COTS Workflow you already have, you just don't know it

Most organisations already have an purchased, implemented, and widely used world-class workflow and case management solution with great reporting and metrics - they just don't know it.

It's your humble IT help-desk and issue tracking software.

The core of this software's functionality is to define the process by which events are dealt with, manage and manage and track the work that needs to be done to respond to these events, and report on the results.

Just think how useful this would be for:

• Customer queries
  
• Purchasing (Your own lo-fi purchase-to-pay process.)
  
• Leave Requests
  
• Expense Requests
  
• Training Requests
  
• Case Management
  
• Sales Cycles
  

Basically any long-running, manually intensive process is a candidate to be tracked and reported in such a system.

Obviously there's significant down sides to using a ticket-tracking system instead of a "real" BPM suite, integration with external apps is horrible for instance, management and dashboard reporting cab be pretty sparse, resource assignment is generally primitive, and the process modelling side will be nowhere near as pretty or support the full expressiveness of BPMN 1.1.

But all this matter less than you think. You have a system here and now that can quickly and cheaply (so cheaply) solve many of your internal process issues - but IT has just kept it for themselves.

So go start playing around with whatever you have - (or install Trac/buy Jira if you don't have anything) and start working. All you need is a process map, and a state diagram showing transition, and who is responsible at each stage, and you can have a system implemented and ready to start training in less than a week. Less than a day if you've done it before.

If you're willing to get fancy you can also use the fact that the notes and description section for tickets in tools like Jira has most of the power of it's Wiki available so integrating in information from external sources is easy.

So what are you waiting for - what process in your organisation would be better served by a ticket-tracking system and what are you going to do about it?

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue_tracking_system
http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/