A theme of my postings this Autumn has been how to work more efficiently - in particular, how to collaborate more efficiently. For example, I described last month how the business world is waking up to the problems caused by email (see Inbox Zero). However, it is not really fair to blame email per se - for two reasons.

First, the problem is wider than messaging. People may finally be realising the business problems caused by email-related issues such as:

• Groaning inboxes
• Failure to group messages naturally by content
• Discussions that fizzle out
• Discussions that fragment among different colleagues
• Discussions that lose their purpose entirely
• ...

However, even these issues are only part of a general problem: the inability to structure high value human work. Other symptoms that are only indirectly related to email (or messaging generally) include:

• Documents scattered all over your file system
• No way of returning to a previous version of a document
• No way of knowing what version of a document your colleagues are using
• Actions that cannot be tracked
• Actions for which you are not sure if anyone has even taken responsibility
• Doing work without knowing what value anyone is getting from it
• ...

The general problem is that people doing high value work may have a great deal of skill and experience; they may be able to get on well with their colleagues; they may be motivated and committed. But this is not enough. Without an understanding of how to work, all these inputs are often put to less than optimal use. This is a polite way of describing things - many people routinely feel as if they are banging their head against a brick wall when trying to get things done in an organizational context.

This brings us to the second reason why it is not fair to blame email per se: the problem is not fundamentally one of technology. The root of the problem is that people go about their business, and their employer's business, without having any useful way of structuring their activities. The means currently on offer are either not supportive enough (for example, time management techniques and calendar software) or too restrictive (workflow and BPM, even in its current evolution towards integration with office systems). None of these offer a robust framework in which the individual can understand who they are working with, on what, when things must be done, and why it is all happening in the first place. Since all these things change every day, it is all the more vital to provide the individual with a way of seeing the wood for the trees.

This way of seeing is not a set of diary appointments or task sequences - it is a network of goals, responsibilities and commitments. For more information, see the Human Interaction Management Web site.

TAKE AWAY

The desktop of the 21st century will not contain menu items and icons pointing to programs that you have installed - rather, it will contain active collaborations that you are engaged in. You will not explore files in folders - you will explore documents that represent your involvement in a process. You will not keep one list of contacts in Outlook and another in Skype - you will just have a list of colleagues, identified by name rather than messaging address.

The workflow and BPM community is unlikely to make this happen, since it represents a seismic shift in approach:

• Away from monolithic server-side applications and towards lightweight peer-to-peer computing
• Away from task sequences and towards human interactions
• Away from the IT department and towards the business person.

The desktops of the future are as likely to come from the games community as the enterprise integration world!

In the meantime, the reference implementation for the desktop of the 21st century is the free HumanEdj software. If you would like a sneak peek at the future, the new version is just out in beta.

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

We all try to keep at least 2 balls in the air: to satisfy workplace responsibilities while keeping our personal career on track. With this in mind, it is interesting what the Canadian government report "Making Career Sense of Labour Market Information" has to say about the impact of technology on the workplace:

"While globalization and other trends ... have a huge impact on workers and the labour market, the changes are small compared to the radical changes brought about by the incremental innovations in technology. Job forecasters believe those who can figure out how the revolution in technology affects hiring practices in their field will be in a position to take advantage of many opportunities."

Is grasp of technology really the key factor when it comes to personal success? I feel this may be only part of the true situation.

In 1995, the management thinker Charles Handy coined an interesting term in his book "Beyond Certainty" (of which you can find a summary here). Handy described the worker of the future as a "portfolio person". A portfolio person does not have a job, as such. Rather, they have various skills, gained through experience, for which they seek customers on an independent basis. Their customers may come from one or many organizations.

Handy sees the key personal abilities needed to survive such a lifestyle as being self-learning and self-management. One might think risk-tolerance would also be vital for a portfolio person. However, these days there is so little job security in any organization that in some ways you can have a more secure and stable working life as a portfolio person, who has a well-stocked CV and knows how to use it.

For many years I have seen myself as a portfolio person (you can find my career history here). Yet now, when I look back, I feel the description to be misleading.

Yes, the various different things I have done, particular over the last decade, have contributed to my personal skill base. And while I do have a job (as CTO of Role Modellers, "The Human Interaction Management Company", responsible for the free HumanEdj collaboration software) I also engage in a fairly diverse set of other work activities. These include, for example:

• Writing books, articles, and so on
• Speaking on various topics, not all of which are related to HumanEdj
• Academic research
• Peer review
• Teaching
• Consultancy
• Mentoring
• Joint ventures
• Writing music
• Performing, conducting and recording music

You would think that this range of activity makes me an archetypal portfolio person. Yet the description doesn't feel right. I did not get involved in most of the things I have done - lets call them all projects, for want of a better classifier - because of my skill set. Rather, it was usually because these projects intersected in some way with things I had already done. Often, some of the people had also been involved in previous projects - if not, there was usually some other, less direct, connection such as having the same corporate sponsor.

