The Insider's Guide to Next-Generation BPM
By John Hamilton, Senior Architect, Process Infrastructure, Computer Sciences Corporation , 03/29/2004
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The wisest guy I ever met in information technology was in charge of implementing one of the very first online database systems here in the UK. This was in the days before anyone used SQL which was, as we all knew, a wholly abstract concept, incapable of practical use. This guy had a theory about databases. He believed that data would rot. Really. He thought that if you stored data and didn’t use it, it would rot away and contaminate other data.
The extraordinary thing about this is that he was right, and it applies to just about anything you store and don’t use (we’ll discuss the relevance of mothballs later).
If you don’t believe me, just bring to mind all those data dictionary systems you’ve seen implemented, at fabulous cost, and never used. This is so common there is even a name for it: shelfware. Hands up, anyone who can honestly say they’ve never seen a pile of shelfware. I’m just as bad as you: I have a contact file a mile long and I know that I’ll never use most of the contacts in it, but I haven’t the nerve to get rid of them.
What is forgotten is just how pervasive this problem really is. A major manufacturer of silicon things spent many, many millions of dollars documenting its processes. It has 18,000 process diagrams. On the shelf. They’ve rotted away, because no one actually uses them.
If you want to store anything-- data, process diagrams, contacts, you’ve got to take it out and exercise it regularly-- “use it or lose it”. Anything that is not in regular use pretty soon becomes unusable.
Now, I got interested a little while back in the upcoming fashion of business processes. It rapidly became clear that there were a great many people, and quite a few systems, that loved to do process documentation. (You’ve met these people. They all discuss theory at interminable length. They are the inheritors of the arguments about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.) Most of them are safe in the knowledge that whatever mistakes they made could never be discovered because their documentation would rapidly become shelfware. Meanwhile, in the real world, real people were continuing to do what they had always done: largely ignoring the rulebook and adapting to changing circumstances.
The “use it or lose it” rule applies here. Process documentation that can be ignored, will be ignored, by people wishing to get on with their work. What I wanted was some kind of process documentation that actually interacted with the real world. It appeared the other day: a formal language that was complete and sufficiently unambiguous as to be executable. This meets the “use it” criterion. If the documentation not only can be used, but has to be used, then it will become and will remain correct. A closed loop feedback mechanism applies here. If a tool or method is necessary for real work, then it will be maintained in good condition: Carpenters keep their chisels sharp. In real life, most people do not use documentation and do not care if it is wrong. They use tools and get mad as hell if they don’t work.
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