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Christmas is coming so it seems appropriate to return to some reflections I made a few weeks ago, on parallels between enterprise technology and church architecture (see Mediaeval middleware and Stress-Oriented Architecture). And it seems I am not the only person making this connection.

Frits Bussemaker, founder and chairman of the Dutch BPM-Forum, wrote to me last week to ask whether I had an answer to a question he posed back in July, via his BP Trends column Gaudi & Gravity. Frits reflects on Gaudi's astonishing architectural masterpiece, La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Anyone who has seen this building cannot fail to be astonished - even today it is like nothing else. Personally I think it very beautiful. Images don't do La Sagrada Familia justice, especially now that construction works aimed at completing the building fill the background with cranes (Gaudi himself never managed to build the entire cathedral), but here is an aerial photo from before works started:

By contrast, George Orwell hated La Sagrada Familia. I have just finished re-reading his "Homage to Catalonia", and was surprised by his description of Barcelona's cathedral as "one of the most hideous buildings in the world". He writes, "I think the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance" (p.214, Penguin edition). Orwell really could be an old grouch sometimes.

Frits discusses how Gaudi "used the law of gravity to model and create this impressive and complex building in the real physical world", and asks:

Is there an equivalent for gravity in our imaginary world of IT, organization, and processes? If there is such an equivalent then we probably would have some very simple principles to shape our complex imaginary world.

Frits posits an answer as follows:

I suspect that the business process is the rope in Gaudi’s model and entities like competitors, shareholders, regulations, and, most important of all, clients will pull an organization into its optimum shape.

I agree with Frits that the "rope" binding together stakeholders in an organization is processes. However, I would add that these processes are not the kind that I call "mechanistic", but rather the kind that I call "human-driven".

Mechanistic processes are like the services of a building (electricity, heating, plumbing, etc). They seem vital, but you can manage without them if you have to. Orders can be taken, invoices created, payments processed and goods delivered by hand if necessary.

In fact it is the human-driven processes (collaborative, adaptive, innovative human work) of an organization that are the infrastructure. Imagine an organization in which no-one was making sales, dealing with customers and suppliers, assigning staff, managing work, signing off payroll, resolving issues, ... - everything would fall apart immediately!

TAKE AWAY

One of my first white papers, back in 2004, reminded people that:

An organization in which people interacted only via scripts loaded into machines could not think, could not respond, could not change and could not possibly provide effective support for its customers.

The trouble is, without Human Interaction Management (HIM), it is not obvious what such interactions consist of.

There is growing recognition that in today’s wired, globalized world, most routine work is being standardized, outsourced and automated. In other words, all that organizations have left to compete on is the interactive knowledge work (what I call “interaction work”) that is left over. HIM provides a means of doing such work more efficiently, and managing it better.

HIM also offers the opportunity to overcome the inherently fickle nature of Internet trading by binding your customers into shared, long-lived, collaborative processes. This is the route towards what Pine and Gilmore (authors of “The Experience Economy”) call the “fifth economic offering”: transformations.

Returning to Christmassy matters, one can make an analogy with modern business and the progress of a pantomime. We are currently approaching what is called the "transformation scene" - a moment when the protagonists get themselves out of trouble by discovering some device that allows them to enter a new and exciting world. The trouble is "Asia, Automation and Abundance". The device is Human Interaction Management. And the new and exciting world is what Information Age herald as follows:

A new generation of people-centric collaborative information management tools is set to produce the first fundamental advances in personal productivity since the arrival of the spreadsheet.

A very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all.

Posted by keithhb in Business Process Management |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

Posted by: Artur Kasprzyk at December 19, 2007 05:11 PM

Posted by: Keith Harrison-Broninski at December 20, 2007 03:51 AM