Here is an abstract from the intro:

Decision support in information systems is not a new subject but advances in technology opens up new opportunities to provide better decision support that is more contextual and based on near real-time information. Newer, smarter business process management tools or iBPMS (Intelligent Business Process Management Suites) facilitate more intelligent BPM.

Intelligent BPM is not the next iteration of artificial intelligence but rather has a knowledge worker at the center of an operational process. Intelligent BPM is not only about efficiency gains but places higher importance on im-proving effectiveness. Intelligent BPM is about achieving operational, busi-ness and performance goals and relies on people’s knowledge, experience and intuition. In order for intelligent BPM to succeed it needs better deci-sions to be made faster and this, in turn, requires better decision support for those people that are part of these smarter processes.

Decision support can take many forms. It can be based on analytics where information is made available to processes in real time to create Operational Intelligence (and it is in contrast with more strategic BI). It can be in the form of external data that help guide process decisions, like weather web-services that support logistics routing processes. It can be algorithmic deci-sion trees that help guide the decision process.

Intelligent BPM without in-built decision support doesn’t aid knowledge workers to drive process outcomes to KPIs or goals. Decision support is the GPS of Intelligent BPM.

More information on the book can be found here: “Intelligent BPM Systems: Impact and Opportunity”

Peter Schoof posted this question on ebizQ and here was my reply:

Let’s look at Jim’s definition “A dark process is an unofficial process used to deliver results and not visible to management”.

So “unofficial process” means that these are not identified, recognized, sanctioned or supported. We know they exist but they are not “visible to management”.

It doesn’t make them right or wrong. Yet.

The key is the visibility to management. That would bring them into the light.  Email is probably the best evidence of the existence of these dark processes. How many “processes” in your organization are done in emails? How many conversations are trapped in your inbox with information that would help improve business productivity if it was “visible to management”?

That will tell you how much of a problem the dark processes are in your business.

The reason why people revert to email is because of the rigid nature of flow-based process solution where you have to define the exact path of process upfront. It works for a number of rigid processes in an organization but not for those unpredictable processes where people (and most often customers) decide on the next step in the process. I suggest that you read Keith’s “Mastering the Unpredictable” if you want to understand the increased interest in event-based process solutions and adaptive case management solutions.

The shear volume of dark process information necessitates the use of technology tools. It is not tool vendors looking for a new market. The problem (and market) exist, we are looking for a way to shine some light on these dark processes. It can be through an event based BPMS or through case tools. It is also through process mining tools linked to an event based BPMS, for example, that you can look at real historical process paths that these unpredictable processes take. It gives management visibility at both an individual transactional level as well as at a aggregated level to identify process flows that may impact operational risk, for example.

I use an example of a Warranty Claim process for a high value item in a blog post that I recently did. It highlights the fact that the multiple outcomes that exist are not necessarily wrong. Each process path and outcome suits the unique circumstances and context of each case.

More and more businesses recognize this and some are starting to see the light in the dark tunnel where dark processes live.

Anyway, enough said, let me get back to my email inbox…

I don’t think it is a question anymore if Mobile BPM is essential to business but rather what is it best suited to. Not all aspects of BPM are useful on all form factors of the various mobile options out there.

Mobile can mean a “mobile worker” that is out in the field using a conventional notebook device (doesn’t that sound weird, that notebooks are now “old”) to connect to a cloud based BPM solution (private or public cloud) and access their conventional browser based user interface to do work. They may even do some process modeling (or agile BPM changes) if their solution allows remote access to the modeling environment. They are likely to access process performance dashboards to look at key metrics or process improvement opportunities.

