July 02, 2004
IT Doesn't Matter - Learning Does.
Last May a journalist named Nick Carr stirred up a ruckus with an article in Harvard Business Review claiming that IT Doesn't Matter. Using the telephone and shipping by rail were great sources of competitive advantage - until every business could afford them. Then they no longer differentiated those who used them. Carr argued that IT is a mature industry, its presence is assumed, and such things as standards will make it even more of a commodity in the future.
Consultants Howard Smith and Peter Fingar shot back a month later with a paperback retort entitled IT Doesn't Matter - Business Processes Do. I ordered a copy the day I met Peter last week, and I read the booklet yesterday evening. In 120 pages, Smith and Fingar skewer Carr, show why IT will matter more than ever, and explain how business process management creates riches.
The big argument is that "Business process management (BPM) systems can, for the first time in the history of business automation, let companies deal directly with business processes: their discovery, design, deployment, change, and optimization." As long as there's innovation, there's room for making processes better. BPM promises to obliterate the "Business-IT Divide."
To optimize a process, the right hand must know what the left is doing. Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), the melding of ERP, SCM, CRM, PLM, and what-not into one all-encompassing application, is a major step forward, but it doesn't link the organization with those outside the firewall such as partners and suppliers. Web Services integrate the enterprise with the outside world, connecting business to business, just as the Web connected consumers to businesses in the last decade.
Does this mean all business is going to be carried out using common processes that embed best practices? Not on your life. "BPM will be used both to differentiate (best-in-class) and to standardize (best-practice)." Count on Amazon, for example, to use best-practice standards for email and credit-checking, and FedEx will deliver your order. Don't expect Amazon to let you peak into proprietary systems such as One-Click Ordering, for that's where their competitive advantage lies.
Nick Carr's screed in HBR attacked data processing as we've known it. Indeed, that's not where to look for big value in the future. Business organizations are moving up the ladder a notch to MetaIT. Instead of one-time automation to save labor, they are establishing structures to continuously improve the way they do things.
Authors Smith and Fingar tell us it's time for the IT tail to stop wagging the Business dog. In their vision of the future, business people will define and own business processes. Instead of doing what-if analyses with numbers on spreadsheets, decision-makers will do what-if analyses of how their business operates or might operate.
As I recently wrote here, it's as if builders could move walls by shifting them on blueprints displayed on their laptops. With a comprehensive business blueprint, an executive can hand off an entire bundle of processes, say payroll, with minimal fuss (and with knowledge of precisely what savings will result.) A manager can experiment with different ways of getting a job done and chose the one with the most profit potential. A worker can fix a glitch in the system that has been irritating customers for once and for all. In the BPM world, business runs the show.
The authors propose a daunting laundry list of other functions the new paradigm can help accomplish, among them "accountability, activity-based costing, business process outsourcing, competitive intelligence, concurrent engineering, crisis management, inter-organizational systems, just-in-time (JIT), key performance indicators, lifetime customer value, pay-for-performance, resource-based strategy, security audit, scenario planning, and supply chain optimization." (Whew.)
My interest in all this is how it improves learning and human performance. Process-oriented environments will impact traditional training just as word processing and social change eliminated most of the nation's secretaries. Process innovation empowers us to create jobs that provide more throughput and greater worker satisfaction, although not through traditional training departments. Imagine the potential of:
- Workflow learning
- Transparent human development
- Grid learning
- Accountable training
- Activity-based certification
- Training value analysis
- Learning performance management
- Concurrent knowledge capture
- Customer learning alignment
- Personal flow monitoring
- Psychological stress alerts
- Individual performance indicators
- Team competency management
- Lifetime worker contribution
- Individualized learning paths
- Tailored management development
- On the fly simulations
For training directors and CLOs, the future holds good news or bad news. It depends on where you're coming from. Training administrators who fail to understand the new dynamics of business as likely to find themselves stripped bare, evaluated by metrics they do not understand, and looking for another line of work. Those who adopt the process mindset take on significant new responsibilities, for everyone knows that the people in the organization are more important than the technology.
