because they have a hard ROI.

Interaction Process Automation – A Communications-Based Process Automation System
Interactive Intelligence has spent the last decade and a half building a comprehensive software platform for IP communications called the Interaction Center Platform. The flagship product based on this platform is called Customer Interaction Center or CIC. We've now extended the capabilities of that proven technology. The first all-in-one process automation solution comes not out of knowledge management, application development, or database technology but from the communications industry. That might seem strange at first, but when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. After all, processes are about people — even automated processes. What's needed is a structured way to help those people work together efficiently in the fulfillment of various processes. You see, process automation doesn't necessarily mean removing people from processes, but rather providing an automated means of moving work among them and making sure it gets done. The pinnacle of automation in the communications realm is the corporate contact center — and a large portion of processes start in the contact center. Such centers involve hundreds or even thousands of people handling phone calls, e-mails, faxes, text chats, and other interactions from a wide range of customers and covering a dizzying array of topics. Over the years, contact center technology has evolved sophisticated notions of queuing, skills-based routing, quality monitoring, and real-time supervision that allow contact centers to operate with incredible precision. And the most innovative company in that demanding world, Interactive Intelligence, has built on hundreds of man-years worth of research and development to revolutionize business process automation. Interaction Process Automation is a single software solution that gives you everything you need to automate your business processes.

To download a complimentary white paper titled, "A New Approach to Business Process Automation," and learn more about the details of Interaction Process Automation, visit http://tmcnet.com/5987.1.

Dr. Donald E. Brown is CEO of Interactive Intelligence (News - Alert) , Inc.

CIS Magazine Table of Contents