There is so much excitement at the moment over applications delivered via a Web browser - wikis, blogs, shared documents/workspaces, portals, Web-based messaging, and so on - that no-one seems to be asking how much any of this actually contributes to the quality of workplace software.

It's all very new, which is an attraction in itself.  And it appears easy to start using such applications, since their user interfaces are often simple.  But is this type of software application actually any better than we had before?

In fact, it's usually much worse.  We've got used to complaining about having too much functionality in applications such as Microsoft Office, so at the moment the Web 2.0 stuff is benefiting from a rebound effect - it's simplicity is tempting. But here are some reasons why such software is a poor substitute for old-fashioned desktop software:

• It is not sensible to try and provide the same level of user interface functionality in a browser application that you can in a desktop application.  Browser programming technology is too lightweight to support truly sophisticated client applications - Javascript, to take one example, is a simple interpreted scripting language that was never intended to be as robust or powerful as the Java language it mimicked.  Any attempt to provide enterprise-class user interfaces solely via such browser technologies will ultimately founder, due not only to problems of download time for huge applications, but also because it is building a house on sand.  Using Web 2.0 means accepting a simplistic user interface.
   
• Most organizations are drowning in complex middleware systems, each of which carries a very high total cost of ownership. No-one wants more such systems. Desktop applications tends to be lightweight - the barrier to adoption is low, whether for one person or for the entire organization, since there is no need to involve the IT department at all. Web 2.0 applications, however, are the opposite - to the user, it seems simple to get started, but most commercial companies do not want their wikis or documents hosted on Google. They want them on their own servers, accessed by server-side software that they have installed, which means engaging with the IT department to start yet another long and involved software adoption cycle.
  
  
• Browser applications intended to support collaboration, as many do, depend on all concerned having access to the same servers.  But collaborative human work processes typically involve people from more than one organization.  Hence all participants may not have access to the same servers, or to the necessary resources on those servers - and even if this could be provided, there are many situations in which no one organization has the right to "own the process".  Hence it is necessary for all concerned to work in peer-to-peer fashion, rather than via a centralized server bottleneck.
   
• Systems intended for use by all kinds of people in all kinds of situation must be very easy to use, doing most of the work for you invisibly - especially back-end integration such as data sharing between applications.  This is not at all true of "Web 2.0" applications - they all present a different user interface, all run on different servers, and do not interoperate in any consistent fashion.  However much office workers may complain about Microsoft Office, they have come to expect a single user interface, which intelligently manages data integration complexity on their behalf.
   
• Any Web-based application is available only when you are connected to the Internet.  But in many working situations no such connection is available - when you are in transit, for example.  A well-designed desktop application, however, can be used at any time, even on any device.  Put the program and your data files on a USB stick, for instance, and you can work wherever you are, using any computer to which you happen to have handy, whether or not an Internet connection is available.

The most successful new desktop software applications of recent years - Groove, Skype, Firefox, and Thunderbird, for example - have not been browser based.  And if they were built today, using currently popular AJAX technologies, they wouldn't work as well as they do - they wouldn't be as fast, as stable, as well-featured, or as easy to use.

So when you are next considering adoption of an end-user workplace application - or building one - ask yourself this question:

Will a browser platform provide the level of functionality that, over the 20 years since the emergence of windowed operating systems, people have come to expect?

And don't be surprised if the answer is a resounding No.

Posted by keithhb in Internet • Office Applications | Permalink | Comments (0)

The well-established law of business known as Pareto's rule tells us that 20% of the work gives rise to 80% of the costs.  Typically this part of the work is the part least susceptible to automation.  In other words, your bit.  What happens when your company realizes that most of its costs are on salaries such as yours?

But no, you may say - people such as myself are the life-blood of the organization.  My employer would not be so foolish as to dispense with the valuable work carried out by highly-skilled individuals such as myself.

It would be nice to think so.  However, despite the BPR fiasco of the 1990s when exactly this kind of thing did happen on a large scale, the current trend towards outsourcing of everything possible is leading to what will probably be an equally disastrous re-run.  Perhaps you will be one of the lucky ones who gets to come back on an inflated consultant's rate when the dust has settled!  Perhaps you won't.  But it would make a lot more sense for everyone concerned to deal with things more thoughtfully this time round.

The underlying problem here is actually very simple.  People even at a senior level in organizations have a poor understanding of what it is that their staff actually do.  They form a simplistic concept of what their staff are up to, and then think: if this is all there is to it, why not get someone on the other side of the world to do it cheaper?

