Observations: These days workflow systems are available from a wide variety of sources and at purchase prices a tenth of what they were in their heyday. In order to shore up revenues the major workflow vendors of the nineties have branched out into business process management systems and folded basic workflow into far more sophisticated and dynamic process automation toolsets. Although those toolsets are expensive and leading edge, the simple ability to pass electronic forms through an approval process is not.

The ability for individual users, with basic technical knowledge, to program their own workflow applications catapulted Lotus Notes from obscurity in the nineties. Of all the office suite applications, Lotus was the only one to really leverage workflow capability effectively. One of the contributors to Notes’ success was the freedom it gave end-users. They could build applications without waiting on IT to do it for them. This meant much more speed, but it also meant that many of these mini-applications were built outside the principles of sound applications development, resulting in sometimes flawed designs that grew to become mission-critical systems. These days the proliferation of alternatives such as intranet, portal, payroll and self service applications offer basic workflow technology at very affordable prices.

Despite the ease of creation and deployment, unplanned workflow implementations can create an unmanageable proliferation of unrelated “mini-apps”. In order to be successful in the long term, a workflow implementation needs to go through the full software development lifecycle and indicative long term plans should be in place prior to the first rollout:

• proof of concept,
• design & build,
• implementation, and
• transition to business as usual.

Many organisations gain familiarity with the applications by choosing an internal IT process. For instance a request for network access or moves, adds and change (MAC) request. Once the organisation has gained some familiarity, move into the build and design phase.

Corporations have adopted email as the de-facto workflow system. Unfortunately many organisations fail to realise the indirect costs – in particular, increasing difficulty of maintaining and managing a secure fleet of mail servers supporting complex network connections across interstate links. The business case is very strong when the opportunity to avoid the increasing menace of externally contracted viruses, Trojans, worms, spyware, and adware is included. Sending forms electronically for approval authorisation through workflow is a reliable method of reducing the quantity of email attachments and the likelihood of contracting viruses from the payload.  Implementing a basic workflow system can reduce dependence on email for a wide variety internal company communications, effectively reducing the likelihood of contracting external bugs. It will reduce the speed with which they spread. Another key benefit is that employees can still be productive if the email system is overwhelmed and they can still use workflow inside the firewall.

Properly implemented, workflow can produce tracking features that provide you with valuable reports that can be used to identify internal performance metrics. Workflow benefits include capability to monitoring the number of approvals, the extent of pending work queues, and the volume of expenses flowing through the organisation can provide key indicators to assist in identifying where bottlenecks in processes may be slowing the organisation down.

Today, tools for individual users to design and implement simple electronic forms are available from a range of sources. Basic features to look for include:

• Ease of use
• Integration with existing email systems and/or intranet applications
• Workflow engine
• Workflow scheduler
• Workflow designer tool
• Form designer
• Form templates
• Online workflow reports

If you have a hundred employees, with an average wage of $30 per hour, working a standard year (42 weeks), your average annual cost of email maintenance is likely to be about $63,000 per year, based on one virus attack and 30 minutes per week of mail filing. Workflow implementations are an IT investment that clearly exhibit economies of scale. A typical business case demonstrates how effectively automating a couple of processes can achieve a limited benefit, but automating more processes and extending workflow to basic internal activities, such as human resources, document review, IT requests is likely to result in even faster return on investment.