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Federated work and process orchestration

MM: This reminds me of two other facets of digital supply chains that emerge as both fascinating and strategic.

One entails what I call the federated work-management dashboard. Essentially, it’s browser-based. But it has an Ajax presentation capability. Graphs and bar charts and gauges, to visually telegraph to the worker what they need to do and what time-frame they need to do it in.

Because it’s data federated in from an orchestration capability, the organization has the ability to dynamically re-allocate resources and dynamically task or retask resources as needed by a particular business contingency.

The other facet I would call “process orchestration.” That is, the ability to orchestrate the activities and workflows and processes through an entire operation if not a supply chain. Could you speak to either as expressions of this digital supply chain vis-à-vis DPM?

IG: Absolutely. What we’re seeing now is this kind of scenario that you described as being in the past successfully implemented for very specific applications, using completely ad hoc tools and building custom applications for them.

Examples of that would be in the automation of a call center. You get very, very advanced load-balancing processes for balancing the work across work areas. And variances of reporting processes and reporting dashboards — to see how you’re doing and what your SLA is and other things of that nature.

I think the next frontier — to use your terminology — is in providing a platform. We call that a business process platform. Providing a platform that can enable any customer to build this kind of environment for virtually any kind of business process — and to do that in a very cost-effective manner.

I don’t know that any product does it to the extent that you described for any one process, and does it in such a way that small, medium and large corporations could deploy it. But I very strongly believe that we’re getting there, and we’re getting there fast.

The orchestration of the process — the technology to orchestrate the process — is there. The technology to serve these very dynamic, very user-friendly user interfaces — using Ajax — is there. The technology for doing load balancing of work among people is there.

What’s more difficult is in doing this load balancing of work for the work that is not transactional. It’s much more related to knowledge. It’s softer. It’s a little bit less actionable. That’s where a lot of thinking has to be done in understanding how you can not only deal with the transactional side of things, but also the creative side of the process. Essentially, doing load balancing of work in a creative process — and mixing the two.

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