One Saturday night the other week I was typing away on a book that I’m working on (probably called The new instability. How cloud computing, globalisation and social media enable to you to create an unfair advantage) and I let out what was probably a quite involved tweet without any context to explain it.
Recently I’ve been thinking about the shift we’re seeing in the business environment. The world seems pretty unstable at the moment. Most business folk assume that this is simply a transition between two stable states, similar to what we’ve seen in the past. This time, however, business seems to be unable to settle into a new groove. The idea behind the book is that the instability we’re seeing is now the normal state of play
Since Frederick Taylor’s time we’ve considered business – our businesses – vast machines to be improved. Define the perfect set of tasks and then fit the men to the task. Taylor timed workers, measuring their efforts to determine the optimal (in his opinion) amount of work he could expect from a worker in a single day. The idea is that by driving our workers to follow optimal business processes we can ensure that we minimise costs while improving quality. LEAN and Six Sigma are the most visible of Taylor’s grandchildren, representing generations of effort to incrementally chip away at the inefficiencies and problems we kept finding in our organisations.
This is the same mentality – incremental and internally focused, intent on optimising each and every task in our organisations – that we’ve used to apply technology to business. Departmental applications were first deployed to automate small repudiative tasks, such as tracking stock levels or calculating payrolls. Then we looked at the interactions between these tasks, giving birth to enterprise software in the process. Business Process Management (BPM) is the pinnacle of our efforts, pulling in everything from our customers through to suppliers to create the optimal straight through processes for our organisation to rely on.
Some vendors have taken this approach to its logical extreme, imagining (and trying to get us to buy) a single technology platform which will allow us to programme our entire business: business operating platforms. They’re aligning elements in the BPM technology stack with the major components found in most computers under the (mistaken) assumption that this will enable them to create a platform for the entire business. Business as programmable machine writ large.
The problem, as I’ve pointed out before, is that:
Programming is the automation of the known. Business processes, however, are the management and anticipation of the unknown.
Business is not a computer, with memory, CPUs and disks, and the hope of creating an Excel with which we can play what if with the entire business is simply tilting at windmills.
The focus of business is, and always has been, problems and the people who solve them. Technology is simply a tool we’ve used to amplify these people, starting with the invention of writing through to modern SaaS applications and BPM suites. While technology has had a previously unimaginable impact on business, it can’t (yet) replace the people who solve the problems which create all the value. People collaborate, negotiate, and smash together ideas to find new solutions to old problems. Computers simply replicate what they are told to do.
We’ve reached Taylorism’s use-by date. Define the perfect task and fit the man to the task no longer works. The pace of business has accelerated to the point that the environment we operate in has become perpetually unstable, and this is pushing us to become externally focused, rather than internally focused. We’re stopped worrying about collecting resources to focus on our reactions to problems and opportunities as they present themselves. Computing (calculating payrolls, invoices, or gunnary tables) is less important as it can be obtained on demand, and we’re more concerned with the connections between ourselves and our clients, partners, suppliers and even our competitors. And we’re shifted our focus from collecting ever more data as it becomes increasingly important to ask the questions which enable us to make the right decisions and drive our business forward.
Success today in today’s unstable environment means matching the tactic – process – to the goal we’re trying to achieve and our current environment, with different tactics being using in different circumstances. Rather than support one true way, we need to support multiple ways.
There has been some half steps in the right direction, with the emergence of Adaptive Case Management (ACM) being the most obvious one. A typical case study for ACM might be something like resolving SWIFT payment exceptions. When the ACM process is triggered a knowledge worker creates a case and starts building a context by pulling data in and triggering small workflows or business processes to seek out data and resolve problems. At some stage the context will be complete, the exception resolved, and the final action is triggered. Contrast this with the standard BPM case study, which is typically a compliance story. (It’s no surprise that regulations such as SOX drove a lot of business processes work.) BPM is a task dependency tool, making it very good at specifying the steps in the required process, but unable to cope with exceptions.
So what do we replace the Talyorism’s catch cry with? The following seems to suit, rooted as it is in the challenge of winning in a rapidly changing environment.
Identify the goal and then assemble the perfect team to achieve the goal.