That “mobile worker” can be someone who accesses their BPM solution from a tablet/slate device like an iPad and even though they can access all of the features of the notebook, they will probably use it for quick response “always on” type customer relationship processes. They may even do the odd leave approval here and there. These devices are great for doctors on their rounds updating patient records or, as in the case of one of our customers, the funeral arranger that sits with a family to plan the logistics of a funeral. By the way, this is a pretty unstructured process. It is also great for social BPM where discussion threads in transactions, for example, need quick response. They may have some key process metrics as graphs on the process form but are not likely to do complex process analytics on their iPads for now. It will mostly be operational metrics.

The chance of them using the touch, pinch and slide to model or change processes are highly unlikely at the moment. That doesn’t say it won’t change in the future.

The “mobile worker” on his or her smartphone is likely to use it almost exclusively for approvals of customer facing or high priority processes. The user interface is optimized for the small form factor and only shows the relevant information to make a quick decision. It is designed for the “always on” employee to will quickly check their email on their phone at a Saturday morning kids soccer game or the manager who needs to approve customer credit notes while waiting to board a plane. Requisitions and purchase order approvals are often candidates for “smartphone” BPM. They are unlikely to have any process analytics capability, but the order approvals process may, for example, have some predictive intelligence in the form.

They are also highly unlikely candidates for mobile modeling. The form factor makes it just too hard.

Mobile BPM is here and used in many processes in many industries and verticals. Mobile BPM is, however, not just a case of taking and existing process and looking at it on your iPhone. The form factor should suit the requirement of the “mobile worker”.

Jim has always been one of the analysts that gets the heartbeat of these things right. We’ve been talking about Social BPM for a while (not sure if it is Facebusiness or Processbook) but when the likes of Jim join the conversation we know that it is more than just a tweet (pun intended).

His blog post addresses the fact that business process management is not about the features anymore. It is not about dynamic processes, rules, content/data, BI or complex event management but how all of these are needed in BPM technologies that tie human and machine interaction together.  Processes of the future need to cater for answers where the questions are not defined yet. It requires new social interaction.

This new paradigm that business finds itself in is not unique. I received a newsletter from our local school today where the principal quoted a book, The ABC of XYZ, by social commentator Mark McCrindle that had this to say in a chapter on ‘Educating and Engaging’:

Age is no longer a factor in learning. We are all students in this information age. While younger generations are now staying in formal education for longer, older generations are continuing their learning experiences well past middle age. Today’s younger generation have been born into a time that has seen the printed word morph into an electronic form where communication is not restricted to the spoken and written word but is multi-modal. The age of reason has given way to the age of participation. It is not the era of experts but the era of user-generated opinion. In these post-modern times statistics don’t influence with the same power as story. It’s not content but process that dominates.

While schools structure learning by subject, Generations Y and Z live life in a hyperlinked world. Teachers deliver formal lessons, yet students are experiential and participative. We test academic knowledge and memory in examinations yet they, with the always-on internet, are living in an open-book world, only ever 20 seconds from any piece of information.

Generation Z is highly intuitive and confident unaided users of digital technology who are too young to remember its arrival. And while the majority of today’s learners are not yet employed, in a decade they will comprise approximately ten per cent of the workforce.

Therefore the future of education depends on understanding and engaging with these 21 century learners. Whilst our schools and structures are very traditional in form, we need to move with steady creative certainty toward many new modes of delivering curricula and co-curricula activities

I don’t think that it is just the education system that is seeing these changes to how people react and interact. I could not help but think of how accurately the quote describes “Gen Me” in the current business context. We may not be there yet and we are all thinking about and working on next generation BPM technologies but our requirements for work management systems are changing.

Process management tools will have to stretch itself in many ways to handle the social and dynamic requirements that “Gen Me” users will have in the months and years to come.

The book is divided into four sections and covers his views on:

• The Information Society;
• Business Opportunities;
• The Changing World Economy; and
• The Next Society.