With this in mind, it is easy to see that my portfolio of skills is not what determines my future activities. There are lots of people who do a number of the same activities as me. However, the network of connections I have established over the years is more unique. The connections are not just with people and organizations. Some connections are with fields - for instance, someone interested generally in the field of project management might end up knocking on my door because they make a connection between agile project management and Human Interaction Management, and a Google search for the combined terms turns up my personal Web page.

Lets follow this train of thought a bit further. Returning to Handy, he proposed that the organization of the future would be a "corporate community", an "existential corporation" that employed some of its staff and engaged with others as necessary on a short-term basis. This is now common practice in large organizations, that has become institutionalized in recent years with the rise of offshore outsourcing. However, while this works fine in the short-term, there are medium- and long-term problems with offshore outsourcing that are now starting to come to light. Vendor lock-in is one - when the only source of expertise in a critical system, or set of administrative practices, has gone outside the organization. Business agility is another problem. Outsourcing is now such a competitive market that vendors routinely make loss-leading bids. Hence it is an unattractive option for the vendor to invest much time and effort in providing innovative enhancements as time goes on - rather, they need to spend as long as possible doing routinized work, in order to make up for the losses they sustained in the first years of the contract.

Hence, I suspect that the next step in organizational structure is for a more complex engagement between organizational service consumers and individual service vendors. In such an engagement, services are supplied via a mediating organization, but this is not a faceless corporation that bodyshops to the client anyone it can find with suitable skills. Rather, the mediating organization is an evolution of Handy's existential corporation, in which the staff may not be full-time employed, but nevertheless have an ongoing relationship that includes long-term obligations on both sides. A typical example of such a modern organization might be the Eclipse Gang, a product development partner that Role Modellers has used for Eclipse plugin development. The Eclipse Gang is a virtual organization:

"The Eclipse Gang are UK-based software developers, all highly skilled and experienced in the Eclipse platform and associated technologies. We work as a virtual team to develop leading-edge products with Eclipse."
[Eclipse Gang]

With such a service supplier, one gains the advantages of outsourcing (economies of scale, no need for training, alleviation of management responsibility, and so on) without sacrificing the personal engagement you get from permanent staff - since the mediating organization provides this engagement for you, and makes it clearly visible.

TAKE AWAY

As we move forwards into a new world of work, there are challenges both for service consumers and for service suppliers.

For organizational service consumers, the offshore outsourcing model is starting to show signs of deep strain. People are now experimenting with "homeshoring", but in the end the problems will remain - that you need commitment on both sides, structured via business processes that implement a mutually supportive relationship. Human Interaction Management can help here, but you cannot remove real-world complexity by any means.

For individual service suppliers, it is not enough to keep up with technology changes. Although this in itself is hard work, more is necessary - in particular, to ensure that you have a stable personal web of connections. These connections are more than names in a LinkedIn directory - they are ongoing working relationships, into which both sides must invest time and effort if they are to stay useful.

It is not simple to maintain the relationships described above. Hence, as time goes on, I expect that more and more "virtual organizations" will spring up in order to make it easier, such as the Eclipse Gang. Such suppliers may well be the future, not only for your organization, but for you personally. If so, technology will change to meet the demands of this new way of working, beyond LinkedIn and Groove to tools such as HumanEdj, which help deal with collaborative business processes that may loosely span organizations, but tightly connect individuals.

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

This blog has often made the point that Business Process Management is - or at least, should be - about more than automation. In fact, automation is probably the last place you should be looking, not the first.

My general claim is that the value to be gained from process management lies not just in automating the "mechanistic" processes tackled by current mainstream BPM tools, since these are but the tip of the iceberg. The most interesting and important work carried out in any organization, the body of the iceberg, consists of "human-driven" processes carried out by people collaborating and innovating. It may be simpler to stick with mechanistic processes, since software vendors on all sides are pushing BPMN and BPEL. However, if you want true ROI from BPM, you will need to adopt new ideas and new tools, ideas and tools that are more suited to interactive knowledge work.

Consider, for instance, the interesting analysis of BPM in logistics by Roger Whitehead. The analysis was originally published a couple of years ago (July 2003) in Roger's "Looking Askance" column on the now-defunct BPMG Web site - it is now available here. Roger looked at how money a corporation could expect to save by implementing BPM software, and his conclusion was: in most cases, not much.