After fifty years of waiting for instructions in its corporate cocoon, training is ready to unfold its wings and be recognized as a full-fledged business process.
This is why we're convening a Community of Practice in San Francisco this fall. I'll try to shed more insight into my vision for this in the coming weeks, both here and at the Workflow Institute.
June 27, 2004
The New Religion
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.
| “Science
without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” Albert Einstein |
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?
|
"Whatever
your mind Napoleon Hill |
The electronic spreadsheet enthralled business managers with the power of what-if analysis. Process models take what-if analysis to the level of organizational change. In lieu of a spreadsheet’s rows and columns, process maps blueprint the value circuitry underpinning the business. Instead of seeing the effect of a 3% up-tick in sales, management can assess the impact of streamlining a process or outsourcing an entire function.
Time for a miracle. I want to move a few walls in my house to make a leisure room out of two small bedrooms. What if I could tear down the walls and build the new room by doing nothing more than changing the architect’s sketch of my house? Well, of course I can’t do that; I’m going to have to hire a construction crew. However, a process model can accomplish changes. Unlike my house, business is mostly virtual. Software runs the show. Change the process map on the screen, and the system automatically generates and installs revised code!
The seers prophesy a new category of asset: Process Capital. An organization that has its processes rigorously refined should be able to swap entire corporate functions in and out like Lego® blocks. The what-if model shows the bottom-line impact of handing off payroll and benefits administration and applying the resources thus freed up to a core business area. Sufficient Process Capital will enable an organization to focus on what it can do best and to shift that focus as conditions change.
"In the Beginning, ARPA created the ARPANET.
And the ARPANET was without form and void.
And darkness was upon the deep.
And the spirit of ARPA moved upon the face of the network and ARPA said, 'Let there be a protocol,' and there was a protocol. And ARPA saw that it was good.
And ARPA said, 'Let there be more protocols,' and it was so. And ARPA saw that it was good.
And ARPA said, 'Let there be more networks,' and it was so."
-- Danny Cohen
Computer
History Museum
A Creation Myth
What laid the groundwork for these audacious claims at the altar of process? Like a voice out of the wilderness, the Internet gave us the sign.
In 1991, CERN released the World Wide Web. A year later, the Internet had 1,000,000 hosts. Two years after that, Netscape went public and the Vatican went online. Assisted by Moore’s Law of the loaves and fishes, the Internet becomes the biggest force in the history of commerce, communication, and culture change.
The miracle of the Net gave us faith and guided us in the right direction.
From Babel to interoperability. In Old Testament days, IBM computers did not talk to UNIVAC computers; GE machines did not talk to Honeywells; NCRs did not talk with Burroughs; and RCA tried to talk with IBM but died prematurely. Commercial computing relied on proprietary software to handcuff customers who couldn’t afford to change horses. Software companies upheld the tradition. But the Net provided a lingua franca. TCP/IP succeeded where Esperanto had failed. Open standards enabled any compliant browser to understand anything on the Net. The value of joining the party soon outweighed the rewards of locking in customers, and before you knew it, IBM was spray-painting Linux penguins on the sidewalks of Chicago. Now in-house and commercial systems are adopting Web Standards, and eventually the world will transubstantiate into a single, immense network.
Don’t play God. The Net is a web without a weaver. No master programmer hides behind the curtain. Like Nature herself, the web organizes itself. Start with simple rules; clear the way; don’t get in the way; let it grow. Great and unexpected things arise from complexity if you let them. In IT, this letting-go takes the form of delegating interactions to bots, personas, and software agents.
June 23, 2004
Business Process Management (2)
Worldwide Interoperability Demonstration of ASAP & WfXML 2.0
Presented by The Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC)
Demonstration of interoperability among three vendors and two open source initiatives (Fujitsu, Staffware, a client, Handysoft, and another)
ASAP = the Asynchronous Standard Access Protocol. Enter the URLs and the metadata hooks up automatically.
