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.

Tell your friends. Tell the boss. Tell your resident futurist. Tell your colleagues. Pass the word. Invite the world.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

_____________________________________________________________

IMPORTANT, FREE ONLINE MEETING ON MEGA-CLASSES & BUSINESS

Wednesday, February 27 at 9:30 am Pacific time

Topic: Business+MOOCs

Location: Google+ Hangout on Air internettime.com/mooc/

Can Massive Courses re-skill managers and workers?

Courses for hundreds of thousands of workers at a crack might change the equation. Then again, they might not. Join this 60-minute conversation to decide where you stand.

MIT and Harvard founded edX to educate the world for free. 400,000 people signed up for a MOOC (course) on artificial intelligence. Don’t think Harvard Business School and Stanford Graduate School of Business have failed to notice.

Training departments face the same fate as local bookstores and record shops. Disruptive innovation is afoot. Lifelong learning is necessary and now we have the vehicle for it.

Participants include rock stars George Siemens, Curt Bonk, Stephen Downes, Coursera, Mark Finnern, Dave Cormier, Terri Griffith, Clark Quinn, the Center for Creative Leadership, Jerry Michalski, Jos Arets, and Jay Cross.

The Learning Community of Google+ is hosting the session. The conversation will be streamed on YouTube.

Find more information about MOOCs and the event at internettime.com/mooc/

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Jay Cross, CEO and Chief Unlearning Officer, Internet Time Alliance. 1.510.528.3105

# # #

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:

The Twenty-First Century Corporation

Businesses around the world are transforming into extended enterprise networks but their training departments are stuck in the previous century. In the pursuit of trying to fix what’s broken, let’s imagine what ideal corporate learning would look like if we could start over from scratch.

In the 1800s and 1900s, successful companies ran like well-oiled machines. Workers were mere cogs in those machines. The people were interchangeable parts. Companies paid them to follow instructions and do the same thing over and over again.

Workers have since replaced machines as the primary means of creating value. Companies rely on them to solve problems, delight customers, and stay ahead of the game. They are what make a business go and grow. A company’s market value echoes the ingenuity, know-how and reputation of its people.

Twenty-first century employees have to do complex, unpredictable work. They have to keep up with a torrent of new products and services, not just their own but also their competitors’. They have to stay sharp in a
world that’s going ever faster. They have to grapple with a barrage of new information and demands on their time. Continuous learning is the only way they can keep up. Their work has become learning, and learning is the bulk of their work.

And, on top of this, technology has connected the world, making it possible to connect with just about anyone, anytime, anywhere. The ease of sharing of information has lead to a cultural phenomenon, which relates to our topic at hand; people are used to being able to get the answers to their questions – to learn – of their own accord through
research and conversation. But this way of learning – autonomous searching and social collaboration – has not yet been reflected in corporate learning, demonstrating that corporate learning has fallen behind.

To keep things simple in our following exploration of how corporate learning needs to change, let’s call the industrial-age (old school) companies Hierarchical and the network-era (2012) companies Collaborative. Control in Hierarchical companies resides at the top. Orders and instructions are pushed down through the organization. Control in Collaborative companies is distributed throughout the organizations. Workers and supervisors have a large say in what they do and they pull in the resources they need for themselves.

So, imagine the training department just disappeared because our organization has shifted from Hierarchical to Collaborative, and learning has become everyone’s business.

Where should we focus to improve learning? It’s a matter of people and infrastructure. Those will be the topics of my next posts on this subject.

White paper | Slideshare

Raines

Bill

We celebrated Hypercard’s 25th anniversary at the Hillside Club in Berkeley this evening at one of Sylvia Paull‘s Cybersalons. Raines Cohen, co-founder of BMUG (Berkeley Mac User Group), once the largest user group in the world, drew out Bill Atkinson with initial questions and then wowed the audience by searching and displaying sites and photos on the web in real time as Bill and the audience brought them up.

