Top 10 applications open on your worker’s PC, and why BPM Software and Workflow Software is not one of them

By brian | December 13, 2010 | BPM, Business Applications, Collaboration, DMS, Facebook, Open Source, SAP, Social Applications, Social Media, Twitter

So you are a manager at a mid-sized organization and you want your workers to use BPM software or workflow software so that you can start to get your processes under control.  Like all managers, you’d love to have these processes execute the same way every single time.  And like all managers, you continue to strive for the nirvana of a company or department that runs on auto-pilot.

Beware: it is getting tougher and tougher for mid-sized businesses to implement new software applications.  The reason is simple- business users are busier than ever (not necessarily more productive) and simply don’t want to log into yet another software application.   No matter how amazingly cool a vendor’s BPM software or workflow software may be, it still is not center stage in most organizations when compared to other applications.

Let’s dig a little deeper.

If I ask you to rank the business applications you use and their importance to you?  What would that list look like.  Let’s make a few assumptions first.  Let’s assume that when I say “you,” I mean a middle manager at a digitally savy company with 200-2,000 employees.  And, let’s not count software that tends to run in the background for many users, namely the operating system, anti-virus, anti-spam, firewall, and backup software.   Instead, we are interested in analyzing what applications each worker has open on their PC during the day.

Ok, with these assumptions in place here is what I believe the list looks like in most companies:

1) Desktop Email Client (Outlook being number one in this category) and/or Webmail

2) Office Productivity Software – Excel and Word (or Google Docs)

3) Web Browser (non Webmail)- everyone is multi-tasking (another way of saying procrastinating) and that means lots of tabs open at once.

4) Chat client (skype, messenger, and others)

5) CRM Software – most companies sell something. And in today’s world a company with more than 200 employees will probably have either a CRM software or a specialized contact center software in place.  You might argue that in the case of SalesForce or SugarCRM, this is simply a webpage, but that is true for most apps today.

6) ERP Software – Once a company’s widget’s are sold, they have to be billed, and before that they was probably some planning and some building before the widget was sold.  So the ERP or Accounting software tends to be quite central in most organizations. (SAP, MS Dynamics, Netsuite, OpenBravo)

7) Wiki/ECM/CMS – Collaboration is a trendy word these days as more and more companies are focused on how to share information to make workers more productivity.  A wiki is pretty darn easy to learn to use, so lots of companies are seeing this as a way to get everyone up to speed quickly.   These easy-t0-use apps tend to proliferate quickly and get installed in multiple instances across different business units.  Sharepoint also tends to be a dominant player in this area.
DMS Software – Most companies tend to be more sofisticated about managing their documents before they think about the processes that lead to the generation of those documents.  And once a company hits about 50 employees, most GMs or CEOs will have become sufficiently paranoid about losing data that they would have made the intelligent decision to invest in some sort of glorified File Server solution.  Again, Sharepoint is the billion dollar a year leader here.  However, companies like Alfresco and Knowledgetree have a nice footprint as well.

9) Facebook – Wait a minute.  Shouldn’t this be in position #1 or #2?  Or better yet, maybe it shouldn’t even be on this list – we are not talking about social applications, rather we are talking about business applications.  There are two points to consider here:  1) workers often aren’t working on what they are supposed to be working on, and 2) the lines between social and business have rightfully blurred.  In fact, the same could be said for Email.  What percentage of email received in the mid-sized company is actually work related?  50% – maybe?

10) Twitter -  Twitter really performs the same functions as #1 and #10, continuing to blur the lines between what is social and what is work.

So, do you agree with my list?  Would you change the order?  What is missing?

For any small to mid-sized enterprise, this list should be frightening, right?  Most managers will be hard pressed to related many of these applications to greater worker productivity.  In my next post, I’ll look at how the BPM software industry should be evolving to deal with this brave new world.