You can find innumerable methods to manage the daily, human-driven processes upon which most businesses rely. These tasks - which frequently have prescribed best practices but happens to other ways based upon players involved - make up around 60 to 80 percent of the work done in any given company. If left to their own devices, employees will likely manage these processes via e-mail or 'microsoft office' applications, on paper or through verbal updates, none that enable managers to track the steps of business critical actions and be sure positive outcomes.

Ad-hoc tasks, by their nature, defy the confines of structured solutions like business process management. However, that doesn't mean that businesses have to accept the operational risk inherent in unmanaged or mismanaged processes.

These are the kinds of adaptive case management solutions which have been created specifically for your unstructured processes. They include gathering information, collaborating with others, managing individual workloads and making decisions which have been relying on the data, judgment and experience of the participants. This technology is usually a standalone solution, or can be embedded in familiar MS Office environments, rendering it intuitive for users and straightforward to feature into day-to-day use.

So what might those day-to-day uses include?

Operational risk management issues produced by unstructured human processes exist in every industry, and run kids from tactical process risk through strategic process risk. The audit process is a classic example of an unstructured human process. Audit processes include several sub-tasks - e.g., defining an audit plan, gathering information and defining findings, creating the recommendations depending on those findings and lastly, the follow-up and tracking of recommendation implementation. Each sub-process is often a negotiation and collaboration involving the involved parties (oftentimes done via e-mail and documents). For illustration purposes, let's pinpoint the recommendation-tracking and follow-up sub-process.

Let's say an audit finds a security issue in a very plant that needs corrective action. An auditor e-mails a plant manager, alerting him towards the safety issue and making tips for addressing it. The flower manager then delegates the work (also via e-mail) for an employee, and explains the corrective actions. They will most likely engage in e-mail conversation about the specifics with the safety issue: What's the problem? What needs review? Which are the next steps? In discussing the answers to these questions, the parties will likely go back and forth a few times. Based upon the specifics, they could involve more downline to fix the problem. These exchanges are not unusual inside auditing process, but as they are ad-hoc and unstructured, the auditor (and management) has no real visibility into the problem-solving activities, aside from the skills to handle and track the complete process lifecycle.

An audit is only one way human processes can be used regulatory compliance. In today's dynamic regulatory environment, new regulations and greater regulatory supervision will be the norm for most industries. In many instances, the procedure for handling these regulations are human-centric and unstructured prior to the organization familiarizes itself with all the regulation plus it consequences. With time, the business may decide to codify the handling of compliance through a structured process held by IT, but until then, most companies will handle it by having a human process, probably executed via e-mail and documents. registered nurse

For example, the new "breach notification" provisions with the Health I . t for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act is often a healthcare regulation which has just been enacted. The regulations require HIPAA-covered entities to promptly notify patients, this and human services secretary as well as the media of any breach affecting a lot more than 500 individuals. Since this is a whole new regulation, one possible way to address compliance is always to assign someone because the breach-process owner. Her first act probably will include sending out instructions on the way to handle the breach. Step one in handling a breach could be sending an e-mail to the breach-process owner whenever a issue is discovered. When this occurs, the business would need to organize an answer for the breach, ensuring that to fulfill the regulatory requirements and any relevant internal processes. That means ensuring individuals are notified, and, if needed, how the government and media are notified. The organization could also launch an inside investigation with the breach. Without adaptive case management, many of these steps is going to be done via documents and e-mail - which makes it impossible to manage, track and audit compliance with all the regulations.

Enabling the monitoring and tracking of unstructured processes through e-mail and documents also supplies a complete system-of-record for execution, a great asset if problems arise and an audit trail should be used. For instance, let's assume you've got a customer overseas, and you should verify a large order could be shipped to the next country. The sales manager the leader often have received an e-mail through the controller notifying him of this requirement (i.e., checking with export controls), but given the type of e-mail, it's impossible for your controller to find out how the manager actually took the right action; it may have fallen through the cracks, or gotten lost in the flood of e-mails received with the sales manager.

Until your company has visibility into these unstructured activities, you aren't managing the majority of the task inside your organization. If these processes needs to be tracked for compliance reasons, then this deficiency of visibility poses significant risk. Consider your regulatory and compliance processes - people-intensive tasks that begin caused by an external regulation. Think about what number of e-mails and documents are generated by these processes. Does your company really know how compliance procedures are executed? Or where all the currently running compliance processes stand? These changes occur with a case-by-case basis, and people tend to depend upon documents and e-mail to face them. However, as these actions entail some kind of penalty otherwise completed by the due date, IT must provide the opportunity to manage, track and monitor these ad-hoc actions. Given how most people work plus the current infrastructure in most companies, the best way to make this happen is as simple as enhancing e-mail and documents with adaptive case management.

It seems sensible it first tackled the much easier problem of handling rote actions that occur very much the same continuously. Business process management and similar products have ably automated oversight of those predictable tasks. Now, technology has advanced enough to address the much more complex few action tracking changeable work. Adaptive case management means that we can monitor ad-hoc processes from beginning to end in a fashion that eliminates risk and increases visibility. Given the significance of these tasks to organizations in virtually every industry, the cost of not managing them is simply too great to consider.