We're watching an interchange of activities on a live flowchart. Then we check the XML code and find that indeed the transaction made its way through the various organizations. Untouched by human hands. This is a virtual replay of pounding in the golden spike.
ASAP can be used today to link systems easily. Next step is to go through OASIS Process, but this is ready to go now.
WfMC is looking to design tool vendors to demo ability to upload and download process definitions using Wf-XML 2.0 in January 2005. Wf-XML 3.0 has "containers" which hold "factories." The URL of the factory automatically calls the details for the "instance" which includes the "activity." The activity contains two blocks of XML Schema: the data and the … The SOAP protocol carries this.
John Pike from Staffware, chair of the WfMC, points out how significant is the demo we have just seen. This was a historic moment.
Panel: Business Process Innovation
Tom Dwyer, Principal, Beagle Research Group, and a panel
Things in process are getting less visible, which is a sign of maturity - when things don't get in the way. The business used to be measuring, monitoring, and improving inefficient processes. The new objective is to use processes for innovation.
1. Innovation = application of an invention (something new) that brings benefit.
2. Two key elements are collaboration and knowledge flow.
3. Process innovation = requires a structured approach of experimentation, education....
Some of the panelists offer all-in-one, others focus on only rules or analysis. It's like assembling cars.
"Process Management Tools should be on the desk of every business user" (says Proforma).
Where is the demand for innovation coming from?
" Need a champion of processes and rules together (says a guy who sells both).
" Demand comes from the business that wants improvement in a process.
" Innovation is overwhelmingly making an existing process better rather than creating processes de novo (Fair Isaac)
" Next processes instead of best practices - things that haven't been automated before (SAP)
" No, most of it's new applications (ProForma, which covers only the analysis and planning end of things)
Where is motivating the demand for process innovation? (Jay.) Okay, I asked a bit more.
- Get executive sponsorship
- Start small, score a quick win
- Talk up the payback
- People matter, include all the stakeholders
- Avoid analysis paralysis
New paradigm. Higher level, where orgs think of process and rules as assets. Build for change.
Supply side business. We build it and then figure out what to do with it. We back into it.
Fair Isaac actually answered the question.
" Stay out of jail - compliance
" Profitability - cost cuts
" IT - infrastructure cost to high
Bottom up, top down, general awareness…it's pervasive. People are buying into it at different levels.
" Next practices. (says SAP)
" Ad hoc workflow vs. workflow in the silo.
" Seeking competitive advantage (buy, buy, buy says the vendor)
[Uh-oh. The vendors on the panel as jostling for position, only presenting examples that tout the value of their own solutions.]
Tom Dwyer observed that in high tech, we often invent something and later find the use for it. BPM is there. We're reverse-engineering the benefits from the invention.
I can imagine another back-formation from process centricism. When a business manager is confronted with the profit contribution of one way of doing things versus another, won't she want to take the option that's best economically? Will the long-term benefits of lasting processes get American business leaders to think more than one quarter ahead? Eventually, if corporations become truly transparent, market analysts could rate companies not only on earnings but also on whether they're focused on the long term or the short.
Doug Engelbart's name is reverberating in my head. Improve the process. Improve the process of improving the process.
BRP is the logic of business laid bare. No fluff. No politics. Just here's how it happens. It's a roadmap people can understand. Like a mural of a meeting, it 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.
The Process-Centric Company & Business Process Frameworks
by Paul Harmon, Editor, BP Trends
Business process is hot. At least as hot as BPR in '93-'94 but this time the interest is broader, which means it will have more staying power.
Customer focus. The Internet has had an impact on the awareness of executives. How quick can I get through the seller's website?
Better control
Reduce costs
Mergers
Process-Centric Company = A company that is organized, structured, measured and managed in terms of business processes. (Most companies are still function-centric.) This is more in the talking stage than the reality.
