Embracing individual process productivity is critical to organizational improvements.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) are familiar business process management (BPM) systems in the business world. Broadly speaking, the promise these systems offer is substantial. By defining and automating our most important business practices, we will be able to work more efficiently, reduce overhead, increase agility, and improve insight into business drivers large and small.

To a great extent, the promise has been realized. Organizations have saved millions of dollars by replacing outdated technology- and paper-based systems, and integrating previously disparate systems to eliminate duplication of effort and increase consistency of information.

Such gains have not been achieved without difficulty. These systems tend to be more expensive than had been promised and take longer (sometimes much longer) to implement. They can be difficult to define, create, maintain, and change.

Even after all the work it takes to properly implement a BPM system, such as ERP or SCM, many of these systems still exhibit shortcomings that keep them from truly helping businesses maximize their potential. These shortcomings include:

• Low adoption rates. Employees are reluctant to adopt new, complex systems. The more complex the new system, the more resistance.
• Incomplete adoption. Despite companies' best efforts to fully define and streamline processes, many employees use only the basic functions and do not take full advantage of the system.
• Long training periods. Complex systems often require at least two weeks to learn, and may take upwards of a year to master. Because of this difficulty factor, those few employees who learn to use the system can end up spending so much time assisting their colleagues that they may end up losing the ability to help move the business forward.
• Low penetration. Initial goals of extending access to everyone in the organization often evaporate in the face of the daunting level of specialization required to operate and support these systems.

Given these problems, it is clear that a significant portion of the opportunity for benefit remains unrealized.

In addition to the shortcomings listed above, many BPM systems fail because they are poorly designed. Typically, the creators:

• Analyze the business process.
• Define the unique characteristics of that process.
• Design a system that captures, streamlines, and standardizes that process.

Often this creation process resembles a management consulting engagement, where consultants go to the company to:

• Interview everyone associated with the process.
• Try to understand what each employee does.
• Determine the workflow of the process across departments.

Then these consultants report back to their engineers, who attempt to reprogram their platform of choice to reflect the specific needs of the company.

The result? A unique, complex business process that everyone in the company is familiar with gets translated into an unfamiliar, complex development environment and produces a uniquely complex business management system.

For example, in the case of ERP systems, many customers get an extended planning cycle and an extended development cycle that result in a difficult-to-learn, difficult-to-use system that is expensive to implement, run, and change.

Why doesn't this development process work? Are there parts of the process that business management systems fail to capture? If so, what are the costs of this failure? Can systems be designed to reflect real business goals, to actually increase productivity, and to really improve the visibility of your business?

Real-World Business Processes Are Manifold
The process captured during the creation of traditional BPM solutions is a fraction of what actually occurs. Other elements that are crucial to a successful transaction include:

• Institutional knowledge. What are the best ways to bring the full power of your organization, including branding, marketing, perception in the market, key strengths, and more to their greatest advantage in a transaction?
• Individual knowledge. What do the people closest to the transaction know about the individual conditions, including past successes, key pressure points, obstacles to avoid, and quality of the relationship-in essence, the "real-world" drivers affecting this individual sale, purchase, or other transaction?
• Communications. Studies have shown that every transaction in a typical business is supported by an average of five to six communications, including phone calls, e-mail, and faxes. How do you keep track of what you've communicated in order to have a fuller record of the transaction?
• Collaboration. Most transactions of any complexity involve more than a simple one-to-one relationship between the agent and the customer. Several individuals and teams may be involved, including finance, sales, customer service, engineering, manufacturing, project managers, and so on. How easy is it for each player to access and contribute to the process?
• Change. No two transactions are exactly identical, and businesses themselves are dynamic. Shouldn't a BPM system take this condition of constant change into account and give you the flexibility to record the differences in each transaction, in addition to the standardized information?

Clearly these elements are all crucial components in real-world business processes, but traditional BPM systems, due to their underlying design philosophies, are inadequate to address them. So most businesses still rely on as-needed, non-integrated systems for keeping the details of specific transactions and process changes. The result is a surrounding layer of inefficiency and a lack of visibility to the customer, which is exactly what businesses were trying to eliminate in the first place.

Empowering individuals and improving employee productivity is not a new concept in the world of business. For years, best-selling business management books have touted the benefits of amplifying individual productivity through empowerment. However, it is new to think about how technology can be used to improve business process productivity.

Over the past decade, software has been designed that builds bridges between disconnected islands of information and gives people powerful ways to communicate, collaborate, and access the data that's most important to them. It's time to build on current technologies and create software that helps people adapt and thrive in an ever-changing work environment.

Advances in pattern recognition, smart content, visualization, and simulation, in addition to innovations in hardware and wireless networks, all provide an opportunity to re-imagine how software can help people get their jobs done. This is an important goal, not only because the technology has been created to make it possible, but because the way people work is changing. Most business processes don't exist in isolation, or on a software island, or even solely in the office. For example, a sales order processor spends time in word processing software, corresponds with customers on e-mail, voice mail, and fax machines, and collaborates with coworkers by using instant messaging tools and attending virtual meetings with team members who may be on the road. That same processor spends time using structured business process software to enter and view orders, print reports, and so on. No longer should individuals engaged in business processes be forced to work in these two different worlds of business process software and personal productivity software. Extending each world into the other until the experience is smooth is what your company needs to do to realize its full productivity potential.

According to Gartner, Inc., "Only those vendors that 'redefine' process beginning with the individual, combining process definition and tools that enable individuals to be flexible with the definition of their specific processes, will emerge as leaders in the 'Process of Me' category." -2006 Gartner, Inc., "Person-to-Process Interaction Emerges as the 'Process of Me,'" by Yvonne Genovese, Jeff Comport, and Simon Hayward

Industry analysts estimate that information workers spend up to 30 percent of their work days looking for data. The time your information workers spend tracking down information, managing and organizing documents, and making sure their teams have the data they need could be much better spent on analysis, collaboration, insight, and other work that adds value to your business.

At Microsoft, we believe in providing individuals with tools that improve efficiency and enable them to focus on the highest-value work. Our implementation of this concept is "roles-based productivity," and it enables the people-ready business by combining the worlds of business process automation and personal productivity.

Microsoft business management solutions offer the same familiar user experience of Microsoft Office productivity applications (such as Microsoft Office Outlook and Microsoft Office Excel). For example, the Microsoft Dynamics line features a roles-based user interface to the products it integrates with (including Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server), extensive collaboration functionality, and powerful business intelligence through integration with Microsoft Office and Microsoft SQL Server. Because these solutions are built around the way people actually work, we believe we can help your business thrive with people-ready solutions that bring together financial management, CRM, and SCM processes with Microsoft collaboration, messaging, mobile devices, and server solutions across your organization.