I promised in a previous post to explain more about the free HumanEdj software that will be available in a month or two. Why should you be interested?

You might not be - if you are one of the few people who use the Web but not email. But if you are like the rest of us, and depend on email for collaboration with colleagues, then you need HumanEdj. Even if you don't yet realize it.

There is an old joke - for some people, email gets in the way of their work. For others, it is their work. As far back as 2003, the BBC claimed that the average length of time per day spent just reading (not responding to) email was 2 hours. In 2005, the average number of emails received per day was 133 (Radicati Group). Going on observations made at the sites of my consultancy clients, I would be very surprised to find that these averages have decreased since then. Many organizations seem to run on email, even more than the telephone - take email away and they would grind to a halt.

This ancient set of protocols (SMTP, POP, IMAP and X.400), intended originally only for communication among researchers working in the same lab, now underpins the modern workplace in the same way as the electronic funds transfer standards ISO 8583 and ISO 7810 now underpin commerce. When you consider that the above figures are averages, it is clear that many people spend most of their working life doing email.

This makes it all the more surprising that email is so fundamentally broken as a workplace tool. To take just one example, everyone knows how hard it is to find old emails. Filtering into folders is incredibly hard work to set up and maintain, and doesn't usually apply to sent emails anyway. Simple searching of unfiltered emails is not much better, since both techniques are based on searching for keywords in some part of the email - sender name, subject contents, date, etc. Yet keywords are no true guide to the context of the message. Two messages may have the same sender and date, and even contain some of the same words in the subject line, yet concern quite different matters - 2 unrelated shipments from the same supplier, for example.

At the most primitive level, people need a better way of grouping emails - into work processes - and to have this grouping done automatically. People would like attachments to be associated with these processes, rather than scattered all over their filesystem. Different versions of these attachments should be related to one another, and proper version control provided. People also need to see higher-level information such as which messages are still awaiting reply, and which documents are awaiting perusal, both by them and by their colleagues.

Going further than just messaging, a key use of email is to agree on actions with colleagues - so this should also be made clear. Proposals for next steps (effectively, work process descriptions) should be clearly identified, along with information such as which proposals have been accepted and by whom. It should be possible to send progress reports and associate them with such process descriptions. Going further, why not provide an interface to the activities themselves from the messaging system, if that is where the activities were defined?

Related to action management is a common problem in the enterprise workplace - what I call the "global CC nightmare". Someone has an issue that they cannot personally resolve, but they are not sure who is the right person to pass it on to. So they CC a mixed bunch of people, hoping that someone will pick up the baton, and in doing so safeguard themselves against a later accusation of inaction. In effect they clear their own desk, at the expense of creating an unholy mess in which responsibility for the issue is totally lost. It is quite likely that either nothing will get done, or competing efforts to deal with the issue will derail each other. To alleviate this, it is necessary to add "opt-in" and "opt-out" functionality to messaging, so that people can declare their (un)willingness to take part in something to the others potentially involved.

Finally, there is the whole quagmire of Business Intelligence. What sorts of information can be gathered from messaging? It should be clear even from the above brief discussion that a huge amount of highly valuable information about staff activities is currently hidden from a manager's view.

TAKE AWAY

If you want efficiency in the 21st century workplace, email is the place to look. Although many office workers spend a large part of their working day using email, it is neither an efficient tool nor a useful source of management information.

Fortunately, new software tools are emerging. Underpinned by the principles and patterns of Human Interaction Management, the new version of HumanEdj brings to fruition ideas developed in response to a global need for better collaboration. HumanEdj sits on top of your current email system(s), integrating seamlessly with them to provide the higher-level features that make it possible to work better. Further, it is a simple client program, requiring in most cases zero configuration - download and install it, then it will automatically work out your name, connect to your email client, load your address book, and so on.

