In recent posts I've discussed how social BPM is appropriate more for routine clerical work than for the dynamic, complex processes of knowledge work (which are the domain of the Human Interaction Management System, or HIMS).
In this post I will illustrate the discussion by comparing the use of a leading social BPM product (IBM Blueworks Live) with the use of a leading HIMS (HumanEdj) for a typical real-world knowledge work process.
BLUEWORKS LIVE = FLOWCHARTS + CHAT
Like other social BPM tools, Blueworks Live is based on what Forrester in 2007 called "human-centric BPM" (i.e., flowchart-based workflow for data entry and low-level decision making). The extras in Blueworks Live that make it "social BPM" (as defined by Forrester in 2009) are the ability to create/change flowcharts without technical expertise and a chat widget for immediate discussion with colleagues:
1. Flowchart creation
"Capturing a process is as simple as typing out a bulleted list of activities. As you type, Blueworks Live generates a set of activity boxes which can then be re-arranged, stacked and grouped through simple drag and drop. Double click on each activity box and add documentation details or attach files on the pop-up form. When you're satisfied with your map, select "Process Diagram" from the tool bar and a flow diagram in BPMN 2.0 notation is automatically generated for you. "
2. Flowchart customization
"Every organization has countless tasks that require approvals or input from multiple people - coordinating these simple tasks can get lost through various email chains. Now you'll be able to configure a repeatable Process App in 90 seconds to help you execute your simple processes, it's as easy as inputting data into a simple form. This ad-hoc approach gives everyone the ability to customize the Process App for each instance that it is run. The Work tab will list for you all the tasks that have been assigned to you as well as all the work that you have created or decided to follow."
3. Chat
"Chat is also integrated for real-time collaboration."
[https://www.blueworkslive.com/#!gettingStarted:overview]
I'll take it as read that the functionality described above applies well to low-level, routine clerical work. To measure Blueworks Live against a dynamic, complex knowledge work process, I will use a common example: marketing a new product or service.
There are some standard Blueworks Live templates for marketing: "Understand markets, customers, and capabilities", "Develop marketing strategy", and "Develop and manage marketing plans". For an example screenshot (the latter of these), see http://bit.ly/blueworks-marketing. All 3 templates are based on the "Cross Industry Process Classification Framework" provided by APQC.
I'll analyse these templates, and Blueworks Live generally, using the 5 principles of Human Interaction Management (HIM) discussed in my last post: team building, structured communication, knowledge management, time management and dynamic replanning.
MARKETING WITH BLUEWORKS LIVE
1. Build effective teams
To understand what "effective" means here, we need to define the goals of a marketing process. This is not simply "to sell the product (or service)" - rather, there are multiple overlapping goals. The product manager needs to understand the feature set on which to focus. Other product managers are seeking to cross-sell their own products and/or services. The sales manager is seeking to maximize turnover. The finance manager is seeking to maximize profit and minimize capital investment. Regional managers each seek to develop presence in their own geographical area. The manufacturing manager is seeking to develop need for items of a type that fit the resources they have available. Senior managers must ensure that new product development is aligned with corporate strategy and image. The marketing agency must take all this into account while creating a promotional and branding package that is proven to appeal to the target market.
With Blueworks Live, each goal of the overall process relates to a variety of steps split across all 3 templates. These steps may be assigned to the same or different individuals, and are carried out as part of a sequence within each process instance. It is hard to see how this will lead to effective teamwork that maintains alignment with enterprise strategy.
With HumanEdj, you begin defining such a process by adding each of these parties as a separate Role, with its own responsibilities. Then you divide the goals up among Stages of the process, adding to each Stage those Roles whose concerns relate to its goals. Some work may be devolved to sub-processes visible from the higher-level process. In this way, the complex interdependency and concurrency among the work required to meet the various process goals are simplified and made manageable.
2. Communicate in a structured way
In order to ensure that the marketing process meets all its different goals, the parties mentioned above need to discuss and negotiate the various aspects of the work, on an ongoing basis. For each aspect of the work, some people will wish to be directly involved, while others will wish only to be Consulted or Informed.
With Blueworks Live, the only means for the parties to discuss and negotiate the work is for the person doing the current step to start a chat session with selected other individuals. There is no formal data or document sharing inherent in the process itself, and communications are essentially ad-hoc. There is ample scope here for misunderstanding and poor negotiation between parties interested in a specific area.
