Executive Summary
Introduction
The Importance of E-mail
Why E-mail Leads to Workflow
Types of Workflow
Active E-Forms
Workflow Action Plan
Bibliography
The purpose of this article is to help prepare an organization to take advantage
of electronic mail by making it the foundation for new application development.
The business enterprise that intends to stay competitive during the 1990’s will
need to embed E-mail technology and applications into the framework of its business
process.
Global competition has already forced American business to streamline and "downsize,"
both organizationally and procedurally. As a result, corporate management is now
focused increasingly on improving time-based processes by shortening "cycle-times,"
and thus, lowering costs.
Electronic mail is recognized as a key technology that enables these objectives
to be attained. One company --General Electric-- could not have carried out its
business strategy of the past decade without the use of new communication technologies
such as E-mail.
E-mail is evolving from being a discrete application to an "application enabler,"
i.e. an information highway on top of which specific applications can be built.
It lends itself well to event-driven business processes by allowing different parties
to communicate without having to be "all in the same room at the same time."
E-mail can be an essential component of "workflow," which is defined as
the automation of office processes that involve forms-routing, database queries,
signature approvals, and filing.
Although workflow technology is still evolving and not well-understood, it is clearly
more than simply routing a formatted screen from one person to another. Workflow
requires a high-level language with logic enabling the designer to insure data integrity
and structure a series of events or "triggers."
Among current workflow systems on the market there is a wide spectrum of computing
platforms, design methodologies, complexity of learning, and cost. In selecting
a work-flow product, it is important to first define a company’s strategic business
objectives, then apply the right technology to the requirements by matching it with
the proper product. The overall scope of the project, and the choice of workflow
product, will be determined by three primary factors: the complexity of the business
process to be automated, how structured versus unstructured that business process
needs to be, and the overall cost of the system.
A flexible forms automation system, of which CASI’s Active E-Forms is one example,
does not mandate the acquisition of a completely new turn-key system or require
the imposition of a top-down model for development. It allows you to automate in
increments within your company’s existing business environment. Active E-Forms preserves
and extends an organization’s current hardware investment and makes an enterprise-wide
forms system attainable.
Some workflow processes that can be automated by Active E-Forms, such as time card
accounting, purchase order requisitions, research requests, and several others are
described in this article. It also provides a technical overview of the Active E-Form
product itself, and it concludes with a suggested action plan for piloting workflow
in your organization and a bibliography of pertinent resources.
"If you thought the 1980’s were tough, the 1990’s will make the 1980’s look
like a cakewalk. It will be brutally competitive." -- Jack Welch,
CEO, General Electric Corp.
Over the past decade, electronic mail and intelligent forms have emerged as new
and growing technologies. Each has the potential to significantly enhance corporate
performance. Since the productivity level of every corporation is a microcosm of
the nation’s economic position, the best way to assure America’s financial future
is to bring productive change to every business organization.
It was President Clinton who stressed the necessity for America to develop infrastructure
and control costs. E-mail technology clearly is a powerful way to achieve the twin
objectives of better infrastructure and lowered costs.
When properly planned and implemented, applications based upon E-mail can make a
significant contribution to the bottom line of companies that are prepared for it.
However, becoming "E-mail literate" does not happen to an organization
overnight. And becoming "prepared" requires commitment to start with the
basics of electronic messaging, and then an ongoing plan to systematically build
applications upon it.
The good news is that more and more businesses are turning to E-mail to keep up
with the pace of business change. Industry statistics show that the number of electronic
mailboxes in operation has been rising at a compounded annual growth rate close
to 45% since 1992 and may exceed 50 million users in 1996. Industry estimates indicate
expected growth in the number of users of electronic mail to reach 100 million users
by 2000.
A substantial number of office workers today use E-mail simply to communicate with
other co-workers; many are not aware that there is a much bigger payoff from "mail-enabled
applications." That is because many E-mail systems currently in use today do
not go far enough in providing the workflow capabilities described in this paper.
Any business enterprise that intends to stay competitive during the '90s will
need to embed E-mail technology into its business processes. To understand "why"
requires a review of recent shifts in the world economy and what this has meant
for business.
