Intalio BPM - Intermediate Timers and Task Management

Use Case: Police electronically file a criminal complaint in which a summons is issued and the defendant has not been processed (electronically fingerprinted with LiveScan and Photographed). The Chief law enforcement officer of the jurisdiction wants to be able to track fingerprint compliance to monitor who has and who has not been processed. In the current model, we are able to capture those defendants who have been processed, but have no way of updating the KPI dashboard on fingerprint compliance for those who have not been fingerprinted once the complaint has been electronically filed with the Court.

Proposed Solution: Using BPM, extend the current model to track those defendants not processed and incorporate any rules of criminal procedure within the process that pertain to fingerprinting following the issuance of a summons.

In the diagram below, a message is received after electronically filing a criminal complaint if the defendant was not processed. A task is sent to the officer filing the complaint - 'Fingerprint Pending'. Since the defendant has 5 days to report for processing, an intermediate timer between the creation of the task and the completion of the task is set to 5 days and 1 minute. An intermediate timer placed on the sub process is set to 5 days. If the defendant reports for fingerprinting within the court ordered time frame of 5 days, the officer will complete this task and the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) for the fingerprint compliance dashboard will be updated. However, if 5 days passes and the task is not completed by the officer the following occurs:

1. The task is deleted from the officer's task list. This is accomplished by calling two (2) different services within Intalio - task manager service and token service. In the task manager service, there is an operation called delete and this operation will delete a given task. The delete operation takes two (2) parameters, taskID and participantToken. The taskID is obtained within the process from the create task response message. The participantToken has to be retrieved using the Token Service. The token service takes two parameters, username and password. The administrator account has the authority to delete a task so those values are passed into the service. The response message from the token service provides the participantToken which can be passed into the delete operation. This will then delete the task from the officer's task list.
2. In case the officer forgot to complete this task, and the defendant was fingerprinted, we send an email from the process using an email web service informing the officer that this task was deleted and if the defendant was fingerprinted to contact the District Attorney's office immediately before bail revocation documents are forwarded to the Court.
3. A task is sent to the District Attorney's office informing them that Bail Revocation may be required due to non-compliance with a fingerprint order as a condition of bail. If the DA determines from their own investigation or from the officer that the defendant was processed, they can enter the name of the booking center and the KPI will be updated and reflected in the fingerprint compliance dashboard. If the defendant was not processed, information retrieved from the complaint can pre-populate a bail revocation web form to reduce redundant data entry. Any additional information required may be entered by the District Attorney staff. A pdf of the bail report can be printed from the web form and submitted to court. In the future it is possible that the document be electronically submitted to the court.
4. Finally, the KPI is updated to reflect that a bail revocation has been filed on this defendant.

Below is a diagram of the proposed work flow.

Diagram:

















More info at http://btmsoftwaresolutions.com

Solving Business Problems - BPM

As stated in a previous blog, I am currently working on a BPM initiative in the criminal justice community. Since I could not sleep last night, I googled BPM and came across a free PDF download - BPM Basics for Dummies. A link to the download is available on my website currently under construction at BTMSoftwareSolutions.com. I decided to give it a read. It was only 78 pages long and you can always learn more. As it turned out, this morning I turned that reading into an email suggestion amongst our team on our current business process model. In a nutshell, this is what I stated.

Our current business process model does not capture one of the significant process outcomes of filing a criminal complaint a consumer (in my situation the criminal justice community is the consumer) expects, the fingerprinting of defendants. The criminal justice community has not been very efficient at ensuring that 100% of defendants alleged to have committed a crime are fingerprinted. They have gotten better, but more needs to be done. And studies show that even a portion of the prison population currently serving sentences are for crimes they were never fingerprinted. Without fingerprinting, criminal justice agencies (Police, DA, Courts, Probation, Prisons, etc) are making decisions sometimes without all the information about a person. Without this critical information about prior offenses, the safety of our criminal justice employees and also the community are impacted.

My suggestion was to indicate that processing defendants is a very important key performance indicator and a metric we can capture within our business process. Some current attempts to address the problem and increase fingerprint rates was to purchase more equipment for law enforcement agencies. But this approach does not address the root cause of the problem, the BUSINESS PROCESS, nor does it assist key stakeholders in monitoring their success in real-time on who has been and who has not been fingerprinted. By leveraging BPM with Business Activity Monitoring (BAM), metrics from within the process can be captured and displayed on a dashboard to users. Dashboards have drill down capabilities so those complaints where no fingerprints have been recorded, users may obtain more information about the defendant and the approrpiate measures taken to ensure fingperprint compliance.

This is part of what BPM is all about - being flexible and agile to changing business needs or newly identified process improvements. Once the process is discussed with key stakeholders, process owners and business/system analysts, the updated business process can quickly be implemented and performance tracking monitored.