Drucker sees the Next Society different to the New Economy. (More on that in a later post) To him the Next Society is a knowledge society. “Knowledge will be its key resource, and knowledge workers will be the dominant group in its workforce”. The main characteristics of this Next Society will be :

• Borderlessness, because knowledge travels even more effortlessly than money. (I think the information freedom that the Internet brought accelerated this trend);
• Upward mobility, available to everyone through easily acquired formal education (I think that informal education through the Internet may have surpassed the formal mediums); and
• The potential for failure as well as success. The fact that you can acquire the knowledge doesn’t automatically leads to successful outcomes, according to Drucker.

He also states that IT is an enabler that helps information spread near instantly and makes it accessible to anyone. This now results in organisations that need to be globally competitive while still operating in local markets. Just think of the local bookstore that needs to compete with the prices on Amazon.

So how does this Next Society impact our organisation’s competitive advantage? What has it got to do with my business processes and how they work in my organisation? According to Drucker the success and survival of every business will depend on the performance of its knowledge workforce. He makes an observation that it is impossible, according to the law of statistics, for any but the “smallest” organisation to have “better people” and the only way an organisation can excel in this knowledge economy is to manage its knowledge workers for greater productivity. So how is that different to the “old economy”?

Well, what made the traditional workforce productive was the system. The factory style, assembly-line “system” was popularised by Taylor and followed by Henry Ford and Demming. The system embodied the knowledge, or the knowledge was “built into the system”. It is the reason why McDonalds can run a fast-food restaurant with a bunch of fifteen year olds. Drucker’s view is that the system is productive because it enables individual workers to perform without much knowledge and skill. According to him, greater skill on the side of an individual worker is a threat to co-workers and the entire system. It is also the way that we design and implement business processes today. We automate “the system” and leave little or no room for workers to deviate from this. It enforces repeatable, consistent and measureable output. But we leave no room for individual contribution.

In knowledge-based organisations it is the individual worker’s productivity that makes the system productive. In a traditional workforce the worker serves the system and in a knowledge workforce the system must serve the worker, according to Drucker. This means that we have to change the productivity tools that we use for the Next Society. It means that the way we designed, implemented, automated and measured organisational processes must change. Processes can’t be as prescriptive and restrictive as what we’ve done in the past. It needs to support the productivity objectives of a knowledge worker and it needs to be dynamic and flexible while providing the necessary organisational control.

Drucker remarks that it would be difficult to overstate the importance of focussing on knowledge workers’ productivity. “For the critical feature of a knowledge workforce is that knowledge workers are not ‘labour,’ they are capital”. There is a shift from labour as a cost to a view of ROI on “labour capital”. Drucker calls it the Productivity of Capital.

The move to the Next Society is here. We have seen the borderlessness of information, the upward mobility of knowledge workers and the way process work changed. Knowledge workers need Next Society tools to support their productiveness. They are not bound to the constraints of an assembly line, either physically or in their contribution to the processes. They require IT enabled productivity support tools that allow them to work anytime, anyplace. The key to Competitive Advantage lies in enabling the Next Society to work in a way that will give a positive ROI on our knowledge capital.

Well I’d like to rephrase it for myself to “Why do I think BPM cloud take off like ERP and CRM”. It also pre-supposes that CRM has taken off (which is a different debate).

I believe BPM will take off but not in the form or shape that we understand or think off today. I wrote a blog post on my BPMJournal blog titled “On Evolution, Darwin and BPPM” and no, BPPM is not a spelling mistake, it stands for Business Process and Performance Management. In the post I discuss the Richard Koch’s theory on “Evolution by Natural Selection” and how it applies to business process management and the “Progress from Order to Chaos”.

In summary (and I suggest that you read the post if you want to understand the context) it states that there is variation (we breed new adapted species), then selection (only a few make it in the new conditions), then more variation based on those that survive, the selection and so on. Being successful or “surviving” is based on fitting the “conditions of life”.

ERP systems in particular didn’t just arrive overnight. It evolved into the technology based systems that we see today through the same natural selection process. It is interesting if you trace the history of the double entry accounting system that a transactional ERP system is fundamentally based on.