The Economic Watershed of 1990-91
Since 1989, the U.S. economy has recorded the slowest growth and the smallest gains
in productivity and net investment since the Great Depression.
For the first time in a half century, several foreign economies outperform our own.
Japan and Germany produce more wealth per capita than the United States--and several
other industrialized nations including Italy and France have closed the gap significantly.
It is a fact that in productivity measured as Gross Domestic Product per worker,
Japan, Germany, France, and Italy all lead the United States.
The new realities of global competition are shattering previous economic assumptions
of millions of Americans. Working for a large company is no longer a guarantee of
security; during the past decade alone, Fortune 500 companies laid off well over
4.2 million men and women.
Corporations, driven by global competition to increase productivity in flat or declining
markets, have down-sized dramatically both in number of employees as well as size
of organizational structure. Entire layers of management have been swept away in
major restructuring of American enterprise.
A Corporate Standout
One of the past decade’s notable examples of such corporate restructuring has been
General Electric under the tenure of its CEO, Jack Welch. During the 1980’s, the
company grew from $34 billion to $56 billion in revenues and produced a phenomenal
18% return on equity, making it a darling of Wall Street and institutional investors.
The reasons behind GE’s success in the face of a negative business climate are enlightening.
First, under Welch, GE downsized its organizational structure. While GE nominally
saved $40 million by removing several layers of management, the real benefit to
the corporation came in the form of improved quality of leadership and the ability
to get products to market faster. As Welch puts it: "People think of ‘de-layering’
as a cost reduction, but it’s really a way of enhancing management...Delayering
speeds communications. It returns control and accountability to the business, which
is where it belongs." He adds: "When you try to move information through
layer after layer in an organization, it is like playing the children’s game of
telephone...the data gets corrupted."
Second, Welch implemented the concept of running a "boundary-less" company--one
that can do business and exchange information with any company, in any country,
just as if that company was actually part of the GE corporate information network.
To accomplish that vision, GE was forced to become a sophisticated user of new communication
technologies.
Six key operating principles
But something more than technological innovation was needed to turn a company as
large as GE into a profitable and formidable competitor. Welch laid the ground work
for a corporate performance philosophy that became distilled into six key principles.
Today GE uses these principles to maintain a competitive advantage in its key markets.
- Manage processes rather than people
- Use process mapping and benchmarking to spot opportunities for improvement
- Emphasize continuous improvement and applaud incremental gains
- Use customer satisfaction as the main gauge of performance
- Treat your suppliers as partners
- Introduce a constant stream of high-quality new products
These imperatives are important because they are a perfect match for the benefits
that electronic mail (a "process technology" itself) brings to the table.
For example, the application of intelligent form-routing to business processes does
not require a costly or radical restructuring of business systems; it allows improvement
to be made in increments. E-mail enables better communication and thus a tighter
partnership between a company and its customers/suppliers. E-mail can also reduce
time-to-market by enhancing communications and information flow between internal
workgroups.
It is no surprise that GE has become a major user of electronic mail, and GE’s information
services division (GEISCO) is a prominent provider of electronic mail services to
many Fortune 1000 corporations. In fact, downsized corporations need E-mail even
more than before to manage broader spans-of-control and enable faster decision-making.
By using and applying E-mail creatively, corporations can better refine their mission,
improve their operations, and empower their employees.
"The high-value enterprise need not be organized like the old pyramids that
characterized standardized production, with strong chief executives presiding over
ever-widening layers of managers, atop an even larger group of hourly workers, all
following standard operating procedures. In fact, the high-value enterprise cannot
be organized this way. The three groups that give the new enterprise most of its
value--problem-solvers, problem-identifiers, and strategic brokers--need to be in
direct contact with one another to continuously discover new opportunities. Messages
must flow quickly and clearly if the right solutions are to be applied to the right
problems in a timely way." --Robert Reich, Professor, Harvard University,
U.S. Secretary of Commerce
The Importance of E-mail to the Corporation
It is a familiar casebook study in today’s business schools: how Japan, using American
technology and ideas, perfected a new system of producing goods. Sometimes referred
to as "lean" or "agile" production, the new system provided
higher quality and more customization than mass production systems of the past,
yet did so at comparable costs. The emergence of these new "processes"
has had a profound impact on the industrialized world. They illustrate the importance
of leveraging time.
