FlowCentric vs SharePoint Workflow Part 1

2009-10-12T16:40:00.000-07:00

It is fair to say that standard workflow in SharePoint handles simple workflow well. For example a process may require a request, a document filed and an approval. Easy stuff in SharePoint. Beyond that SharePoint needs considerable development effort to deliver complex workflow.

SO

The inclination is therefore to think ‘well if it’s simple go SharePoint, complex look to FlowCentric’.

I say NO

As soon as you use SharePoint workflow the process falls outside the business process management, governance and reporting framework that FlowCentric naturally enables.

What does this "business process management, governance and reporting framework" mean?

As standard, the business will benefit from a common and central repository for its process orchestration including:

Process design and deployment management.

Standard tracking visibility, aging, notifications and escalations features.

Audit trails with drill down to all activities exposing all details.

Automatic archiving with drill down to all activities exposing all details.

Business activity monitoring, frequency, by role, by user, what, when, and any process attribute.

Broader analysis and reporting, all reporting is immediately available in the myAnalytics suite, custom reports can also be delivered in this framework. In fact FlowCentric creates a data warehouse to make custom reporting easy.

Benchmark and performance management (setting target resource usage cost and effort and reporting activity against these).

Version management, ability to deploy versions of a process and monitor results, also allows for seamless cutovers with minimal business disruption, no down time.

The main benefits of the framework are that it:

Supports continual improvement

Provides a basis to drive down associated costs, increase productivity, improve service delivery and leverage existing systems inc SharePoint.

Ensures processes are aligned to business outcomes.
Provides business intelligence to support improved decision making.

SO

Why have two ways of managing process, and how would you achieve the above in SharePoint without a substantial amount of development effort?

SharePoint does not have any of this native capability
- FlowCentric does.