The Insider's Guide to Business and IT Agility
By Francis Hayden, Consultant, Francis Hayden Ltd. , 11/27/2005
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**Editor’s Note: This is a review of Human Interactions: The Heart and Soul of Business Process Management, MK Press, 2005 (http://www.mkpress.com/hi/).
I have always had a problem with the idea that everything is a process. To tell the truth, I have problems with a lot of fashionable nostrums but this one has been a bugbear for years.
Process enthusiasts have been selling me their line ever since the days of BPR and I always find myself saying, ‘Yes, but…‘. Yes, but it depends what you mean by a process. Yes every business activity should be dedicated to creating value for customers but that doesn’t mean that a business is like a machine. Yes work needs to be organised and managed but that doesn’t mean that every step and every outcome can be pre-programmed. Yes a business has to produce tangible products but that doesn’t mean that thinking, speculating and even dreaming, have no value.
We have machines for doing machine-like work these days; machines can assemble TVs and cars, machines can manipulate huge quantities of information, machines can deliver precisely defined messages in microseconds, and so on. The work that is left for human beings to do is very different in character. After all, somebody has to design the new car and the new production line. Somebody has to evaluate the results of calculations and spot new trends. Somebody has to listen to messages and respond with understanding and insight. So we get human beings to check things, evaluate things, decide things, correct things, solve things, create things. Many of them spend their time thinking, understanding, persuading, communicating and, crucially, discussing and collaborating with other human beings. Much of this activity has very little tangible output and yet we dedicate our brightest and highest paid people to it. It is some of the most valuable work that our businesses do.
But the enthusiasts continue to talk as if businesses and the business processes that constitute them were purely mechanistic. I keep trying to explain that things have changed in the last century - since Frederick Winslow Taylor published his Principles of Scientific Management and Henry Ford implanted the idea of the production line as our ideal of well organised work. We have mechanised and automated a lot of processes and that has been an important achievement but surely we don’t have to use workflow and BPM systems just to make people slaves to the same pre-programmed style of work.
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