Clay Richardson of Forrester and Keith Swenson of Fujitsu had recently a webinar on dynamic processes. This is covered by Sandy Kamsley here. I could not follow the webinar, but looking at the transcript, I understand that in some domains there is certainly a need for process to be more flexible to let the process workers perform their work more effectively. This flexibility (or can I say empowerment – 2.0 ish :)) is particularly important in knowledge intensive domains like insurance, emergency management, dispute handling.

In my understanding, these concepts were pioneered by Connie Moore in an article describing process adaptability. She categorizes the processes into a spectrum ranging from structured, well defined “steps” to be adhered  giving some ground for achieving the outputs expected  using the skills of the workers executing the activities in a process. Each of these processes require different levels of empowerment for the knowledge workers.

This was followed by (Wil) van der Aalst, Professor, Department of Mathematics & Computer Science, in defining what is called case handling which is more contexual and data oriented view of processes.

I plan to elaborate more on these in next blogs in this space. Keith, I will be very interested if the webinar is available for download, as I am interested in this topic.