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.

Peter Fingar

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.

I wrote this post nearly ten years ago. The wheels of innovation turn slowly.

Nine days ago, I posted a spec for what I wanted, put $149 on my credit card, and began receiving design options. 23 designers submitted a total of 62 entries. 3 withdrew their designs. 3 designers made my short list. I selected the winner last night.

Here’s the winning icon:

Look for it at Online Educa Berlin.

99designs also does brochures, web pages, t-shirts, banners, and book covers. I’ll be back.

I crowdsourced the design of the icon to 99Designs. I put up $149 and designers are submitting ideas. What do you think? If you feel strongly, leave a comment. Note that all entries are numbered.

Here’s the Web poll. If that doesn’t work, I’ve cut and pasted the contest pages below.

Thanks!

THE JOURNAL REPORT: LEADERSHIP IN HUMAN RESOURCES

So Much Training, So Little to Show for It

An expert on corporate programs reveals why they often are a waste of time and money

In this lopsided Wall Street Journal article, a professor slams training for all the wrong reasons.

For one thing, he disregards experiential learning on the job and seems to think that training always takes place away from the job.

He touts the need for a thorough needs analysis which defines who will take what topic and be tested on it. That might have worked before jobs became complex. It’s tough to pull off when the future is unpredictable and work involves dealing with novel situations.

He laughs off companies that believe technology will solve all training problems. I’ve been in the learning business for forty years and have yet to meet someone who thinks tech will solve all training problems.

I couldn’t resist leaving a snarky comment:

Dr Salas focuses on training that takes place away from the job. He’s looking in the wrong place. Most corporate learning takes place informally in the course of doing the job, not in training courses away from the job.

These days, many organizations support what’s known as the 70-20-10 model that says 70% of learning is experiential, 20% guided by others (often managers and supervisors) and a mere 10% via formal instruction. Salas offers common sense advice on making the 10% work better. There’s a lot bigger bang for the buck in making the learning ecosystem supportive of learner-directed “pull” learning.

The school system is one of the few institutions where lectures, courses conducted in artificial environments away from the context of what’s to be learned, and one-way “push” learning are the norm.

Corporate learning has its flaws, to be sure, but they are minuscule when compared to the practices that are commonplace in schools and colleges. Most corporate trainers know more about learning theory than the grad students who lecture in colleges.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Jurgen Appelo plays with more models of how things ought to work than anyone I else I know. His book Management 3.0 presents, assesses, and sometimes interconnects with agile, people-oriented processes relentlessly. I’m a fan. See his blog. And this presentation:

Some people think their credit card information and Amazon preferences are stored a mile overhead in a cumulus cloud. It’s not that mysterious.

Just think of the cloud as a humongous computer that is connected to endless warehouses of rack-mounted servers spread around the globe. Is it safe? Like walking across the street in Manhattan, it’s perfectly safe if you know what you are doing. You don’t need to see inside the cloud. All that’s required is faith when you put things in, they will emerge where and how you want them to.

Four years ago at the Expo 2.0 conference, I was among those asked “What is cloud computing?”

“At the Web 2.0 Expo, we asked Tim O’Reilly, Dan Farber, Matt Mullenweg, Jay Cross, Brian Solis, Kevin Marks, Steve Gillmor, Jeremy Tanner, Maggie Fox, Tom McGovern, Sam Lawrence, Stowe Boyd, David Tebbutt, Dave McClure, Chris Carfi, Vamshi Krishna and Rod Boothby the same question: What is Cloud Computing?“

Looking back, things haven’t changed. Millions of words later, the cloud is what it always was.

To my amazement, 332,156 people have watched the video.

My broadest exposure on the net is a minute-long comment I made four years ago.

#itashare

What’s a course? Where did courses come from?

The word course derives from twelfth-century French for running or moving forward. Over time, it morphed into meaning the circuit that was being run on, as in racecourse. In the fourteen century, academics started using the term to mean a planned series of study. Today, a course is a standard unit of measure of learning. Vendors sell training by the course. Students complete certain courses to earn a degree.