The particular example he chose to illustrate this view was of logistics costs, based on the 2003 report on supply chain performance from the Grocery Manufacturers of America. Logistics, as readers of this blog are no doubt aware, is a classic focus area for BPM, since most enterprises hope to automate it as far as possible in imitation of market leaders such as Dell and Wal-Mart. Here is Roger's summary:

I can see perhaps five areas of [logistics] cost that might be amenable to business process automation. They are:

1. planning, forecasting and scheduling (including inventory management) - 2.5 per cent
2. information processing (including e-commerce) - 1.8 per cent
3. customer service - 2.7 per cent
4. procurement management (or "buying", as we used to call it) - 1.1 per cent
5. plant warehousing - 7.4 per cent.

I have not included distribution centre costs, since these are mainly to do with goods handling. For some reason, this seems not to be an area where people use BPM much, if at all.

Together, the five areas listed above account for 15.5 per cent of the responding companies' total supply chain costs. That equates to just over 1 per cent of their net sales (15.5 per cent of 7.4 per cent). Since none of these companies is running at a loss, this is 1 per cent or less of their cost of sales.

Many of the activities under these five headings will already have been streamlined and computerised. The scope for cost cutting will therefore be less than in a 'green-field' situation. We could possibly reduce their cost by an average of a tenth, if we're lucky. That is roughly 0.1 per cent of these companies' total costs.

This is not going to cut the mustard. Something that might cut less than 0.1 per cent of a company's costs is not going to head anyone's list of favourite cost-reduction programmes. These companies would be looking to claw back elsewhere in redressing the 12 per cent increase in their costs since 2001.

Some companies are, of course, seeing greater cost savings than this from BPM. However, the general point Roger makes is that many enterprise activities "already have been streamlined and computerised", if only via implementing ERP packages during the 1990s. Proponents of SOA and BPM are currently struggling to convince boards that exposing the functions of these packages as Web services, and then hooking the functions up into new combinations via BPEL, is going to make any significant difference to running costs.

But why is the debate all about cost saving? Neither commercial nor government organizations have it as their mission to spend as little money as possible. What they are there to do is add value for customers. It is in adding value that enterprises have the chance to see true ROI from SOA and BPM, not in cutting costs. So the question becomes: are you more likely to add value by streamlining an existing set of routine activities, or by enhancing the way in which people work together, innovating as necessary, in order to delight your customers?

To help answer this question, let's take an example modern enterprise, a widget manufacturer that deals via the Internet both with suppliers and with customers, and ask: From what does their revenue arise?

Does it arise from their widget assembly operations? From the logistics activities that supply parts to these operations, warehouse the finished products, then deliver them to customers? From the transaction handling of payables and receivables? From the management of after-sales tasks such as returns management and servicing?

In fact, none of these contribute to revenue - they are all costs. For this reason, many organizations are now outsourcing all of the above in order to gain economies of scale. The revenue of the business derives from quite different sources; namely the collaborative, innovative human work required to conceive and design products, investigate markets, open up channels, make deals, resource activities, finance the enterprise, structure the organization, and manage all of this on an ongoing basis.

TAKE AWAY

All this can be summarized by saying that mechanistic processes are about increasing efficiency, while human-driven processes are about adding value. If your organization is commercial, your mechanistic processes are about saving money, while your human-driven processes are about making money.

So where should you be looking, if you want to get ROI from BPM or SOA? At mechanistic processes, with the hope of shaving a small percentage from your running costs? Or at human-driven processes, with the intention of achieving a transformation in the value you offer customers?

If it's the latter, then be careful. On every side, incumbent workflow and BPM vendors are offering re-badged versions of legacy products that claim to handle human-driven work, typically via a superficial integration with office software such as Word and Excel. There are also a few startups throwing hats into the ring, with claims that they can transform your working life by applying a BPMN template to lists of meeting actions. But treating human-driven processes as mechanistic will only damage them, not improve them. People actively dislike and resent being treated as cogs in a machine! Try to make your high-value staff into slaves of a new form of task list, however cleverly packaged, and you will get nothing but workarounds and backlash.

It is very tempting for managers to think that they can organize the interactions of knowledge workers in the same way that they organize the interactions of computer systems. However, attempts to do this will end up costing you very dearly. A task sequence, however described, is far too restrictive for high-value human work: there is no scope for everyday occurrences such as returning to previous versions of a document (or set of figures), revisiting a previous activity (or part of it), starting an activity (or part of it) before all the inputs have been received, and so on. Further, there is much more to knowledge work than can be captured in any task sequence: goals, responsibilities, commitments, and all sorts of other information that is fundamental to the success of the work but has no direct relation to tasks. Just to take one example, many human-driven processes require players whose contribution is not strictly functional - think RACI.

Rather than office applications with workflow lipstick, what you need is a new form of process management, that is based not on task lists, but on the true nature of human-driven work. Only in this way will you realise the true potential of business process management - and help your organization become a leader, rather than yet another follower.

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