Just as one day of "float" in the financial markets can mean hundreds
of thousands of dollars, "information float" resulting from a company’s
operational procedures is just as costly and needs to be managed or eliminated.
Competition today is just as often time-based as it is technology or product based.
In such cases, the critical factors become time-to-market, sales cycle time, logistics
cycle time, and customer response time.
For a large enterprise facing time-based competition, problems of command and control
(i.e. process coordination) become paramount. Since most middle-level managers spend
an average of 50 to 60 percent of their office time "communicating" directly,
i.e. talking in person or on the phone, any technology that reduces the barriers
to communication (whether walls or time zones) is desirable.
E-mail and applications based upon it have an important role to play in the down-sized
corporation of the 1990s. E-mail provides a way to save time, broaden communication
across an ever-increasing span of control, and enhance existing computer investments
while controlling costs.
A recent study by Ovum Research found that computer applications with "high-impact"
had certain characteristics. Our comments pertain to the way electronic mail and
its associated applications match those high-impact characteristics.
High impact applications:
- Fit the natural operating style of people and organizations.
E-mail, because of its asynchronous process orientation, is a perfect match for
most people’s operating style.
- Deal with semi-structured information and procedures.
Because it deals with text, numbers, application data, and binary files, E-mail
is very flexible in this regard, and is becoming more so.
- Are enterprise-wide in scope.
Through gateways, E-mail systems can become enterprise-wide in reach. Companies
such as Soft Switch provide such enterprise-wide E-mail delivery capabilities.
- Are cross-enterprise in reach.
Through external gateways to public carriers, E-mail provides access to other companies
such as customers, suppliers, regulatory agencies, etc.
- Protect the existing systems investment.
By using the resources of the existing computer complex, E-mail can preserve a company’s
existing investment while extending its reach.
- Address additional complete business processes from the beginning to the end
of the cycle.
Addressing the total business process is what workflow is all about.
"Messaging Systems are a natural choice for workflow systems because the store-and-forward
nature of electronic messaging is perfectly suited to the way people work."
--The Clarke Burton Report, April, 1991
While the growth rate of E-mail has been quite rapid over the past decade, it is
about to explode even more dramatically due to a convergence of technologies. Cellular
modems, mobile messaging software, and the expanding bandwidth of E-mail are all
factors behind the increasing penetration of E-mail into everyday life.
E-mail has had a beneficial effect upon productivity because it takes the burden
off the user to "inquire" interactively. For some business processes such
as airline reservations, interactive inquiry is mandatory; for many others, it is
not necessary and in fact is costly and support-intensive. A better alternative
is for the application to send a message to the individual giving notification of
a condition or action as soon as it has occurred. This leverages time and enhances
productivity.
For example, a busy investor could be notified by E-mail whenever General Electric
stock rises above $43 per share or drops below $34 per share. He might actually
prefer this rather than having to search the listings in the Wall Street Journal
or dial Dow Jones on a daily basis. This kind of event-driven "triggering"
is made possible by coupling an E-mail system with database applications.
The ability of E-mail to accelerate the natural flow of daily business
life is also what makes it most useful. In order to compete in the years ahead,
a corporation will have to build E-mail capability in two areas: internally within
the organization, and externally, reaching outside the organization to other entities
such as customers, vendors, regulatory agencies, etc.
The Advantages of "Mail-enabling" Applications
Many companies have processes that are begging for automation but have not been
automated either because the MIS programming staff is backlogged, or because the
cost to program the application appears higher than the projected return on investment.
Such potential applications, while important, may fall short of being considered
"mission critical." They fall right into the category known as administrative
forms applications.