Electrocomponents plc, 743 million pounds
Download Annual Report
www.electrocomponents.com
Chief Process Officer: Richard Butler
CEO, CFO, CPO
Lots of work on alignment in the 90s was horizontal, integrations from supplier to customer. New alignment is vertical: integrated measures, managers, and resources. The vertical lets management conceptualize the business and therefore to change
SEI CMM Process Maturity Levels, used to assess software by DoD but is a good touchstone for assessing process maturity. From ad hoc to process improvement. Most companies are only at about 2.5. They don't have measures that tie to strategic goals.
Strategy and Goals
Business Process Architecture
Implementation: Employees/Systems
Six sigma/OMG model-driver architecture
Business Process Outsourcing = how to focus on core
Outsourcers are good prospects for BPM
Different groups want to discuss different pieces of the triangle.
Business Process Frameworks
Aka Reference Models, Templates
High level descriptions of a set of processes, measures, best practices
Provide a package that allows an analyst to treat a given process as an instance of a class of similar processes (they characterize processes at a high level)
Examples
1. Supply Chain Council (SCOR). 700 companies. How to link up processes at a high level and how to measure them. (Check their layers of modeling) This is essentially meta-processing mapping. Plan ' Source 'Make ' Deliver. At a one-day meeting, a dozen people from many companies spend the morning learning the terminology and notation; in the afternoon they create and agree upon a global, interoperable supply chain. An independent auditing agency provides benchmark data to other in an industry. The Benchmark enables you to assess your level of profitability if your performance were average. Management Plan and HR Best Practices are part of SCOR.
2. TeleManagement Forum eTOM, implemented in IT as NGOSS, their expanded architecture.
3. HPs Extended SCOR Architecture. In the Compaq merger, they modeled both the HP and the Compaq supply chain where each company had a similar process. Which process provides the best profit opportunity? Instead of a list of software apps, the supply chain guys presented a blueprint and financials. Now HP has taken this to marketing, sales, and manufacturing. It works great at HP, but since it's proprietary, it doesn't facilitate conversing with partners. (Two newly established councils are working on taking this to marketing and sales functions.) See www.supply-chain.com
for the latest; this only happened last week.
BP Frameworks are a major opportunity for companies to significantly improve their business process practices. Nothing else offers BP practitioners the speed.
Gary Chan, IT manager, City of Walnut Creek
Gary Chan explained how the City of Walnut Creek implemented BPM, the results received, and the City's vision of the future. This was the first time I've heard the details of a far-ranging deployment that involved all employees and will eventually link all customers (residents) in City projects. Plus, they brought the entire project home for under $100,000 and in less than six months.
BPM is the execution of software, measures, and processes than enable rapid, more accurate, decision making. It makes for fiscal responsibility.
Had a manual system. Nothing real-time. Two-week old reports. Monitor project progress.
Implementation of Metastorm, from signing the contract to generating reports, took place in 5 ½ months. Six weeks for training. Now installing web version. The City no longer uses any other project management software.
Creating paperless environment. Little training required: they pick it up at the push of a button. On-demand reports. Tracks all project communications. Automated processes for approval and to escalate multi-level project changes. Let's public service employees who don't work 8 to 5 communicate with others.
The total tab for the software and some expert advice from the vendor was $85,000. The hold costs down, Walnut Creek did most of the process design in-house.
Walnut Creek is currently putting the app on the Web. They envision opening up the system to citizens. If you've got a pothole in the street in front of your house, you log it on the system and monitor the trouble ticket from there on.
Futures Panel
Difficulty implementing is that companies are not organized by process. We don't need to control so much as to do the right thing. How are our haphazard processes doing? Then how can we do them better?
This is all about making business more efficient, not about adding infrastructure.
BPM has an overall architecture for management.
What are our PKIs? How are we doing against those indicators? How could we do better? What's that worth?
Janelle: At the enterprise level, all the PKIs I know of are financial. (Should Workflow Institute help develop the intangible PKIs?)
One view: IT will come under the business managers. Contrarian: We've been there before. IT people think all Business people are idiots; the business people think IT people are idiots. Another contrarian view: When more people can make changes without coding than there are coders, things will change. Right now there is one BP analyst to every ten Java coders. It should be the other way around.
