Anyone who’s worked with me at any point over the last 5 years knows how seriously I take workflow. As a concept, it is in fact the foundational component of my IPM Value Pyramid. If you accept the notion, as I’ve stated many times, that the best means to achieve the ephemeral “Knowledge Management” is to focus on the low hanging fruit – simple and direct process improvements designed to address the everyday work of practitioners – then you understand how important and transformational a tool workflow, as both a concept and system, can be to an organization.
More than anything else, workflow is method by which an organization can formalize and codify its policies and procedures in the systems that it implements to support its practices. But in practice, workflow seems to be manifest as large-footprint technologies that are out of the reach of all but the largest firms, because its costs are so astronomical.
Why should implementing a technology that designed to use and present systems you already own and use be such an expensive proposition? Even systems that advertise workflow components built-in seem to use tremendous poetic license in making those claims. Most current IP Management systems claim to have “robust” workflow functionality; but absolutely no IP Management system on the market today can so much as provide a built-in faculty for automating a task (say, opening a new matter) based on an external trigger.
Workflow is the opportunity to make transformative practice changes. We should have higher expectations.