Processes just exist in organisations to deliver results. And I think every process needs it’s own level of flexibility. Some processes might be straight through (Taylor) other processes might be more “do whatever you think is neccessary to help your customer” .
And that makes that process management is not simply applying tools or methodologies. Every process needs it’s own way of steering. And that might be more or less strict, with or without automation. It depends…and that is hard to sell out of a box
Good post. I think you are spot on regarding Scientific Management, Automation and BPM.
Practically speaking though, I think there needs to be a middle-ground. While BPM is rigid and procedural, I’m not sure ad hoc case management is a solution, it just seems like the pendulum swinging too far the other way. We can’t wave a wand and assume all enterprise controls go away.
People do need to be empowered with more discretion and flexibility in achieving goals; we need to promote problem solving and innovation on the fringes of the enterprise where interactions happen, but we can’t forget legitimate compliance concerns (regulatory, legal, safety, etc.), nor forget that businesses should capture experiences from lessons learned to inform subsequent activities.
We have to get rid of gratuitous, standardized, non-responsive processes and replace them with dynamic and adaptive processes that can contextualize interactions and respond with just the right data, capabilities, and policies to promote informed decision making.
The comments above have touched upon the “predictive” versus “dynamic” aspect. They talk about “flexible” process, but always one single process to flex from. I would like to stress something very important in this post that I have not seen discussed very often.
Taylor teaches not only that the process should be strictly defined, but that there is one single “right” approach. Reality is that there are a plurality of possible approaches, none of which are completely right or clearly wrong. By focusing on trying to find a single best process, we often compromise to produce something that really does not fit any situation very well. We can compensate by giving “flexibility” to the user but maybe that is missing the whole point.
We should be thinking about collections of processes which overlap, but offer advantages and disadvantages relative to each other. And then, of course, it will be common for some processes to work well with some workers in some locales, and others to work better with other workers, or other locales.
“Why would we stay locked in our belief that there is one right way to do something, or one correct interpretation to a situation, when the universe demands diversity and thrives on a plurality of meaning?” – Margaret Wheatley
-Keith Swenson
http://social-biz.org/2011/05/11/its-all-newtons-fault/
And to continue with the last post; I think flexibility is always found in execution, not in design.
There is always a process to create a result, but is it neccessary to manage and control this? Maybe it is better to just start to execute with a result and a goal attached to it:
“I want this product in 10 days and it may not cost more then 100 dollars”.
You could start thinking a few days about how the process must be. Why not start and write everything down that helped and didn’t help to create the product within its goals.
You’ll create a best practice out of execution! In this way you will build up a mass load of knowledge about how to create your products. Sounds like a process..
Thanks for the comments!
The challenge here is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. While the time of the one true process might have passed, this should not imply that we simply throw up our hands and allow unstructured chaos. We need to collect simpler and more composible processes which we can string together via something like ACM or business policies/rules (aka, Jim Sinur’s rules+process), where the granularity of the processes determines the balance between control and freedom, and the provision of alternative processes to achieve the same goal to allow the right approach to be used in the each business context. I like to think of this as developing the enterprise playbook, and it’s a journey that we’ve only just started.
Great post! Clearly puts the current shift from top down BPM towards dynamic and adaptive case management into perspective.
My hypothesis is that this shift is also caused by democratization of data. Where previously only managers had all the information. Those managers had to translate goals into tasks and delegate. Workers then had little context and just had to perform their tasks. Nowedays, average workers have easy access to a lot more information. As workers become more knowledgable, allowing them to perform better judgements.
I agree with your conclusion that support for ad hoc case management is a much more common need then the need to automate top down delegation of simple tasks.
I’ve assembled more of my thoughts related to this post in Recycling BPM
Very, very good post that echoes many of the ideas bouncing around in my head. As I see daily in my work, there is rarely one way unless there are compliance implications or a workforce that can’t be trusted to be creative. Contrast that with there being ANY NUMBER of ways of doing work and you have the two poles of the problem. Structure must sit side-by-side with lack of structure as a business necessity, and getting the mix right is the critical challenge. Software alone doesn’t do this as the human brain remains much more complex than the computational powers of a computer. I feel a post coming on…