One view: IT vs. the business. IT should be the business.
Are there efforts to establish standards at a higher level, e.g. accounts receivable? There's SCOR. There are also semantics being developed for some 300 industries.
"Information Resource Management" covers everything IT should be doing.
Business Intelligence has demonstrated how coding can be delegated to business people. It's time for BPM to get on board.
The assembled crowd sings Happy Birthday to Greg Rock,
panel leader and CEO of Brainstorm Group.
From luncheon conversation:
Who's the #1 thought leader in this space? Geary Rummler.
Who do the vendors sell to? It's sort of like the training market. The natural buyers lack budget and clout. Few firms have a Chief Process Officer, so there's no natural prospect at the top level either.
I plan to summarize these reports and attach my consclusions. Then they'll go on the Workflow Institute site.
Your correspondent
June 22, 2004
Business Process Management Conference
Brainstorm Group.Tuesday, June 22, 2004. Hyatt Regency, San Francisco Airport
Business Process Management – The Path to Becoming an Adaptive Organization
by Janelle Hill, METAGroup
Confusion among the terms: BPM, SOA, On Demand, Adaptive Organization. BPM includes integrating human activities with required data & systems.
True e-Business has yet to happen. Although process management theory is mature, process thinking & use of BPM technology is not.
Adaptability of Business Processes
- Enhancements
- Extensions
- Corrections
- Refinements
How much is too much? How often? Don’t do it all; do the processes that need to be adaptable.
To understand the bounds and potential of adaptability, business users must have an appreciation for the technologies.
Historical perspective
| EDI Successes |
EDI Failures |
| Standardized top business documents for reusability; standards based, bullet proof |
Point to Point one-offs, hard-coded, complex, high cost, specialized skills, single implementation infrastructure (VAN), data interchange only |
| EAI/B2B Successes |
EAI Failures |
| Brokered architecture encourages reuse, Simpler tools, metadata driven engine, Standaradized application adapters, Transport Choices |
High entry cost, Specialized skills, Emphasis on data an message transformation, not process, Not bullet proof |
| BPM Advantages |
· |
| Lowers costs with standards – fewer skills required, commoditization drives down software cost, leverages existing data nd process. E.g., $500K in 2002, $50-250I in 2004. Visual representation (BPMN). Open (XML). Supports multiple levels of process abstraction in the modeloing palette. Change the process and automatically change the code. |
· |
The more your applications expose themselves as Web services, the easier they link to existing systems.
A summary of this report will appear at Modeling must become a business discipline – not a creative pastime. Get a real modeling tool, not just a drawing tool like Visio. The model facilitates the conversation between business process and IT. It defines what events – human or system interactions – advance the process. Abstract objects hide implementation details. (It’s software application-agnostic.) This just lets you define where you want business processes to be adaptive. BPM is a Service Oriented Architecture. Interoperable, virtual network. Challenges of BPM… (Business modeler = someone “like a former McKinsey consultant, who really understands the big picture.” I can’t imagine the cost of putting together a team of these guys.) IT culture shock: From Code to Models. Model mindset – not just learning the tool. Willingness to share development responsibility. This is a new game for IT, which has been accustomed to squirreling away during development and returning with a solution. If IT architects don’t buy in, this won’t work. BPM is both a strategy and a set of technologies. It requires business and IT to work with one another. Educate everyone, then assess readiness. Establish notational standards (not just Visio drawing). Peter is great. He wraps BPM into a package management can buy into. It's a Strategy-Execution Machine. Give your people "Work Processors" so they can get your business aligned. Bravo! Dot-com bust: $3.5 trillion sucked out of market. 