Bill credits his success to Steve Jobs. “He believed in me.” They were best friends for three years, often as not having dinner together. Bill created MacDraw, QuickDraw, and Hypercard. Bill had gone independent by the time he wrote Hypercard. Apply had agreed to bury another brilliant programmer’s masterpiece, Mac Basic, to get a lifeline from Microsoft, which immediately killed it. Programmers were wary that Apple might not do what was best for their applications.

People in the audience stood up to tell Hypercard stories. A number of former Mac journalists were on hand. Some people credited Hypercard with having started their now successful businesses.

Bill? He spends a lot of time perfecting a postcard writing app. To his mind it’s cooler than Hypercard. You can upload a photo and the app will print a high res card, stamp it, write your message on it, and get it in the mail. It’s ironic, a sophisticated app that is out to save an old artefact, the post card. PhotoCard is s a free app for the iPhone.

I was struck by the simplicity of Hypercard. It was powerful but never added the useless chrome and doo-dads that modern apps ship with. Someone asked, “How did you know you were done?” Bill said he was finished when the kit was complete. You’re through when the app does what you’d asked it to do. Hypercard is sort of like Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language. You don’t have to be an architect or city planner to get the concept and apply it elsewhere.

Many of us have tread in Bill’s shoes, trying to find ways to enable people to pursue their passion without having to become experts in arcane domains like programming.

Our usual response that “smart phones route around IT” doesn’t cut it when you want to work web 2.0 tools into the organizational fabric.

Today I bought a gadget to get us the access we need. Maybe it will become the organization’s guerilla on-ramp to the net. It’s a mi-fi card from Verizon.

This is a slick little gadget. Fits in the palm of your hand. It’s smaller than my iPhone. It looks cool.

When I push the button (there’s only one on the device), it immediately sets up five wi-fi access points.

The price tag of these things had kept me out of the market, but Verizon has a sale going now. The Mi-Fi device is free (although you’ll still have to pay sales tax on it). The basic service is $35/month and you have to sign up for two years to get the deal.

I’m confident the Mi-Fi is going to pay for itself by skirting the access fees charged by #(&$#! hotels and #&($& airports. No more squinting at my iPhone when there’s a document I need to read.

Thanks once again, Moore’s Law.

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.

For example, that’s a real psych-test blog above. See any weird stuff? It’s all in your head. The blot’s neutral.

Some people think mute PowerPoints constitute training. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Hence, this deck includes sound.

This is practice for a presentation I’ll be delivering in Sao Paolo next month. I’m sick as a dog, sicker, actually, so don’t listen if sniffling and heavy breathing offend you. A healthy version will come out later.

How to embed sound in a SlideShare deck: Record your words as you run through your deck. I used Garage Band and saved the spiel as an mp3. Upload your presentation to SlideShare. Click Edit. Syncing sound to slides is intuitive.

Any feedback? My audience includes business training managers and teachers; they don’t understand how people can be expected to learn without a teacher.

Once upon a time, the world was predictable. Isaac Newton had convinced us that every action resulted in an opposite and equal reaction. Rene Descartes thought and therefore, was. People made long-term plans. Logic ruled.

Then we realized that everything is connected. Outcomes result from the interplay of complex adaptive systems. Butterfly effects, asymmetry, and self organization abound. What emerges next is anybody’s guess. It’s time to shed the delusion that we are in control. Logic is oversimplification.

What’s a person to do when complexity turns our clockwork universe on its head? In a increasingly volatile environment, rigidity is suicidal. But how can we be flexible without being wishy-washy?

My colleagues at the Internet Time Alliance agree that we need to embrace complexity, not hide from it. Harold Jarche writes, “Few are bored with complex challenges. The more people who are engaged creatively, the more effective the organization will be and no, there isn’t a course you can take to address this.”

The undisputed authority in this field is Dave Snowden. In October, he’s leading a series of one-day executive seminars on Leading Through Complexity: A New Simplicity.

I’m going to attend the San Francisco event. Perhaps a bunch of us will head out to dinner afterward to review what’s we’ve learned. This stuff is important but it’s never easy!