An intelligent forms-routing and approval system is a good way to reduce that programming
backlog by allowing non-programmers to design and implement their own automated
procedures. Using a 4GL to define variables, screens, and logic, users can program
the path of an electronic form from one approver to the next. The logic behind the
form checks limits established in each user's directory profile and uses its
own logic to determine the next step in the approval process.
"Most business applications aren't really based on interactivity. They're
a series of event-driven activities conducted across time, space, and people."
--Patricia Seybold, Seybold Report on Office Administration
In every company, information moves in a continuous flow between operating groups.
Yet in spite of computerization and a wide range of communication mediums (TV, radio,
satellite, computers, etc.), the paper form is still the dominant method of information
movement for businesses -- and a dominant form of bottleneck. (Who among
us, for example, has not had to call the boss' secretary on more than one occasion
to ask, "Has the form been signed yet?")
The fact is, it is not the form itself, but our methods of processing it that represent
the greatest obstacle to increased productivity. Studies show that for every dollar
spent on the creation of a paper form, over $30 will be spent in processing it.
It has also been estimated that as much as 80% of the processing time required for
forms is spent in transit time between processing points.
What is "workflow"?
Like many industry buzz-words, "workflow" has as many definitions as the
number of vendors trying to break into the market. At its most basic level, "workflow"
is technology that automates the process, its related tasks, and the path that information
connected with the process must take through an organization.
In selecting a workflow product, several factors must be considered:
- How complex are the business processes needing automation?
- How accessible would you like the workflow capability within the organization to
be?
- How much of your budget are you willing to invest in the project for additional
software, and in some cases, additional hardware?
Two types of business environments are natural candidates for workflow. At the high
end are mission-critical applications that are highly structured and often complex
processes requiring automation. These "production workflow" systems are
usually quite comprehensive in scope and often include image integration and large-scale
document archives. Production workflow systems almost always require the re-engineering
of the business processes to fit a top-down conceptual model of the process. They
usually do not operate on top of an electronic mail system, but instead use a database
document management system as the foundation. These are characteristically expensive
projects requiring large-scale development efforts to provide total "process
automation."
Other business environments are less structured, less complex, and better served
by an automated solution patterned after the business processes already in place.
These processes are amenable to a workflow product built on top of E-mail. By virtue
of that fact, such a product can be more flexible and less costly. This kind of
system, sometimes called "administrative workflow," does not replace an
existing process with a complete new model, but does allow the automation of the
separate sub-tasks that make up the process.
One ancillary benefit of workflow is that in the process of automating forms-based
processes, companies end up streamlining and reducing the number of procedures they
have, thereby achieving greater operational efficiency.
Some Examples of Candidates for Workflow
Many processes that involve forms are amenable to forms automation, either in whole
or in part. The objective is a simple one: to get information to flow faster, to
make data easier to exchange into and out of required formats, and to track the
status of the process.
In each candidate process, there are several common characteristics. Each process
is represented by an already existing form. The forms process spans two or more
people or departments. The form may involve approvals or authorizations. Some examples
of successful workflow development are outlined below.
Sales Lead Management - The sales department of an industrial products
company enters all information about incoming sales leads into an intelligent form
which is routed via electronic mail to the appropriate sales representative based
on ZIP code. Information in the lead form can be transferred automatically to a
secondary call report which each sales rep must return within a fourteen day time
period. Any call report that is over ten days old is flagged and highlighted in
the E-mail system. Returned call reports are returned to the central sales administrator
who runs a monthly batch report summarizing lead results by several criteria.
Personnel and Recruitment - A pharmaceutical company uses intelligent forms
routing and bulletin boards to manage its job posting, recruitment, and placement
activities. A job requisition is submitted for approval by the hiring manager and
is returned to personnel where the relevant position information is posted on the
Personnel Bulletin Board on the company E-mail system. A copy of the approved requisition
is also routed to the E-mail in-box of the appropriate corporate recruiter.
Company employees who wish to apply for the open position can submit their application
using a standard intelligent E-form accessible from the company-wide Forms Cabinet.
After interviews have been scheduled and completed and a hiring decision made, the
company's internal applicants are notified of the results by E-mail. External
applicants receive a letter on company letterhead generated by the E-mail system.