In 1494 Frater Luca Bartolomes Pacioli, friend of Leonardo da Vinci, published his fifth book, Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita (Everything About Arithmetic, Geometry and Proportion). It was written as a digest and guide to existing mathematical knowledge, and bookkeeping was only one of five topics covered. The Summa’s 36 short chapters on bookkeeping, entitled De Computis et Scripturis (Of Reckonings and Writings) were added “in order that the subjects of the most gracious Duke of Urbino may have complete instructions in the conduct of business,” and to “give the trader without delay information as to his assets and liabilities.” He acknowledged in his book that thirty-six years before him Benedetto Cotrugli wrote Delia Mercatura et del Mercante Perfetto (Of Trading and the Perfect Trader), which included a brief chapter which described many of the features of double entry.

The point I am making is that ERPs evolved over an extended period of time and will continue to change in future. ERPs didn’t start selling that well in 1500 or 1700 or 1900. I remember large Kalamazoo hand written “accounting systems” in my dad’s offices in the late ’60s, early ’70s. Today we wouldn’t contemplate starting his type of business without at least the standard modules of a manufacturing ERP. We just won’t be competitive and survive. I think the shortcomings of ERP have spawned the “next generation” and growing emergence of BPMS systems. But is all part of the evolutionary process.

BPM systems are evolving in a similar way to address ad-hoc, dynamic process requirements. The emergence of systems like Facebook disrupts the behaviour of people that use ERP, CRM and BPM systems and will change the face (no pun intended) of business systems forever. I’ve always held the view that future ERP systems will be based on a type of “BPMish” tool and I think that SOA, BPM, ERP, BI etc. are all converging to new ways of using technology to get better at getting work done. This is in the end the main objective. It will not look the same as what we know right now. It will be better adapted.

I think it is too early to say that BPM won’t take off like ERP and CRM systems. That is, if you see BPM as the technology component and not the management science. I think it can and will take off, maybe just not in the form that we see it in now. It is all based on how well it is suited to the “conditions of life”

Double entry system source: http://www.canhamrogers.com/HDEB.htm

One of his comments was “Deliver what is needed just in time and account for change – but manage change, design to account for it, deliver “good enough” to account for the evolution”

We often see analysis paralysis where customers want to define all combinations, permutations, exceptions and business rules upfront that they are so fatigued after that exercise that the processes stay in document form and never gets digitised in process automation tools like XMPro. It is a pity because the real benefit is in making processes executable.

Processes should never be static. They should be designed for change as new process requirements “emerges”. Process management is continous discovery journey that requires an adaptive process approach. Start off with basic processes that add value quickly and improve them as the real requirements emerges. The benefits of “getting it started” far outweigh the perceived benefits of “getting it perfect”. Real process performance improvement can only be leveraged by management action.

One of his other comments was that if you can’t create a solution in 90 days or less for a specific process problem, you are doing it wrong. I have to agree but more on that in a next post.

I’m typing this from my iPhone and I am getting close to my bus stop. Let me quickly press this (read more on mobiles for process management on the eXomin website) before I miss my stop.

What are your biggest frustration with business process management?

Imagine how my business output increases if I can approve leave, expense claims, credit notes etc while I’m on my way to work. I don’t have to wait to fire up Outlook on my notebook to get my process to do list. All because my processes are in the cloud and I am mobile.

Anyway, this is my stop and I must get off here. Submit to post

One of the comments on the interview states that “… to start a journey, a path must be chosen. All you need is a map, maybe even a compass will do”. It continues that the point is that the end path is not always known ahead of time. This is certainly true for a large component of the work that we (knowledge workers) do on a day to day basis. Our work has changed from the factory style, sequential and pre-determined workflow, to dynamic event based process “reactions” based on the contextual knowledge that we have for the activity that we need to address. This is quite a long explanation. Let me simplify with an example.