Courses are usually formal, in that the curriculum is defined by an outside authority. Courses are usually delivered in the same format regardless of the difficulty or breadth of the content, as for instance the 50-minute classes we endured in school and college. A cut-off score on a test supposedly verifies that the course’s lessons were learned.

Some people erroneously equate courses and learning. You need to learn something, you better take a course.

In point of fact, very little adult learning occurs in courses. People learn from experience, from solving problems, from asking questions, from mimicking others, and from trying various things until they hit upon the thing that works for them. Most adults studiously avoid taking courses. They resent them.

Few experienced people in business can dedicate a full hour to anything, particularly if they only want to learn two minutes of information embedded somewhere in the middle of a fifty-minute course. They have their own agendas; they have work to do. They lack the patience to wade through recitations of what they already know and lessons on things they don’t deem relevant to their work. They know what they want to know and that’s all they’re motivated to learn. It’s like walking into a discount superstore to buy a bag of licorice and finding the only size of licorice they sell is the three gallon 24-pack. It’s often easier to just go without.

In the past, I’ve sounded a wake-up call that most learning does not take place in courses. If that’s all we’re offering, we aren’t serving our internal customers. When this message fell on deaf ears, I wrote that courses are dead. I think I underplayed the message. Actually, courses are a ticking time bomb. If courses are the only way you enable experienced workers to learn what they need to know in order to excel, you’re not fulfilling your professional responsibilities. Tech-savvy hactivists are replacing the passive and obedient older workforce we’ve been accustomed to. Real soon now, you’ll be confronted with workers who are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it any more. If you don’t hack the system, they will.

Courses are boxes, and everyone but the new kids on the block believes it’s good to think outside of the box.

Are you up for a challenge?

Join me next week for a simple game.

Set-up and rules:

First, load up on the spirit of social, informal, experiential, network-assisted learning by attending Harold and Jane’s workshops, listening to Clark or Charles’ presentations, reading our blogs and books, and/or drinking the Social Business zeitgeist from Fast Company, Andy McAfee, Working Smarter Daily, or McKinsey & Co.

Next, seat four to six people around a poker table or small conference table. At least half the players should be trainers, instructional designers, or HR professionals.

Players stack 4 quarters in front of their place at the table.

The dealer/convener opens a conversation about how workers or managers in their company could more effectively learn a particular skill. The conversation may ramble into talk of incentives and measurement, but players should guide it back to the theme of how employees can get better at that particular skill. The objective is to avoid the language of top-down courses and formal learning.

Players make suggestions one to three paragraphs in length, one after another, beginning with the player to the left of the dealer. It’s fair to build on one another’s ideas. The talking stick passes counter-clockwise at the end of each turn.

A player who says “COURSE” or “INSTRUCTOR” or “TEACHER” or “TEST” or “GRADES” puts a quarter in the pot for each occurrence.

Players with competitive natures usually wait until a person has said their three paragraphs, hoping they’ll blurt out several of the forbidden terms in one turn (which will cost them several quarters).

Play continues until only one person still has quarters; that person takes the pot.

Let’s see if you can prescribe a learning solution without resorting to the controlling world of courses.

Join me next week on Google+. I’ll deal. Up to ten of us can play. We’ll webcast the event.

Email me in advance at jaycross@internettime.com, subject: game. Google+, our gaming platform, works best when I invite participants in advance by email.

Time: 10 am Pacific time, Wednesday, August 15th. I’m +jaycross on Google+. If you haven’t used G+ yet, download the app in advance and set it up. This is not rocket science but you’ll miss the beginning of the game if you wait until the last minute. If you haven’t tried Google+, well, you should.

Bomb image by mcol, courtesy Open Clip Art Library

Q1) Harold in his blog post says ”For too long our organizations have suffered from the disease of complication. It’s time to simplify.” Let’s look at how we can simplify learning solutions. How can we help people keep up to date with what’s happening INSIDE their organisation – in simple ways?