The perspective underpinning such decisions is that work can be defined as a series of tasks.  This task-oriented outlook arises from traditional management tools such as work breakdown structures in project planning, and is supported by mainstream technologies such as workflow and BPM.  In such approaches:

1. Work is divided up into tasks
2. These task units are assumed to capture what is done.

This is fair enough when the work consists of assembling cars on a production line, or matching bank statements to receivables.  However, the approach breaks down completely when it comes to what I call human-driven work - the sort of collaborative, adaptive, knowledge-based work that you and your colleagues do.

Treating work as task-oriented is equivalent to viewing it from the outside - as a detached observer, individual tasks are all that you see.  However, this is completely inadequate for human-driven work, which must be understood from the inside.  Your own work is not about tasks at all.  It is about things such as information, interaction and innovation - much of which is almost invisible to an observer.  Only by understanding work from the inside can you make valid judgements about it - such as how genuinely to do it better.

TAKE AWAY

How far down the outsourcing route is your organization already?  Where will it stop?

Even though ignorance of the true value of human-driven work was the direct cause of large-scale losses during the BPR fad of the early 1990s, it is all happening again.  In fact, those most concerned about it are the outsourcing companies themselves - the suppliers, not the customers.  They may be making a packet at the moment, but know there is huge trouble ahead when their clients start to realize what they have let themselves in for.

So, in an effort to stave off the coming backlash, the outsourcers are actually in the vanguard of efforts to better understand human work.  Many of them are already looking to the techniques of Human Interaction Management to get a better handle on what highly-skilled people actually do.

However, ultimately it is the responsibility of each organization to get properly to grips with what they want to outsource, and how.  The old notion of "core" processes has been discredited for a long time, with Hewlett-Packard outsourcing printer design, and banks everywhere outsourcing financial transaction handling.  So when will you come to understand what the highly-skilled people in your organization contribute - before or after it makes them (quite possibly including you) redundant?

Posted by keithhb in Business Process Management • Internet • Management | Permalink | Comments (0)

What?  The Chair of the Workflow Management Coalition, and former CTO (and designer) of Staffware, saying workflow sucks?  Yes, it's true.

Jon is not exactly noted for reluctance to rock boats.  But this statement seems particularly challenging.  I'll look more closely at Jon's message, and the content of the white paper he recently published, in a moment.  But first, we need to step back a bit.

Consider my post last week, How to abuse your software investments, in which I asserted that the deluge of new Internet tools known as Web 2.0 is actually a disadvantage to most organizations.  People are spending more and more time using these sexy new programs and devices without having any way of measuring the contribution to business goals made by such use.  As a result, most organizations are wasting more staff time than ever before.  Hardly the spirit of "extreme competition" needed in the new and challenging 21st century business environment!

To take just one example of such time wasting, here is a quote from the BBC, to which Jon himself drew my attention:

It’s not unusual for office workers to spend as much as two hours a day, every day, sorting and reading all the mail which pours into their in-boxes, let alone the time they have to spend responding to it.

How much is this contributing to personal or organizational goals?  I've written about the problems of corporate email before.  But email is just one example of how human work is actually being hijacked by new workplace technology.  Blogs, wikis, mailing lists, forums, intranets, chat, Web search, .... how are you measuring the operational (dis)advantages resulting from use of such tools in the workplace?

Here is a picture of where most organizations are now:

The underlying problem (and here we are getting closer to Jon's message) is that traditional work management tools - such as workflow - are of no help at all here.  You might think of workflow et al as "Work 1.0" and current knowledge-focused, collaboration-intensive, and innovation-driven work practices as "Work 2.0".  Here is a picture of where organizations need to go:

The key element of this picture is the blob in the middle, Human Interaction Management System, or HIMS.  What is an HIMS?  And why do we need one in order to implement what Jon's white paper calls Knowledge-Intensive BPM, or KIBPM - to control fundamentally important business activities such as Project Management and Case Management?

Let's start with the definition of an HIMS.  Here it is, from "Human Interactions: The Heart and Soul of Business Process Management" (2005), the seminal source book on Human Interaction Management (HIM):

A process modeling and enactment system that provides native support for the six Role Activity Theory object types (Role, Entity, Activity, User, State and Interaction), uses a state-based approach to Activity enablement and validation, permits Interactions to be composed of multiple asynchronous channels, and supports management of process change by allowing any process component to be created and configured as a natural part of process execution—not just objects of the six fundamental types, but also the user interfaces by which they are presented (screens, for example) and the means by which they interact with other systems (Web service calls, for example).

