Our friend and colleague, internationally acclaimed consultant and speaker Mark McGregor has written an interesting article contributing to the understanding of Business Process Management (Definition by BPTrends). Enjoy!

"Given the hype and the publicity that has surrounded the term business process management (BPM) over the past 18 months to two years, there can be few in the information technology industry - whether vendors or users - who have not at least heard of the term. But the mass of information about BPM has, in many cases, led to confusion over what it stands for and what it really means.

The acronym BPM, for example, has been variously used to describe business process modelling, business process management, business performance management and best practice management. The emerging consensus, however, is that the term BPM stands solely for business process management, while the practice of BPM includes process modelling, performance management and best (or next) practice.

From a technical perspective, BPM started out being used to describe a new generation of technologies that could be viewed as workflow++ or workflow 2.0. But like so many elements of the computer industry, that early definition has become blurred.

For instance, it has since been used to describe new versions of everything from document management systems, content management systems, workflow systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, customer relationship management (CRM) systems and in fact just about anything where the vendor thought they might get greater traction in the market by using the BPM acronym.

But BPM is about much more than just technology. It is very much a management philosophy and is about doing business differently.

Customer focus A key differentiator is that it approaches business from an 'outside-in' perspective rather than mimicking the inward-looking focus of most other approaches to the management of business processes. The main tenet of BPM then is to look at, and to organise, the business from the perspective of its most important element - the customer.

Looking at the business from the perspective of the customer involves much more than merely adopting a 'customer focus' or a fancy mission statement asserting the organisation's 'customer centricity'.

It requires a far more fundamental examination of the business, with senior management asking questions such as: What constitutes success for the customer? And how can the business profitably deliver against those success criteria?

Only once those questions have been answered can the organisation reorganise the way it works accordingly, so that everything is geared to generating more of those successes - and minimising failures.

Of course, it also means questioning other things that the business does and asking, "If it does not contribute to those customer successes, then why do we do it?"

Interestingly enough, experience has amply demonstrated that organisations that take this 'outside-in' view and think long and hard about customer successes first, find it much easier to also drive waste out of their processes and systems.

Furthermore, the resulting cost savings tend to be greater than with a purely cost cutting program alone, and more importantly, such an approach does not risk damaging the very fabric of an organisation - as pure cost-cutting often did and as 1990s style business process re-engineering projects frequently did, too.

All too often, cost cutting and systemisation tends to be looked at from a purely balance sheet perspective, without sufficient regard to the damage that the resulting cuts may cause to an organisation.

By way of example, in times of economic downturn many organisations traditionally look to cut back on their marketing spend. However, it is now well proven that those companies that maintain their spend come out of the downturn much stronger and, in fact, very often overtake those who cut back. Why? Bec-ause, invariably they have started to cut away at the fabric of their organisation.

One example of the benefits of a strong - some would say relentless - customer-focused business is South West Airlines in the US.

The company has posted a profit every year for the past 30 years - when bigger name US airlines have struggled and failed - and is arguably a leaner, faster, better-motivated organisation than all of its competitors.

Why has the company been so successful? Because South West Airlines has a clearly defined strategy that is relentlessly focused on the customers it wants, and the way it keeps those customers happy - flight after flight.

Most importantly, the company has organised itself entirely based on what it takes to deliver on this strategy. South West Airlines has proven that the combination of strategy, people and process make the difference, particularly when placed in the context of customer outcomes.

Old and new For BPM to deliver the biggest benefits, organisations have to look and think differently about their business and its processes. It is in this requirement that BPM differs from the existing workflow and document management systems approaches that companies might already be familiar with. But at the same time, those systems are still likely to be needed to support BPM when it is fully implemented and understood.

In short BPM is not about throwing away those old systems and approaches, but instead it is about ensuring that those systems deliver both the intended benefits and the required benefits in order to maintain a competitive advantage.

Simply putting in a system to reduce costs is of no long-term benefit to the organisation if that system does not in some way deliver greater benefits to the customers.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing any organisation considering undertaking a BPM initiative is dealing with cross-functionally. To be effective in BPM means breaking down artificial, internal boundaries and instead organising people and resources in the most appropriate way to deliver the goods and services to the customer.

Inevitably the idea of challenging the status quo of traditional hierarchical structures meets with many objects and a lot of obstacles! That is why BPM is not something that can be driven by IT or managers low down in the structure of an organisation.

To be successful, BPM has to have a profound impact on the organisation, which means it will require support and approval from the very highest levels."