With HumanEdj, all the Roles in a Stage are informed about all work done in that Stage, automatically receiving all deliverables and discussion messages. The amount of work that a Role contributes to a Stage can be as much or little as desired - they may produce a key deliverable or simply supply review comments. Communications are inherently structured and purposeful.
3. Create, share and maintain knowledge
The marketing process will produce a great deal of valuable knowledge about the product/service, its context (both inside and external to the organization) and its potential consumers. This knowledge should be marked up automatically, made available for re-use (i.e., shared appropriately), and its lifecycle managed (i.e., kept up-to-date).
With Blueworks Live, "the application acts as a centralized repository for all process documents and attachments". In other words, documents are stored in a database. It is unclear how any knowledge inherent in the documents created by the 3 separate types of marketing process will be exposed, re-used and maintained.
With HumanEdj, all artefacts are marked up automatically simply by virtue of belonging to the process in the first place, and can be created or used in higher-level processes, from where they can be updated and versioned as appropriate. Knowledge management is an integral part of the work itself.
4. Align your time with strategic goals
The people participating in the marketing process will also have other responsibilities, so they need to manage the time they spend on each type of work. In order to assess how best to spend their valuable time during each working day, they need to understand the value of the marketing process as a whole, of each aspect of the process, and of their own contributions to those aspects.
With Blueworks Live, the steps in each process are expected to be carried out in a pre-defined order, although this order may be adjusted on creation of each process instance from a template. In other words, once a process is initiated, any work assigned to you will sit on your task list until you complete it ("The Work tab will list for you all the tasks that have been assigned to you as well as all the work that you have created or decided to follow"). This typically leads to busy people completing work items as quickly as possible and not necessarily with due regard to quality, simply in order to avoid being penalized by management.
With HumanEdj, your To Do page is supported with both lower- and higher-level representations showing the nature and context of each process, Stage and Role. This provides the information you need in order to allocate your working time effectively. The owner of each HIM process continually negotiates with all parties involved to adjust work assignment and scheduling during the life of the process.
5. Negotiate next steps as you work
Knowledge work can only be effective if those involved are able to collaboratively evolve the structure of the work as it proceeds - to discuss and agree next steps repeatedly throughout the work, based on progress so far and the circumstances encountered along the way.
With Blueworks Live, you are either an editor with the power to change a process, or a contributor with the power only to use a process, and access rights control whether you are editor or contributor on a specific process. This is the kind of informal responsibility splitting commonly found with enterprise document management, which often leads to conflicts over control and highly complex traceability.
With HumanEdj, each process has a single owner, who negotiates with the other players to agree changes and then takes responsibility for implementing them. If specific parts of a process are to be controlled by another person, those parts are devolved into a lower-level process owned by the other person. Control is managed according to a simple, universal paradigm that nevertheless flexes to meet every possible need.
TAKE AWAY
My purpose here is not in any way to criticise Blueworks Live, which is a well-designed, modern tool for creating and executing flowcharts in a Web browser. My purpose is to point out that the current hype for social BPM is unjustified, which cannot be a good thing either for consumers or vendors. If you try Blueworks Live expecting a solution for high-level knowledge work, you will only come away disappointed.
At conferences I am often approached with tales of woe from people who have to try and use a BPMS to do knowledge work. A typical complaint is that the BPMS was purchased to deflect the impact of accountability regulations, but that its use hinders daily work - so much so that in practice people find themselves working around the BPMS, or bypassing it entirely. People feel excluded and disempowered by the intrusion of the BPMS (a technology for automation) into work that by its very nature operates on entirely different principles.
The current hype around social BPM is the next step in this damaging trend. It would be better if vendors positioned social BPM as a technology for automating routine clerical work such as insurance claims, expenses approval, and complaint handling - i.e., the forms of work described in the Blueworks Live case studies. In other words, social BPM can and should be used for those low-level mechanics of an organization's internal operations that have not already been dealt with via packaged applications for finance or customer relationship management.
Nothing good can come of positioning a BPMS (social or otherwise) as a solution for knowledge work - or indeed, for any work in which internal or external boundaries are crossed. Ever been passed from one department to another, then eventually back to where you started, when calling a large organization with a consumer problem (as I was recently with Vodafone)? Blame your feeling of despair on their adoption of a BPMS for customer service.
If you want to structure and improve high-level and/or cross-boundary human work, then you need to complement your BPMS with a HIMS such as HumanEdj. You may well need both a BPMS and a HIMS, since they are not interchangeable. A BPMS is for routine, low-level clerical duties. A HIMS is for all other human work. Only together does your organization get what it needs to structure and improve all human work processes.