300,000 jobs lost. Enough technology already. RTE = real time enterprise; BRM = business process management. Executives are fed up with three-letter acronyms and technology being foisted off on them. They’re reading Nick Carr’s “IT doesn’t matter” in Harvard Business Review. Carr suggests that IT is a commodity. Fingar says IT is nothing but an enabler. Porter taught us that differentiation is the key to competitive advantage. (Don’t read Porter; it’s soporific. Read Max Strategy, a 100 page parable.) FedEx founder wanted to “sell time.” Poo-pooed at first, Fedex IS NOW A $20 billion enterprise. George Stalk’s Competing Against Time is the argument in favor of BPM. We need a better vocabulary than IT’s to get managements excited about this. Toyota and Honda managed structural changes that enabled their operations to execute their processes much faster. Toyota went through a two-year internal M&A. (Now you can do it with BPM.) HBR July 1988. Change has switched from episodic to evolutionary. What was discontinuous is now a flow; the pace of innovation is what’s key. Serial innovators will run circles around the competition. Time-Based Competition Cycle, product design, lead, lag, time to market The most value for the lowest cost in the least amount of time. Cheaper, Better, Faster. Toyota: Empower the people on the line, not just the production line. “Downsizing was the objective of BPR.” Time based competitors: ········· Compress time to mfg and distribution ········· Cut time to develop and introduce new products ········· Cut inventory thru value-delivery system ········· Lever all competitive differences Process maps are not the object. The point is whether that map will execute with my business. We need executable BP models. BPM is not IT Software Development, its an IT tool that enables business people to build and manage processes “Time is the scarcest resource.” – Drucker GE: Digitization of business process was the key. Now it's shifting to managing processes. Time-based competition is not new. But the BPM System is a way to make it real. Look for his new book, differentiating BPM from IT. No one in the corner office has a clue what BPM is. BPM is all about strategy execution. Typical value chain has 22 companies in it. With BPM systems, the tide has shifted--For the 1st 50 years
IT has automated the business, for the next 50 years BPM systems will be used to automate IT. Competition is one end-to-end value chain vs your end-to-end value chain. Peter conceptualizes a Work Processor. It’s the competitive weapon of choice. BPMS inside. What does it do? It squeezes out time. This squeezes out the right kind of costs. NDA… The specs. Doesn’t automate people out of their jobs, but instead amplifies their work by providing human connections, a shared information base, a communal knowledge base, shared design tools, shared problem-solving tools, and a command and control capability over existing IT systems…all without onhe line of code. Underpinning include cognitive science, HCI, AI, pi calculus, M, collaborative filtering, semantic search, etc. Peter told me he is putting the finishing touches on his new book, which takes the Work Processor metaphor forward. Expo break BPM Thought Leader Panel: Creating the Process Oriented Enterprise Q: John’s familiar with the automation of human processes. That market never took off. What’s different now? What’s the trigger to growth? A: BAM, Web Services, etc., are all helping from a technical perspective. Accountability and governance issues raise issues of corporate control. A triggering event is the thought of the CEO going to jail. Q. Greg, senior execs ready to take on process responsibility? A: Yes, there’s a general understanding that processes are vital. Senior managers feel like they can’t understand ownership and execution. They must own the automation of the process. Q. Mark, why do you think outsourcing is the right approach? A: It becomes easier and easier to construct a contract if there’s outsourcing involved. Both parties need to manage their risk. Challenge – example – call center answers in funny accent you can’t understand. A measure might be how long it takes to get a question answered. Either party can game the system. John: Can an outsource guy go to jail? Who owns the process? Who decides? Rachel: customers are just starting to implement Sarbanes-Oxley. There are interesting court cases on the way. How about process insurance? Seems to me companies and their outsourcers need a pre-nup. Q. IBM’s modeling tool for BPM is a way to draw boundaries. What’s your experience? Do customers take ownership of the models? A: The most successful contracts go that way. BPM can enhance teaming, too. IBM is committed to standards. They are the only one with a BPEL runtime engine. Off the shelf processes viable? IBM: I’d call them process templates. RosettaNet and UCCNet involve processes, too. Use the 80/20 rule. It’s similar to packaged ERP. Takeaways from IBM at First Data Train motivated analysts Culture change required Find success everywhere Build confidence in the modeling process through ultra-competency Whatever you do, don’t give the analyst job to anyone in IT. They won’t buy it because they know better. Reading List: Luncheon speech by key sponsor Enron. Worldcom. Power blackouts. Hurricanes. Every one of these is the result of broken processes. Agility is the cure-all. AIIM finds that 44% put BPM on the top of CIO to-do lists. IDC says Managing Business Processes is #1 call in IT. The prime sources of BP value are: BPM is not IT. BPM works by consolidating the white space on the chart, not IT. Gartner looked at 50 BPM projects. 