The offer letter to the winning applicant is triggered by the final approval of
an intelligent E-Form initiated by the personnel department on behalf of the hiring
manager. A monthly report is run and distributed by E-mail that summarizes all interview
and offer-letter activity for the month.
Loan Processing - A bank uses forms routing and approval to manage the
document flows involved in its loan processing operation. Previously, both the loan
approval and amortization schedule were paper-based manual processes which took
several days to obtain. Now, the loan approval documentation is routed to management
for approval while an amortization schedule is requested from the bank's computer
which calculates and returns the schedule via E-mail where it can be printed locally.
What used to take a week now takes less than a day in most cases.
Research Request - As part of its research request system, a bank uses
intelligent forms. When a customer requests additional information about a disputed
transaction, such a request ultimately gets handled by the research department at
headquarters. This group works on a LAN with sophisticated workstations providing
visual access to microfilm and microfiche. The local branch initiates a "research
request" form which is automatically routed to a mailbox belonging to the research
group. The mailbox is polled several times each day and any forms and messages are
downloaded to the LAN. The research group then retrieves the requested information
and generates hardcopy images where necessary. The form is returned to the local
branch informing them of the status of their request and when to expect a hardcopy
to arrive at the branch.
Time Card Processing - Aerospace companies are required to keep very detailed
and accurate records of labor, allocated by contract and subcontract. In the past
this has been handled through a largely manual paperwork system.
At one large aerospace firm, an existing paper-based salaried employee labor charging
system has been augmented with a paperless version using intelligent electronic
forms. The new system was implemented primarily to support a remote manufacturing/test
facility, but has now been deployed to other sites.
The aerospace company desired an on-line, CICS-based "front-end" to the
existing batch-oriented labor system. They wanted the new system to do as many up-front
edits and validations as possible, in order to eliminate the usual error report-correction-error
report loop that was so characteristic of batch oriented systems. The project faced
an important constraint in that it had to be implemented quickly (in 60 days or
less) and not require a lot of programmer man-hours.
Each employee selects his/her timecard from a cabinet and updates it at the end
of the day. The form prompts the employee for the required information, performs
validation checks, and computes elapsed time intervals automatically. When the employee
invokes The APPROVE function, this launches the form up to the department manager's
level for approval. After managerial approvals are applied, the form is converted
to data and entered into the CICS batch job stream for payroll processing. The company
has discovered that data and calculations handled this way are much more accurate
and consistent than the previous manual time card system.
This mail-enabled application saved the client time and money by:
- Reducing paper
- Shortening the processing/approval cycle
- Reducing human error through computerized validation and checking
This application was programmed and deployed in less than sixty days using Active
E-Forms.
As an administrative workflow product, CASI's Active E-Forms (AEF) is a way
to develop automated business processes that span groups, departments, divisions,
and entire organizations. By riding on top of EMS, which runs on most IBM and compatible
host computers, AEF is an efficient, low cost way to attain operational experience
in developing forms-routing and workflow applications.
AEF includes a 4GL-like language that allows the definition of variables, screens,
and logic within the routing and approval process. Some of the key features of Active
E-Forms are listed below:
|
Master Forms Menu
|
Extended Color Attributes
|
Alarms
|
|
Forms Security
|
Validation Checking
|
Highlighting
|
|
Path-of-Authority
|
Cursor Placement Control
|
Trace log
|
|
Forms Status Tracking
|
Nested If/Else Logic
|
Triggers
|
|
Help - Field Level
|
Link/Call Routines
|
Forms Linkage
|
|
Dialog Style of Entry
|
Direct Style of Entry
|
Data Tables
|
|
Serial Number Assignment
|
Batch Table Maintenance
|
To provide an "agile" information delivery system, every IS organization
should establish an action plan. Here are some suggestions about how to approach
a pilot project:
- Look at your company’s vision, strategies, goals, and objectives. What
are your company’s information bottlenecks? Which ones impinge most severely on
corporate goals and objectives? Can you map the process from start to finish? Which
segments of the process are amenable to forms automation?
