In recent years Business Intelligence (BI) systems have provided coverage to numerous organizations for the generation of knowledge based on information from their systems (CRM, ERP, DWH, DM, etc.). In the competitive world in which we live, this generated knowledge, along with that of its workers, is the main form of differentiation that exists for an organization. It is for this reason the need to have tools that allow us to model and manage this knowledge.
“Knowledge is different from all other resources. It makes itself so obsolete, so that today’s advanced knowledge is tomorrow’s ignorance. And the knowledge that matters is subject to rapid and abrupt change … ”
Peter F. Drucker.
For some time, entities such as Gartner or the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) announce the next step in the technology sector in the business world. Once the stages of data and information management are overcome, the next step is to take a step further in knowledge management so that we not only use technologies that allow us to generate knowledge from information to help the expert in the Decision-making, how BI does, but also technologies that make use of knowledge to allow to build systems that are capable of thinking decisions like the expert himself.
“Advancing to support more knowledge work is the goal that many organizations, thus there is a new swell of activity around unstructured processes.”
Jim Sinur, Gartner, January 2009.
Knowledge work: a new market to exploit
Recent statistics tell us that an employee dedicates his work time to an organization in four large task groups according to the following distribution: 12% in personal relationships, 7% in business process management, 42% in tasks Collaborative and 38% specialized tasks that require specific know-how.
Today, technologies have supported most of these tasks: In order to facilitate personal relationships we find tools such as CRM, for business process management tools such as BPM and for collaborative tasks we find Intranets, Internet and Smart Process Management: Next step to Business Intelligence 2 other communication tools. However, to date there is still no significant offer of solutions to support the tasks that require specific experience or know-how. What is this about?
A knowledge worker, such as a doctor, performs tasks that require specific know-how when, for example, he makes a treatment for his patient. To do this the doctor must think about the activities that will be necessary to carry out to achieve his goal: to heal his patient.
Knowledge workers are characterized by being able to take a set of decisions consisting of action plans to achieve their objectives, taking into account their know-how and previous experience in solving similar problems. In addition, an expert in an area is able to think of solutions to achieve different types of objectives reliably (taking into account future consequences of their decisions), in a non-repetitive way (they do not always solve problems alike) and taking into account Account possible contingencies to which they would have to react and rethink decisions already taken.
These types of elements mean that until today no solutions have been offered that suggest how to make certain decisions to skilled workers since for this, advanced technologies are needed that are able to emulate the reasoning of a specialist in the matter.
Smart Process Management (SPM) supports the problems posed as it allows the automatic generation of processes or action plans to achieve objectives as an expert would do: taking into account the corresponding know-how in a reliable way, no Repetitive and taking into account possible contingencies.
Thanks to Smart Process Management technology, solutions can be developed that allow the experts to make decisions in a faster and safer way thanks to the suggestions that the system will make. And at the same time it will also enable organizations that do not have a large number of experts to make all their staff decisions as if they were the best of their experts. SPM technology generates a new blue ocean of opportunities that will allow technology companies to take advantage of a new yet unexplored market: to suggest and streamline the generation of knowledge worker decisions.
Smart Process Management: One Step Forward
So far the decisions made by the Knowledge Workers were, in a way, mainly supported by the BI tools that obtain a series of indicators and additional knowledge resulting from an analysis on a certain area of Smart