How many of your financial processes are structured? Not many, I bet. More likely, to get something done you fire off an email message to somebody who then fires off messages to others. Eventually a message may get back to you with the information you wanted or that some task has been completed (or not completed). That’s an unstructured process, and it is the way most knowledge workers function today.

Gartner’s Jim Sinur, in a recent blog, describes it as such: “Unstructured process is where the process map is more variable and in some cases only pictured after the fact. … There generally is not a process flow per se.”

Whatever the unstructured process flow is, you won’t really know until it is done, if even then, and it is unlikely to be repeated exactly the same way. Not only is it unstructured, but it is ad hoc. This makes unstructured processes very difficult to manage. But that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be managed. The question is how.

Business process management (BPM) tools might be used to manage unstructured processes, but they generally require a specific documented process that you can describe and model. Unstructured processes, by definition, are just that — unstructured, not amenable to declarative descriptions and modeling.

A few years ago, Forrester Research took a stab at what it called human-centric BPM. It identified a dozen vendors, drew up several hundred criteria, and began rating them. What were they thinking? Two hundred-plus criteria are overkill for any process management!

In its latest BPM report, Hype Cycle for Business Process Management, 2009, Gartner turned its attention to unstructured processes. It found that “few organizations are actively examining how unstructured process work gets performed in their companies,” but that “not managing unstructured processes can often lead to wasting time and money.”

Gartner still thinks the management solution lies in the BPM, which can somehow be applied to unstructured processes. “Using BPM for these types of unstructured processes provides visibility into decision-making, helps avoid redundant work activities, and manages those parts of the process that are semistructured,” the researchers declared.

However, a few vendors have taken a different approach. For example, ActionBase, an Israeli company, built unstructured process management capabilities into Microsoft’s Office Suite and Outlook since most unstructured processes revolve around email and other Office Suite tools. ActionBase adds a central server which tracks the flow of the unstructured process through a central repository and enables managers to follow the progress, do reporting, and perform the usual management functions.

ActionBase’s newest capability, AuditTracker, enables tracking and control of an organization’s entire audit process, from the initial planning steps to the audit reviews. It even tracks the implementation of the audit findings and recommendations.

Other unstructured process management players include Handysoft and Itensil.

Expect the BPM players to add unstructured process management to their tools now that Gartner has identified unstructured processes as the next big thing. For a finance department, unstructured process management may be far more useful than BPM. ###