In this post I will illustrate the discussion by comparing the use of a leading social BPM product (IBM Blueworks Live) with the use of a leading HIMS (HumanEdj) for a typical real-world knowledge work process.
BLUEWORKS LIVE = FLOWCHARTS + CHAT
Like other social BPM tools, Blueworks Live is based on what Forrester in 2007 called "human-centric BPM" (i.e., flowchart-based workflow for data entry and low-level decision making). The extras in Blueworks Live that make it "social BPM" (as defined by Forrester in 2009) are the ability to create/change flowcharts without technical expertise and a chat widget for immediate discussion with colleagues:
1. Flowchart creation
"Capturing a process is as simple as typing out a bulleted list of activities. As you type, Blueworks Live generates a set of activity boxes which can then be re-arranged, stacked and grouped through simple drag and drop. Double click on each activity box and add documentation details or attach files on the pop-up form. When you're satisfied with your map, select "Process Diagram" from the tool bar and a flow diagram in BPMN 2.0 notation is automatically generated for you. "
2. Flowchart customization
"Every organization has countless tasks that require approvals or input from multiple people - coordinating these simple tasks can get lost through various email chains. Now you'll be able to configure a repeatable Process App in 90 seconds to help you execute your simple processes, it's as easy as inputting data into a simple form. This ad-hoc approach gives everyone the ability to customize the Process App for each instance that it is run. The Work tab will list for you all the tasks that have been assigned to you as well as all the work that you have created or decided to follow."
3. Chat
"Chat is also integrated for real-time collaboration."
[https://www.blueworkslive.com/#!gettingStarted:overview]
I'll take it as read that the functionality described above applies well to low-level, routine clerical work. To measure Blueworks Live against a dynamic, complex knowledge work process, I will use a common example: marketing a new product or service.
There are some standard Blueworks Live templates for marketing: "Understand markets, customers, and capabilities", "Develop marketing strategy", and "Develop and manage marketing plans". For an example screenshot (the latter of these), see http://bit.ly/blueworks-marketing. All 3 templates are based on the "Cross Industry Process Classification Framework" provided by APQC.
I'll analyse these templates, and Blueworks Live generally, using the 5 principles of Human Interaction Management (HIM) discussed in my last post: team building, structured communication, knowledge management, time management and dynamic replanning.
MARKETING WITH BLUEWORKS LIVE
1. Build effective teams
To understand what "effective" means here, we need to define the goals of a marketing process. This is not simply "to sell the product (or service)" - rather, there are multiple overlapping goals. The product manager needs to understand the feature set on which to focus. Other product managers are seeking to cross-sell their own products and/or services. The sales manager is seeking to maximize turnover. The finance manager is seeking to maximize profit and minimize capital investment. Regional managers each seek to develop presence in their own geographical area. The manufacturing manager is seeking to develop need for items of a type that fit the resources they have available. Senior managers must ensure that new product development is aligned with corporate strategy and image. The marketing agency must take all this into account while creating a promotional and branding package that is proven to appeal to the target market.
With Blueworks Live, each goal of the overall process relates to a variety of steps split across all 3 templates. These steps may be assigned to the same or different individuals, and are carried out as part of a sequence within each process instance. It is hard to see how this will lead to effective teamwork that maintains alignment with enterprise strategy.
With HumanEdj, you begin defining such a process by adding each of these parties as a separate Role, with its own responsibilities. Then you divide the goals up among Stages of the process, adding to each Stage those Roles whose concerns relate to its goals. Some work may be devolved to sub-processes visible from the higher-level process. In this way, the complex interdependency and concurrency among the work required to meet the various process goals are simplified and made manageable.
2. Communicate in a structured way
In order to ensure that the marketing process meets all its different goals, the parties mentioned above need to discuss and negotiate the various aspects of the work, on an ongoing basis. For each aspect of the work, some people will wish to be directly involved, while others will wish only to be Consulted or Informed.
With Blueworks Live, the only means for the parties to discuss and negotiate the work is for the person doing the current step to start a chat session with selected other individuals. There is no formal data or document sharing inherent in the process itself, and communications are essentially ad-hoc. There is ample scope here for misunderstanding and poor negotiation between parties interested in a specific area.
With HumanEdj, all the Roles in a Stage are informed about all work done in that Stage, automatically receiving all deliverables and discussion messages. The amount of work that a Role contributes to a Stage can be as much or little as desired - they may produce a key deliverable or simply supply review comments. Communications are inherently structured and purposeful.