- Be proactive now to avoid having to be reactionary later. It is important
to gain experience with E-mail and forms-routing techniques in order to be prepared
for more advanced technologies toward the end of the decade. Do not let the plethora
of products out there deter you from taking the first steps. To wait and do nothing
might well be the riskiest strategy of all. Organizations that neglect to pilot
mail-enabled applications today will face even greater competitive pressures down
the road.
- Evaluate the trade-offs of your design approach. After you have identified
an "area of need for workflow," decide what kind of technology is best
suited as a solution. Should you start with a "top-down" versus a "bottoms-up"
approach? A host-based forms routing pilot can provide enterprise-wide forms access
and extend the life of your investment in the SNA terminal network. A LAN-based
approach provides a more attractive user interface but may not be able to scale
enterprise-wide or access corporate data on the host.
- Organize to succeed. Delegate responsibility for E-mail and mail-enabled
application development to a senior IS analyst or manager. Establish a messaging
system infrastructure first and give it time to settle in. This will ensure an easier
learning curve for future workflow applications.
- <Find the best spot for a productivity gain. Listen to users' needs,
then focus your pilot implementation on a specific small-scale application. Pick
a department and a process where the advantages of electronic forms-routing and
a compressed time-cycle will be most evident and appreciated. Pilot departments
often are Personnel (time-cards), Loan-processing, or even the MIS department itself
— but there can be many others.
- Be pragmatic, not "revolutionary." Do not fall into the "Big-bang"
syndrome by thinking that all forms-based processes have to be automated and rolled-out
at the same time. Pilot one or two forms processes in order to build a base of users
and experience that can be used to guide further application development. Build
on and exploit the existing enterprise platform and network.
- Boehm, Barry. Software Engineering Economics. (Englewood-Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall, 1981)
- Bouldin, Barbara. Agents of Change: Managing the Introduction of Automated Tools.
(Englewood-Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice Hall, 1989)
- Burton, Craig and Jamie Lewis. "Workflow Automation," The Clarke Burton
Report, Salt Lake City, UT, April 1991.
- Dyson, Esther. "Why Groupware is Gaining Ground," Datamation,
March 1, 1990, 52-56
- Ferris, David and Nina Burns. Integration of PC Network E-mail: Planning, Product
Evaluation, Implementation. (San Francisco; Ferris Networks, 1991)
- Flores, C. Fernando. Management and Communications in the Office of the Future.
(unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of California at Berkeley, 1981)
- Greif, Irene, Ed. Computer-Supported Cooperative Work: A Book of Readings
(1988: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc.)
- Johnston, William B. and Arnold Packer. Workforce 2000. Work and Workers for
the 21st Century. (Hudson Institute, June 1987)
- McCready, Scott, et. al. Work-flow software: The Challenge for the '90's.
(Framingham, MA: IDC/Avante Technology 1992)
- Opper, Susanna and Henry Fersko-Weiss. Technology for Teams. Enhancing Productivity
in Networked Organizations. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1992)
- Ovum Corporation. The Computer-Integrated Corporation. (London: Ovum Publishing,
1990)
- Reich, Robert B. The Work of Nations. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991)
- Schrage, Michael. Shared Minds: the New Technologies of Collaboration.
(New York: Random House, 1990)
- Soft Switch Corporation. Electronic Mail: Technology, Applications and Infrastructure.
(Wayne PA: June 1990)
- Sproull, Lee and Sara Kiesler. Connections: New Ways of Working in the Networked
Organization. (Cambridge, MA; MIT Press, 1988)
- Tichy, Noel & Stratford Sherman. Control Your Destiny or Someone Else Will.
The Story of Jack Welch and GE. (New York: Doubleday, 1993)
- Wilkovsky Gruen Associates. Electronic Mail: Size and Prospects. (Arlington,
VA: Electronic Messaging Association, 1996)
- Wright, Benjamin. The Law of Electronic Commerce: EDI, Fax and E-mail.
(Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1991)
- Wright, Benjamin. "Contracts without Paper," MIT Technology Review,
July 1992, 57-62.