This is a complex definition, of course - almost what you would expect to see in a software specification document.  This is deliberate and necessary.  A HIMS must be a very specific sort of beast, in order to support the 5 basic principles of HIM:

1. Connection visibility - to work with people, you need to know who they are, what they can do, and what their responsibilities are as opposed to yours.
   You need Role and User objects, both instances and types, each with its own properties and responsibilities.
   
2. Structured messaging - if people are to manage their interactions with others better, their communications must be structured and goal-directed.
   You need Interaction objects in which there are multiple asynchronous channels, each for a different purpose.
   
3. Support for mental work - organizations must learn to manage the time and mental effort their staff invest in researching, comparing, considering, deciding, and generally turning information into knowledge and ideas.
   You need Entity objects that can be created, versioned and shared within a process.
   
4. Supportive rather than prescriptive activity management - humans do not sequence their activities in the manner of a procedural computer program.  There is always structure to human work, sometimes less and sometime more, but it is not the same kind of structure that you get in a flowchart.
   You need State objects that can both enable and validate Activity objects, along with the Roles that contain them.
   
5. Processes change processes - human activities are concerned often with solving problems, or making something happen. Such activities routinely start in the same fashion - by establishing a way of proceeding. Before you can design your new widget, or develop your marketing plan, you need to work out how you are going to do so - which methodology to use, which tools are required, which people should be consulted, and so on. In other words, process definition is an intrinsic part of the process itself.  Further, this is not a one-time thing - it happens continually throughout the life of the process.
   You must be able to manipulate not only objects but also user interfaces and integration mechanisms via the process that contains them.

How could a conventional "task allocation and notification" system possibly provide all these vital features?  Just to take one example, I have never seen a workflow/BPM system in which it is practical for users to try and make significant change to a process from within the process itself.  This is why Jon Pyke says, of course with tongue in cheek, that workflow sucks.  We need a new form of software tool, in order to support the business practices that are at the heart of organizational efficiency in the 21st century.

TAKE AWAY

 If you want to compete in the 21st century, you need to leverage your human resources efficiently.  If you want to leverage your human resources efficiently, you need an HIMS - not a workflow/BPM system rebadged as an HIMS.

So ask any software vendor trying to sell you a "Human Interaction Management System" how their offering conforms to the definition above.

Don't let them sell you a pig in a poke.

Posted by keithhb in Business Process Management • Internet • Knowledge Management • Management • Office Applications | Permalink | Comments (3)

Here are some typical programs that someone reading this blog might use during a regular working day, in no particular order:

• Email client, perhaps as part of a Groupware solution such as Notes, possibly pushed to a device such as a Blackberry
• Web browser, particularly for search
• Intranet portal offering a Business Intelligence dashboard
• Reports from a decision support system
• Workflow/BPM task manager for notifications and work allocation
• Back-end ERP system for data on finance, logistics, inventory, etc
• Operational front-end system for various forms of data entry and maintenance
• Document/content management system
• Spreadsheet
• Word processor
• Presentation designer
• Drawing tool
• Project planner
• Voice-over-IP (e.g., Skype)
• Shared document access (e.g., Writely)
• Sector-specific databases - of drugs in healthcare, license numbers in law enforcement, and so on
• Sector-specific tools - graphics editors in design, CAD/CAM tools in engineering, and so on
• etc etc etc

I could go on.  These days, many people would add peripheral tools such as blog editors to the list, for example.  But perhaps you take my point!  It's a long list, isn't it.

Peter Drucker wrote, as far back as 1966 (in "The Effective Executive"):

The effective person focuses on contribution.  He [sic] looks up from his work and outward towards goals.

The great majority of people tend to focus downwards.  They are occupied with efforts rather than with results.

In other words, effectiveness is not about tasks.  It is about time.  Decide at the start of each day what are the most important things you need to achieve, then allocate your time accordingly.

Do you do this?  Most people would like to, but in fact are simply drowning in a sea of software.  They spend much of their time using programs of various forms, without ever stopping to ask a simple question:

How much does use of this software, at this moment, contribute either to my personal goals or to the aims of my organization?

TAKE AWAY

We are in the midst of a massive change in human working behaviour.  Some people, and some organizations, may be capitalizing on it, but many more are not.  The world is polarizing into the "very smart", who understand how to leverage the change - and the rest of us, who are just struggling to keep heads above water.

So, do you want - and does your organization want - to be "very smart"?  If so, you need to tackle grass roots issues head-on.  In particular, you first need to find out what are your staff are actually doing each day.  Most organizations have no way of knowing this, let alone any way of measuring its effectiveness.

I will be talking more about this issue in future blog entries.  For now, you might like to refer to this article - What is going on in your Organization?

Posted by keithhb in Business Process Management • Internet • Management • Office Applications | Permalink | Comments (0)