The introduction of workflow management tools should be seen as an opportunity to improve both the underlying business process and the existing organizational structure. Many benefits can be accrued if the workflow management system is implemented as part of a broader business solution.

Opportunities for Organizational Change: Workflow Management Systems can help agencies and departments achieve the organizational changes necessary to operate effectively in today’s world. These changes might include the move to a flatter organizational structure and greater team orientation. Since activity steps, roles, and rules are built into the system, less intervention should be needed to manage the business process. In addition, improved communications provided by notifications, document sharing, and an improved understanding of the process itself can lead to increased collaboration among team members and/or across teams and business units. Workflow management systems tend to unify people with diverse skills into a more cohesive unit.

Workflow definition tools also allow for the separation of IT from workflow management. This puts the business process immediately and directly under the control of the people using the system.

Opportunities for Process Change: Since workflow systems force organizations to examine and define their business processes, it is the ideal time to consider business process reengineering. In fact, it is essential that an underlying process be analyzed and improved prior to workflow system implementation in order to avoid further embedding of bad practices. James Kobielus suggests that an organization optimize a process with any of three goals in mind: “minimizing process time, maximizing value-added process content, or maximizing flexibility at the initial point of customer contact.” ⁶ He provides some guidelines for achieving each of these:

• To minimize process time
• reduce the number of participants in a process
• reduce the maximum completion time of each task (automate tasks, notify staff of approaching due dates)
• reduce time to transfer work between tasks
• reduce maximum queuing time for any one project (prioritize items that have been awaiting action for a long time)
• increase the number of tasks running in parallel
• To maximize value added content (i.e. improve the quality of your product or reduce its price)
• apply standard workflow routes, roles, and rules automatically to each new case; deviate from the standard only when certain predefined thresholds are crossed (exceeds dollar limit) or certain flags are raised (customer complaint)
• provide participants with immediate, on-line access to all information bases
• enable continual tracking and notification
• eliminate costs associated with paper documentation (scan and index as soon as it enters the workflow)
• To maximize flexibility (i.e. more fully address customer needs) at the initial point of contact
• provide multiple access options
• capture customer data only once
• support distributed transaction processing (“one-stop-shopping” for multiple transactions)
• enable ad-hoc flexible work-flow by allowing the first point of contact with the customer to tailor the process to the customer’s needs

Just as important as reengineering is workflow management’s support for continuous business process improvement. Systems which log information about how the defined process is actually working in practice provide valuable insights into areas which might be better tuned. Since business people can define workflow without IT involvement, there is more likelihood that process changes will occur.

Improved/Increased Access to Information: Workflow management systems build corporate knowledge. “Workflow takes the business intelligence that comes from experience and embeds it ...” ⁷ Process information that may have been scattered among various staff members is now combined and available to all employees. This is especially useful to newer employees who may have limited understanding of a more complex business operation.

“Workflow environments encourage knowledge workers to add greater structure - in the form of routing lists, receipt notifications, version controls, (and procedures)...”⁸ Staff are now more likely to provide information to other members of the team. For any particular project or job, more information about both the history and the current status of the process is now available for any staff member to view.

Improved Security and Reliability:I Workflow management “provides secure storage and access to a consistent set of all of the data related to a service.”⁹ Workflow management unites data from many different applications and provides this data with organization and integrity. Using mechanisms such as role privileges (determines who can access and/or change information), process control (e.g. a document may need management approval before moving on to the next step), version control, and system back-ups, the data becomes more reliable.