Managing long-tail processes using FormSys

Abstract

Efforts and tools aiming to automate business processes promise the highest potential gains on business processes with a well-defined structure and high degree of repetition [1]. Despite successes in this area, the reality is that today many processes are in fact not automated. This is because, among other reasons, Business Process Management Suites (BPMSs) are not well suited for ad-hoc and human-centric processes [2]; and automating processes demands high cost and skills. This affects primarily the "long tail of processes" [3], i.e. processes that are less structured, or that do not affect many people uniformly, or that are not considered critical to an organization: those are rarely automated. One of the consequences of this state is that still today organisations rely on templates and paper-based forms to manage the long tail processes. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.