Wednesday, June 23, 2004

A Screed about Process

If you walked into the conference I’ve been attending for the last two days cold, you would not have a clue what people were talking about or why you would want any part of it. You might think you’d stepped into a revival for geeks. I’ll bear witness to what transpired.

Peaceable Kingdom

Speakers fervently describe a Second Coming for IT, an entirely new and hyper-productive way of doing business. In the Promised Land, managers and workers no longer need to turn to IT to get their jobs done. Bankers run the banks and merchants run the stores without relying on CIO’s to satisfy their customers. Silos fall. Everyone makes informed decisions. Converts are on the edge of their pews.

The prophets envision the profits, but their belief system lacks a name. Some call it Business Process Management. Other say it’s Web Services. Yet others talk of Service-Oriented Architecture. They describe the wonders of SOAP and UML, seek blessings from W3C and OASIS, and tell parables of independent angels agents doing what’s right. They speak in tongues.

Non-believers sense a sham. The masses have long prayed at the altar of IT for better, faster, cheaper ways of creating value and making the world a better place. The vengeful IT god inevitably punishes the populace with plagues of non-functionality, cost overruns, missed deadlines, administrative catastrophe, scaring away customers, frustration, and demoralization. To every FUD there is a season.

Are those who herald the new order today’s false prophets or are they messengers trumpeting true change? Business people are skeptical. Fool me once, shame on thee. Fool me twice, shame on me.

What does business gain from going to this church? Less lag time between strategy and execution. Faster response time to customers. More agility amid changing conditions. Faster cycles, less lead time, less lag time. Richer innovation and more of it. Focus on core strengths. Everyone singing from the same hymnal. This is not IT; this is business.

Twenty years ago, few executives touched a keyboard. Today, few business people change the process they employ to do their jobs. Tomorrow, workers will contribute to helping their organizations improve the way work is performed. Continuous performance improvement will become everyone’s job.

A New Testament

Epiphany: If you climb up the ladder of abstraction several rungs, you can begin to divine what the prophets are talking about. The patterns we couldn’t see because we were too close begin to come into focus. The grand design becomes obvious.

The day-to-day world of commerce is so far below that the cubicles, silos, firewalls, and boundaries fade away. From up here, people and politics are impossible to discern. We’re looking at the broad flows of value across the global marketplace.

Just as the first image of the earth from space raised our consciousness of living on a tiny sphere in space, looking at the flows of knowledge and value from above brings what’s really important in commerce into sharp relief.

From up above, all business consists of flows of value across networks. As on the Internet, all nodes are connected. Sometimes the route from one node to another is circuitous and inefficient, but somehow it all works together. When synapses in the human brain traverse a meaningful route, the result is a memory. When value flows through an organization, the result is a pattern. When patterns are repeated and refined, they become a process.

Processes can be modeled and mapped. In fact, evangelists recommend that business organizations map current processes simply to get a handle on what they are really doing. Disconnects and gross inefficiencies will become immediately apparent.

A map of a process is a picture of how an organization works. The map tracks a common reality, not a view from within a silo. The map divorces descriptions of how things work from personalities and turf issues. A process map is the logic of business laid bare. No fluff. No politics. Just “Here's how it happens.”

Like a mural interpreting a meeting, a process map enables people to talk about what works and what doesn't without getting personal about it. The map is agnostic. Everyone's goal is to make it better. Furthermore, thanks to smart software, the value of choosing this option instead of that is automatically generated and explicitly stated.

For example, when HP was merging with Compaq, the combined organization had many redundant processes. The staff modeled each HP and Compaq supply chain process whenever they overlapped. They chose whichever process promised the best profit potential. Instead of presenting a list of software apps to debate, the supply chain guys presented a blueprint and financials for an optimal mix of interoperable processes. Now HP has taken this to marketing, sales, and manufacturing. Why shouldn’t all businesses be evaluating the way they do business all the time?