Suppose we receive an email from a client that want to change a purchase order from a 1 000 widgets to 10 000 widgets. Their initial order was wrong as someone left the last digit off. They still want it on the same delivery date. Suddenly there are a number of things that need to happen in your process. Our hard-coded predefined process requires that the sales person completes an “order variation” request that will be loaded in the ERP system. It may now move the delivery date out due the large variation because the MRP planning module and it may also moved to pending status as the customer credit limit is exceeded and needs to the adjusted. This is where the sales person generally revert back to email and collaboration as the structured dependency of the process limits his or her ability to “manage the process effectively”. The credit change process is manually escalated early on while the Operations Manager is called/emailed and briefed on the possible change and impact on inventory and production planning. Existing process controls are bypassed and process actions are dynamically routed and escalated based on the information that we gather at each step. We may find that credit approval requires additional information and possible collateral from the customer and we “know that we are about to receive a number of additional orders from the client as our account manager informed us that the customer landed a big contract”. Do you see the complexity in the process? It is not in the actual execution of each task, it is in deciding on a course of action based on information that we gather in the context of the process or as it emerges. It is not the activities but the combination and permutations of when and how we need to execute them. The above example is a simple one but one that most organisations would address collaboratively if they had to do it right now.

We generally model the suggested or “happy path” but this is not to say that it is the only effective way of doing work. Sometimes (most of the time) we need controlled process activities that we can sequence as the process requirements “emerges”. That is an Adaptive Process. It adapts itself in each specific transactional instance. We still do the same work, but we done necessarily do it in the same way every time. We still have specific process activities that are compulsory in every process, like credit approval, but we sequence it based the dynamics of the business. This is true “process management”.

The above example demonstrates the challenges that we face with models that are based on sequential workflow style routing and I’ll be posting on follow up posts on some ideas and suggestions around dynamic models.

One of the discussions is to try and define BPM in 160 characters or less. I added my few cents and came up with 2 attempts along these lines:

• The purpose of BPM is to actively manage process events, variables and stakeholders to deliver critical, measurable process outcomes; and
• It is “applied common sense” to make sure that you do the right things the right way over and over to stay in business and that you get better at it.

Roger Tregear’s definition, however, is the best BPM for Executive Dummies that I’ve seen in a long time.

• Organisations exist to deliver value to customers and stakeholders. That’s strategy.
  
• They do this via a series of coordinated activities across a number of functional elements of the organisation. That’s a process.
  
• It makes sense to optimise these processes so that they satisfy the requirements of customers and other stakeholders. That’s process improvement.
  
• Taking a coordinated view of the performance of the processes by which an organisation delivers value, optimises performance. That’s process management.
  
• Process management allows organisations to focus on processes that create the market differentiation described by the strategy. That’s execution.
  

It is more than a 160 characters but it describes the essence of what BPM wants to achieve, or for that matter, the essence of what any organisation wants to achieve.

It is actually part of an article that Roger did (see the “achieving process based management” in the box.net section of his LinkedIn profile) and I recommend reading it. He lists some of the reasons for BPM in the same document, which I will comment on in a later post.

Back to the “profound sequence from strategy to execution”. Not all organisations look at their processes strategically. They should, and Roger gives the definitive reason in the five bullet points. We seldom find prospects or customers that want to start the discussion with strategy. Most are looking at bullet 2, the series of coordinated activities across a number of functions in the organisation. Most have a problem with coordinating events across functional areas of their business and want a quick fix. And that’s generally where many organisations stay. They may automate them but they don’t get the benefits associated with managing them.

It also illustrates the difference between process automation/workflow and business process management. You may require process management software tools to achieve effective BPM, but it remains a way of thinking and how you approach processes that will have the long term strategic benefit. There is a process in getting to real BPM. The good news is that it is fairly simple and not hard to do. Just take the five points and apply them to your organisation and go from strategy to execution through your processes.