3. Create, share and maintain knowledge
The marketing process will produce a great deal of valuable knowledge about the product/service, its context (both inside and external to the organization) and its potential consumers. This knowledge should be marked up automatically, made available for re-use (i.e., shared appropriately), and its lifecycle managed (i.e., kept up-to-date).
With Blueworks Live, "the application acts as a centralized repository for all process documents and attachments". In other words, documents are stored in a database. It is unclear how any knowledge inherent in the documents created by the 3 separate types of marketing process will be exposed, re-used and maintained.
With HumanEdj, all artefacts are marked up automatically simply by virtue of belonging to the process in the first place, and can be created or used in higher-level processes, from where they can be updated and versioned as appropriate. Knowledge management is an integral part of the work itself.
4. Align your time with strategic goals
The people participating in the marketing process will also have other responsibilities, so they need to manage the time they spend on each type of work. In order to assess how best to spend their valuable time during each working day, they need to understand the value of the marketing process as a whole, of each aspect of the process, and of their own contributions to those aspects.
With Blueworks Live, the steps in each process are expected to be carried out in a pre-defined order, although this order may be adjusted on creation of each process instance from a template. In other words, once a process is initiated, any work assigned to you will sit on your task list until you complete it ("The Work tab will list for you all the tasks that have been assigned to you as well as all the work that you have created or decided to follow"). This typically leads to busy people completing work items as quickly as possible and not necessarily with due regard to quality, simply in order to avoid being penalized by management.
With HumanEdj, your To Do page is supported with both lower- and higher-level representations showing the nature and context of each process, Stage and Role. This provides the information you need in order to allocate your working time effectively. The owner of each HIM process continually negotiates with all parties involved to adjust work assignment and scheduling during the life of the process.
5. Negotiate next steps as you work
Knowledge work can only be effective if those involved are able to collaboratively evolve the structure of the work as it proceeds - to discuss and agree next steps repeatedly throughout the work, based on progress so far and the circumstances encountered along the way.
With Blueworks Live, you are either an editor with the power to change a process, or a contributor with the power only to use a process, and access rights control whether you are editor or contributor on a specific process. This is the kind of informal responsibility splitting commonly found with enterprise document management, which often leads to conflicts over control and highly complex traceability.
With HumanEdj, each process has a single owner, who negotiates with the other players to agree changes and then takes responsibility for implementing them. If specific parts of a process are to be controlled by another person, those parts are devolved into a lower-level process owned by the other person. Control is managed according to a simple, universal paradigm that nevertheless flexes to meet every possible need.
TAKE AWAY
My purpose here is not in any way to criticise Blueworks Live, which is a well-designed, modern tool for creating and executing flowcharts in a Web browser. My purpose is to point out that the current hype for social BPM is unjustified, which cannot be a good thing either for consumers or vendors. If you try Blueworks Live expecting a solution for high-level knowledge work, you will only come away disappointed.
At conferences I am often approached with tales of woe from people who have to try and use a BPMS to do knowledge work. A typical complaint is that the BPMS was purchased to deflect the impact of accountability regulations, but that its use hinders daily work - so much so that in practice people find themselves working around the BPMS, or bypassing it entirely. People feel excluded and disempowered by the intrusion of the BPMS (a technology for automation) into work that by its very nature operates on entirely different principles.
The current hype around social BPM is the next step in this damaging trend. It would be better if vendors positioned social BPM as a technology for automating routine clerical work such as insurance claims, expenses approval, and complaint handling - i.e., the forms of work described in the Blueworks Live case studies. In other words, social BPM can and should be used for those low-level mechanics of an organization's internal operations that have not already been dealt with via packaged applications for finance or customer relationship management.
Nothing good can come of positioning a BPMS (social or otherwise) as a solution for knowledge work - or indeed, for any work in which internal or external boundaries are crossed. Ever been passed from one department to another, then eventually back to where you started, when calling a large organization with a consumer problem (as I was recently with Vodafone)? Blame your feeling of despair on their adoption of a BPMS for customer service.
If you want to structure and improve high-level and/or cross-boundary human work, then you need to complement your BPMS with a HIMS such as HumanEdj. You may well need both a BPMS and a HIMS, since they are not interchangeable. A BPMS is for routine, low-level clerical duties. A HIMS is for all other human work. Only together does your organization get what it needs to structure and improve all human work processes.
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