Despite this, previous versions of HumanEdj have presented a rather forbidding interface to the novice, requiring people to learn and use new terminology. However, the new HumanEdj 3 provides a radically revised and simplified user interface, based on feedback from early adopters - you now get the benefits without having to acquire the theory! If you are interested in trying out a pre-release version, see the Web forum for details and feel free to contact me - by email, of course ;-)

HumanEdj 3 is now available for download. A short demo video is also available.

Posted by keithhb in Management | Permalink | Comments (0)

Business Process Management is generally acknowledged - at least by practitioners, if not by software vendors - to be a form of management, not a form of technology. With this in mind, 2 books I read recently are illuminating on what BPM currently stands to achieve.

Peter Drucker used to say that management contained elements of both art and science - he thought of it as a "liberal art". Despite his pivotal status in the development management thinking, this put him rather at odds with the general current of 20th century work in the field, most of which focused on extending Frederick Winslow Taylor's efforts to develop a "Scientific" approach to management. The ideas of Drucker, Senge, Handy and other such systems-oriented thinkers may inspire people, but on balance they have probably had far less impact on the day-to-day operations of business (and certainly less prominence in MBA courses) than figures such as Shewhart and Deming, who developed Taylor's principles into a set of simple practices via which business people could organize their activities. Total Quality Management, Six Sigma and BPM all stem in the end from Deming's Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle.

PDCA bears only a peripheral relation to true science. It may employ a variant of the Scientific Method in its iterative approach to developing a useful process, but it can hardly be thought of as seeking to uncover any fundamental truths about the universe! However, let's stick with the analogy with science for a moment.

The first of the 2 books mentioned above is "Progress and the Invisible Hand: The Philosophy and Economics of Human Advance", by Richard Bronk. This work typifies a general trend in 20th century ideas about science. From the First World War onwards, disillusion with the potential of science grew and grew, reaching its apotheosis in Rachel Carson's 1962 polemic against DDT, "Silent Spring", which many people consider to have marked the start of the Green movement in politics. Bronk's book epitomizes this attitude, and is particularly wide-ranging. It's central thesis is that Enlightment thinkers were misguided - scientific control over nature, as expressed via the operation of a free market, has not in fact made us happier, and is unlikely ever to do so.

The second book, by contrast, is an impassioned defence of science. "Science and the Retreat from Reason", by John Gillott and Manjit Kumar, argues that any problems caused by science are simply due to misuse and misinterpretation. Rather than being our undoing, science has the potential to solve most evils, if only it were properly funded and its practitioners properly motivated.

The books are not exactly opposed. Both of them can be taken to make the case for greater and more thoughtful government intervention to support the efforts of scientists. However, there is a piece of the puzzle missing, which is this. Science cannot be used effectively without society being ready and able to do so. In other words, there must be an effective mechanism via which new technology resulting from scientific discovery can be put to use for the general good.

TAKE AWAY

What has all this discussion of science and society to do with BPM?

Let's suppose that management is in fact a quasi-scientific discipline. Then BPM in its current form - and the software used to implement it - can be likened to a brutalizing technology such as DDT. A workplace dominated by BPM is one in which innovation is stifled, collaboration is reduced to depersonalized approval routing, and an individual person's duties consist of carrying out particular steps in a pre-defined and mostly automated sequence. This Kafka-esque vision is all that we can possibly build with methods such as Six Sigma and Lean, and tools such as BPMN and BPEL4People. Just as the side-effects of DDT were to lay waste to ecological diversity for decades, unrestricted use of BPM in its current form has the potential to lay waste to healthy workplaces worldwide.

In fact, this is only scratching the surface of the impact in store for organizations that commit whole-heartedly to current BPM methods and technologies. In future postings to this blog, I will illustrate some disastrous end results that may lie in store for adopter's of today's technology buzzword, SOA, and show how SOA has a good chance of completely destroying your IT infrastructure.