2/3 took less than 6 months to implement. 2/3 were primarily human focused. 2% had no human component. 60% hd no system activity. (Which makes me wonder if this is really BPM.) I asked METAGroup’s Janelle Hill if BPM designers were thinking about the workers’ quality of life that would result from implementing BPM Suites. She told me that process designers were aware that BPM would fail without people. They focus on human systems. I replied that eLearning experts all parroted the mantra that what counts is the people, not the technology. Then they sell and install the technology, and the workers are left to sift through excruciatingly poorly-designed programs. Do BPM folks factor the satisfaction of the worker into the equation? Alas, Janelle told me, no. It’s the old one-quarter-at-a-time thinking. I said we would address the issue at the upcoming Workflow Symposium. No show. 
Competing on Time with the Revolutionary Business SEx Machine
Peter Fingar, co-author of BPM, The Third Wave and The Real-Time Enterprise
Besides that, the 
Flow is the trickier piece of the puzzle. I am thinking of Flow in the psychological sense, as Mihaly Csizentmihalyi describes it. 
Roaming through 
We've had opportunities to improve working conditions again and again. The peasant's lifestyle was impoverished and hard, but the early factory hand or coal miner working 12-hours days in wretched conditions certainly had it worse. People were not treated as machines. Foremen didn't beat machines. Supervisors didn't yell at and berate machines. Plant managers didn't abuse machines to the breaking point. No, the industrial workplace treated people worse than machines, as if they were throw-away tools. 
We've come a long way, you think. Out of sight out of mind. But sweatshots, slave labor, stoop labor, lost limbs, and the working poor are all there if you look. Not to mention McJobs.
The San Francisco Bay Area has been blessed with great weather for a few days, and nature is ripping me away from my computer to go for walks. This morning I wandered down the hill to join the Saturday ramble of the 
Tromping up the hill, a fellow with a dog passed me. "This is the cardiovascular section," he said. I told him that's why I was here. 
Health was only one justification for my tromp. I'm hatching a new concept of what's going on in the world, and nature's a great place for quiet contemplation. It blows my mind that I can see San Francisco from the East Bay hills. It's jam-packed with people. Yet the guy and his dog are the only creatures I see during an hour of hiking. 
This morning, when I awoke, I wrote: "We are at the dawn of an era that will change the structure of business, the nature of work, our view of the world, and our impressions of ourselves. Our culture and institutions are stretched to the breaking point. After a quarter-millennium of the Industrial Age, humankind is poised to rewrite the rules, abolish modern slavery, stop plundering the earth’s resources, and focus on using our time wisely. 
The model for the future is biological. Nature doesn’t have executives, managers, supervisors, or bosses. No one’s in control. Living things interact with one another and their surroundings. They adapt. They grow. It’s not planned; it just happens. There are no hidden agendas, no shadow organizations. In business, complex interactions will spontaneously create organizations without bosses, software without programmers, webs without weavers, and learning without instructors. 
"The fellow who invented local area networks once said that no matter how much you hyped the power of the Internet, it wasn't enough. That's the way I feel about the Future of Learning that IBM has been describing. But it's not just IBM. It's all of us. It's the convergence of learning and work."
I spent yesterday at IBM Research’s annual Almaden Institute. This year’s focus was Work in the Era of the Global, Extensible Enterprise. It was an inspiring day.
Tomorrow. February 4. 10:00 am Pacific Time. Macromedia Breeze.
Take our brief 
Winners will be announced during our 