WikiPedia turned 10 years old today. I attended a delightful unconference with a hundred Wikipedians at the Hub in San Francisco.

How’s this for a deal? $25 paid for breakfast, lunch, a full day’s events, presentations by Ward Cunningham and Kevin Kelly, and even a celebratory t-shirt.

Hundred of events like this are taking place around the world.

It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely success story than Wikipedia. From the Welcome to Wikipedia booklet:

Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in the world. It is created and maintained by more than 100 thousand contributors from around the world. Every month Wikipedia receives over 386 million unique visitors. Wikipedia features more than 16 million articles in over 260 languages. It is free to use, free to edit, and free of advertisements.

Eugene & Ward

Ward is also a leader in the Agile Software movement and the thought leader in Software Patterns.

We discovered a common interest in learning from pictures and video. Periodically his company’s software staff gets together for a day-long retreat. Quarterly was not frequent enough, so they invented “micro-quarters,” of which there are six a year. At the conclusion of each retreat, people draw pictures of what they’ve accomplished. With the camera on his laptop, Ward takes a video of each individual explaining his or her picture. He edits out the ums and ahs to prepare a fast-moving video documenting the event. People use these to review the event and check on progress when the next micro-quarter rolls around.

Ward’s original wiki was geeky beyond belief. It relied on CamelCase and oddball formatting conventions. It was not pretty. I mentioned that ten years ago, my glossary defined wiki as “a way to stop a conversation.” So I asked Ward how he felt about today’s spiffed-up, user-friendly wikis. He told me that a few days after he released the first wiki, another developer had hacked out a different version. Didn’t ask permission or anything. Ward thought about it and decided that was okay. He was happy to contribute the wiki to the public good. I’ll cover the content of Ward’s presentation in another post.

Eugene Kim introduced the open space session masterfully, getting the participants to explain the rules of open space. Whatever happens is what is supposed to happen. If it’s not beneficial, move on.

The first breakout I attended dealt with getting new people to create and edit posts. Many people approach Wikipedia who don’t realize they can edit the content. More fundamentally, they don’t see themselves as editors. I called up the Wikipedia home page on my iPad. It’s totally intimidating. There’s no on-ramp for new users. When I brought up instructional design, forty faces went blank. I suggested putting together a few simple videos showing a user explaining what’s going on. Some people liked the idea, but some Wikipedia foundation people began explaining how hard it was to change the front page. (There’s enormous perceived resistance to change by the elite contributors.) Did I know how tough it is to make changes when hundreds of millions of people were involved?

This evening I discovered that there are already dozens of “how to edit” articles on YouTube. Maybe someone can convince Wikipedia to point to them.

In another breakout, Gordon Mohr encouraged us to explore how to make Wikipedia “Broader, deeper, and edgier.” This may have to take place outside of the Wikipedia framework. We touched on many topics. Some new articles would be better positioned as “not ready” rather than “not good enough.” Wikipedia would feel less exclusionary without the distinction made between members and outsiders. Why not consider all users members — and therefore editors? It occurred to me that Wikipedia has scant room for discussion. It’s still just an encyclopedia; it might be better by adding commentary and a forum for discussion.

Another breakout discussed Wikipedia – the next ten years. What should evolve?

I wanted to be able to walk around in the knowledge space, sort of the Library of Alexandria meets Second Life.

I also pushed my current passion, the workscape. Why not give readers the option of checking a box that would prompt periodic reinforcement? Battle the forgetting curve with brief, spaced reminders built right into the system. One of the old hands said you could already do this. All it took was remembering what pages you’d viewed and revisiting them. Another Wikipedia said c’mon, nobody’s going to do that; they won’t even remember what pages they’d visited. I don’t sense the group was very interested in people learning things beyond their initial exposure. If you have encyclopedia DNA, it’s hard to think outside of the encyclopedia box.

Toward the end of the day, Kevin Kelly gave a closing presentation on What Technology Wants, his new book. I’d heard Kevin’s pitch two months ago in Berkeley and departed in confusion. I’ll detail today’s version in another post.