This is not the fault of BPM and SOA itself, which are simply technologies - ones that, used appropriately, have every chance of delivering all their promised ROI. However, like science in general, they cannot be positive forces unless applied within an organizational "society" that permits innovation to thrive, collaboration to take place naturally, and individuals to work in a healthy way. What we need is not more systems thinking, but a simple, practical, step-by-step way for people to work together better, both within and across organizational boundaries.

Does any of this strike a chord with you? If so, stay tuned to this blog over the Autumn to find out why SOA is so potentially dangerous, and how the techniques of Human Interaction Management can be used to avoid meltdown.

Posted by keithhb in Management | Permalink | Comments (2)

First, I apologize to regular readers of this blog who have been wondering what has happened to it recently. It has been a busy Summer! In particular, development of the next version of HumanEdj has taken up much of my thoughts.

I will be writing more about this (free) software in coming months - the problem that HumanEdj solves, namely how to collaborate more efficiently, appears to be pretty much ubiquitous in the working world. Things have certainly changed from when I first started publishing on the subject of Human Interaction Management, in late 2004! Back then, the claim that we needed a new form of process management for human-driven processes was treated with a mixture of incomprehension, disbelief and (to my surprise) even anger, from people who had spent a long time getting to grips with BPM as it was and mostly still is. Now everyone from Bill Gates to the BBC is talking about how the modern workplace is in crisis.

I hear this everywhere I go now, whether it is on consultancy assignments or chatting to people socially. The key symptom is poor use of email - a groaning inbox, being unable to get results from sending messages, misunderstandings between colleagues, and much more. A colleague recently pointed me at the interesting GoogleTech video Inbox Zero - if you don't have time or patience for the entire hour's talk, a summary is also available.

The talk is interesting not so much for its content, which as the presenter states up front is hardly rocket science, but for the number of hits - 147287, last time I looked! The fact that such a conventional chat about email handling is receiving this level of attention indicates how many people are struggling to make use of this most basic workplace tool, and how serious a problem it is. The Inbox Zero video is part of a sudden flood of talk on the topic, such as this article from the Wall Street Journal.

However, most of these writings simply scratch the surface of the real issues. As the summary of Inbox Zero referred to above points out:

Email is a medium. It’s not where the action is. I have a question here though: I agree with the fact that the action is not in email. But could we put the action there? If email is the core tool of a knowledge worker, shouldn't more tools integrate with email? E.g. why can't I just write a document in my email? Or the other way around: why can't I just write a document in Word and decide that I want to send the content as an email? (Note: I don't mean attaching the document to an email!)

Indeed. Further, there are deep underlying problems not addressed by any of these writers. Just to give one example, most people now routinely confuse asynchronous and synchronous communication - in particular they tend to use email where telephone is more appropriate. Hence emails acquire false urgency. There are many more examples, relating to deeper interpersonal issues such as responsibility, authority, confidentiality and competency.

The next version of HumanEdj, due for release later this year, tackles these issues head on. With zero configuration (if you use Outlook - otherwise you need to tell it where your email lives) it will categorise all your email for you, outgoing as well as ingoing, including both body text and document attachments. You'll then be able to see at a glance who you are currently dealing with, what the dealings are about, who you are waiting on, who is waiting on you, and much more - in particular, why all this is the way it is.

These features, however, are just the icing on the cake - you get them "for free", before you even start thinking about structuring your work in process terms, which is the real power of the software. However, it is the Human Interaction Management underpinning that makes the approach possible.

TAKE AWAY

Can you see the writing on the wall? It is a clear warning - if you don't act in the very near future to solve the human collaboration problems of your business, you won't have a business for much longer.

In the next postings to this blog, I will say more about these problems, and how they are addressed by the principles and patterns of Human Interaction Management. I also hope to include some sneak previews of the free HumanEdj software that provides full support for the ideas.

If you would like to be part of the "new world of work", rather than left behind by it, stay tuned.

Posted by keithhb in Management | Permalink | Comments (2)