A Process Automation offering

I have discussed before that I think business process automation is the ultimate end state of a CRM Architect. What I mean by that, is that the ultimate way CRM pays off and that we as solution architects make value for our clients is to make real business processes that occur in our client organizations, and design mechanisms for the client to perform them in the CRM solution such that they execute faster, with more reliability, and to be measurable. In this case, the CRM solution is Siebel.

So my own work/life balance finds me pursuing three parallel threads on the work side (We won't get too much into the life side in this blog). First are my client responsibilities. I think all my readers have similar ones, so I won't go into them. Second, is this blog. My goal for this blog has always been a technical repository. That is, the solutions I post about here are geared towards technical Siebel professionals and can be leveraged against any functional design. My thoughts on why an open source approach for this basically comes down to the fact that any technical expert who sees this logic can and will take it for themselves. I mean that in the best way possible. What makes a technical expert truly valuable, is not only to understand new concepts, but to have a repository of all the things they have seen and done before. While, I think applying the algorithms I post about can return tremendous value to a client, I do not think these types of algorithms can be proprietary in the sense of the profitable. You would spend your life fending off those who copy and modify. I think the value to ourselves comes from showing our clients that we can understand these concepts and apply them. For me, writing a blog about them is a way to demonstrate that and I encourage other long term Siebel experts to do the same.

The third aspect of my professional pursuits I have not posted about before, but it is related directly to what I believe should be all of our prime objective when it comes to CRM, process automation. Basically, I have built another alternative to Siebel Workflow/Smartscripts/Task UI which has a different set of strengths for what I feel was missing in the Siebel base product. It is a task automation engine. The idea is that business processes are typically a series of steps or tasks assigned to different people. So I built a framework in which an administrator can setup and maintain these tasks and who they are assigned to in Siebel. The seed of my idea came from the out of the box Siebel Approvals functionality, and the Universal Inbox. Vanilla approvals can assign inbox items to a series of named employees or positions, and it is implemented in the Campaigns and Quotes modules off the top of my head. The approval thread can be either linear or parallel. This is interesting but it is immediately apparent that it is very limited. After all, a well implemented client may have spent a lot of time implementing complex assignment rules to assign objects to people based on all sorts of rules. I may want to assign approvals to people dynamically based on these same assignments. Or perhaps I want to approve dynamically up a position hierarchy. Or maybe what I need to automate is not technically an approval at all, but a series of service requests. Or maybe I want to assign an item to a different person based on attributes of the item being evaluated, say a dollar amount field.

What I have built hopes to address all of these functional requirements and much more into a product offering that can be administered 100% from the GUI and specifically adds value by addressing the three pillars of process automation:

1. faster execution - Escalation of items after designated time periods, scheduled reminders, Just in time notification to avoid "notification overload"
2. with more reliability - System controls the next assignee, rule based, version controlled rule matrices
3. and to be measurable - see current process status, steps stored in DB, can report on overall process metrics (avg length, bottlenecks, etc)

Getting back to my earlier point about what should be open source and what not. I have decided that this engine, which includes many functional algorithms will remain proprietary. I think the approach I have come up with involves some innovations which are not easily reproducible. I hope to use this blog as one mechanism to communicate my expertise in the area of process automation. I appreciate any good will and contacts I receive through this blog so feel free to let me know if something like this may be of value to your clients/employers. I will continue to post information about this engine in Teaser format.