Remember, modeling something that is already broken only speeds up gathering information that the process is broken. You want to measure the As-Is process to define a baseline of measurements. These measurements then can be compared to the To-Be process to determine the Return On Investment (ROI).

Probation Office Case Scenario

Having worked in the Probation and Parole field for 10 years, these agencies spend a significant amount of time preparing reports for the Court. These documents often need review from a supervisor with almost certain revisions and updates. Once completed, these reports are then shared with other criminal and non-criminal justice agencies pursuant to rules of criminal procedure and local court orders. So how does this current As-Is process look. Lets take a look at the current business process for compiling information, reviews and submissions and then compare this to what a To-Be business process might look like using BPM.

The current As-Is process scenario typically follows this route. An officer of the court gathers information from a local Record Management System (RMS) that holds offender information. This information is usually entered in by various personnel including support staff who enter the initial case information followed by probation officers who add additional case information as it is collected. To prepare a report, the Probation Officer uses a text editor and redundantly types this same information which was recorded into the RMS system. The report is then printed and delivered to a supervisor for their review. If any revisions are required, the paperwork is delivered back to the officer for corrections. This cycle continues until the report is approved at which time it is forwarded to the Court. Reports thatare permitted to be shared with other criminal justice and/or non-criminal justice agencies are also forwarded, usually in paper print. If this information is valuable to those receiving agencies, they typically redundantly enter the same information into their RMS.

As you can see from reading this case scenario, the process is not very efficient. From the redundant data entry, paper and printing costs, delivery costs (inter office and sometimes mail which requires postage) and the possibility of misplaced papers, BPM can allow agencies to better align their IT environment on a low budget and modify a business process as it changes. Lets look at what this To-Be process, using BPM and other open source technology could look like.

An officer starts a report by logging in to their business process console and selecting the type of report (process) they would like to begin. Information from various external sources are gathered using web services to pre-compile a majority of the information, thus reducing redundant data entry. The officer can save this report if not complete and it will appear in their task list neatly organized so not to slip through the cracks only to be remembered last minute. Once the report is complete it is submitted into the process electronically. Business rules decide on where this information flows next. If supervisor review is required, the report can go to a specific supervisor or be available to all personnel with the role of a supervisor. A supervisor can then CLAIM a report to be reviewed and the task will no longer appear in the other supervisors task list. The supervisor can make determinations as to whether the report should be approved, revised or rejected. Based on the supervisors decision the process flow continues. If revisions were requested, the officer will receive a task and possibly an email notification that the task is waiting for them. The officer can review any comments the supervisor made and resubmit the report upon completion. Again, this cycle continues as before in the As-Is process, but paper/printing costs are reduced and tracking of the process is possible using Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). Once approved, the process continues delivering the information to those participants involved in the process - humans and systems. Web Services using XML can be integrated into the process to allow information from the process to populate other RMS.

As mentioned in the To-Be process, Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) can be developed to capture key performance indicators to see if goals, objectives and/or mission statements of that organization are being met. This provides decision makers with critical data they can use to re-allocate resources, request additional resources or realign their goals and objectives based on the data collected. And since the data is being collected from within the process, no other human intervention for record keeping is required. Another added benefit that using business process management software allows for.

BPM is not a panacea, but from my experience it bridges the gap between the IT developers, Business Analysts and Operational Level staff that require IT support to increase efficiency of their current business processes and activities. In addition, with the amount of open source software that is available, software costs for such a system can be substantially reduced..

Business Process Modeling

Coming from a criminal justice background and commercial software product culture, accepting a new job which was focusing on open source software for Business Process Modeling felt a little daunting - and the first several months were. It has been almost two years since that leap of 'faith' and I have come into my own. I have also realized the benefits an organization may receive using this type of technology. What type of technology am I writing about - BPM (Intalio), MySQL, Apache DS LDAP, Orbeon xForms, Tomcat Server, eXist XML database. These are some of the products I have come to know over the past year.

What have I been developing with these products? I am currently working on a project which models a criminal justice process that allows information sharing between external entities relying mainly on Web Services and XML. The process is modeled representing all the actors involved (humans and systems) and the decisions, rules and flow that make up that business process . The entire application development has integrated the above technologies to deliver the back-end data storage both in a relational database (MySQL) and as XML documents (eXist), web server container (Tomcat), Directory Structure for user log in credentials (Apache DS LDAP), IntalioBPM which models the business process which creates the BPEL to deploy to Tomcat and web forms that expose all of these components to the end user - Orbeon xForms.
A significant amount of XML technologies are utilized in delivering the end result - Web Service Description Language (WSDL), SOAP, XSLT, XSL-FO, XPATH and XQUERY to name a few.

I often wonder about the market for such a software development using the above technologies that focuses on small to medium size businesses with limited technology budgets but with the necessity to be as efficient as possible. I hope to continue down this path of BPM and XML in the future and would love to hear from others on their experiences with such technologies and those who are interested in reading/learning more.