We are very sorry that we haven't been able to write a blog entry since the 30th of June. We had a few colleagues and friends suffering from the recent bad flu outbreak in Australia (it's Winter here and it shows) and the rest of the crew had to hold the fort in the meantime. Now we're back on our regular staffing level and all of you can expect regular blog entries from now on (unless another event stops us doing so).

For this blog entry we selected a great article by our friend and consulting colleague Bob Lewis, president of US-based IT Catalysts, Inc. Bob uses the right words when he reminds us to win the hearts and minds of those people who are most affected by a new project or any engagement for that matter. Some may call this "Stakeholder Management", which sounds mechanic and is not exactly what Bob had on his mind when he wrote the following piece. Enjoy!

 

"Carl Sagan told the story of the last question on a biology final exam: "You're part of the first expedition to Mars. How would you determine if there's any life there?"

One essay -- it earned an A -- went like this: "Ask the inhabitants. Even a negative answer would be significant."

Here on Earth, the anthropologist and adventurer Thor Heyerdahl sailed a raft, the Kon Tiki, from South America to Easter Island. His goal: To demonstrate that his hypothesis regarding cultural diffusion from South America into Polynesia was possible.

Prior to Heyerdahl's landing, archaeologists and those who play on the fringes of scientific inquiry had developed a wide variety of elaborate theories to explain how the island's famous multi-ton stone statues came to be erected. Among the more popular: Space aliens did it, presumably as a change of pace from leaving crop circles in the English countryside.

Heyerdahl took an approach to discovering the answer that was, if anything, more daring than sailing his raft across the Pacific ocean. He asked the inhabitants, who happily demonstrated the technique their ancestors had used.

In corporate America, right now as you read these words, there are companies in trouble. The executives responsible for running them don't know they're in trouble, but they are.

The reason these executives don't know their companies are in trouble is that they've never pondered the question of life on Mars, nor the mysteries of Easter Island. Their knowledge of the companies they lead comes from financial reports, information provided to them through the chain of command, and their memory of how things used to be when they were lower in the hierarchy and closer to the action.

Were they to ask the inhabitants -- were they to talk directly to employees and customers -- they would know that:

• Recent attempts to cut the cost of raw materials have resulted in deteriorating product quality.
• The "successful" system replacement project didn't actually turn off the old system, which means that a third of all financial transactions are posted using unaudited ad hoc patches.
• Following the recent offshore outsourcing effort, on-shore employees are spending a quarter of their time translating variable names and comments written in Urdu to English. They charge their time to maintenance so the outsourcing project will look more profitable.
• Employee morale is in the sub-basement because, following the significant wage concessions by employees needed to save the company, the top executives received serious bonus packages. Employees drew the obvious conclusion -- that their wage concessions were needed, not to save the company, but to fund the bonuses. (Okay, this last one didn't require talking to the inhabitants. Even the tiniest amount of empathy would have sufficed.)

Many executives have read about the importance of "walking around." And so they do. They walk around, exchange pleasantries with "rank and file" employees and figure they've taken the pulse of the company.

An observation which might or might not be relevant: In my admittedly limited and indirect experience, officers (and former officers) who use the term "rank and file" are also the ones who consider their military forces to be nameless and faceless troops who they blithely send out to be shot at for no valid tactical reason.

They are also more likely to refer to dead civilians as "collateral damage," not as tragedies.

The officers who refer to these same people as "soldiers" or "men and women" are more likely to choose the right battles and tactics. They are also more likely to have real conversations with the men and women who do the actual fighting and know what conditions are really like on the ground.

They listen, that is, to the inhabitants.

Since we're on the subject of military tactics, here's a piece of wisdom that's at least as old as Sun Tzu: The battle is always for hearts and minds.

Taking and holding land certainly matters. It just doesn't matter as much, because if you have the hearts and minds of the men and women who fight for you, and of the civilians who live in the disputed territory, you'll end up with the land. Without their hearts and minds, you'll lose tomorrow the land you took today.

While the stakes are less dramatic, as an IT leader the same wisdom applies to you. Whatever you're trying to accomplish, you first need to win the hearts and minds of the men and women who have to make it happen.

They are the inhabitants. If you want their hearts and minds, talk with them."

• Awareness for Enterprise 2.0 worldwide has risen considerably since last year,
• The technology progress is excellent, even that Andrew feels he is "drowning" trying to keep up with the evolving toolsets,
• Yet communication of the results to interested organisations is still spotty.

 

After a long week spent with clients I was about to write a blog entry about Systems Integration as I came across a brand new article by our friend Bob Lewis of US based IT Catalysts, Inc. It addresses a severe problem that many business processes have: They sometimes switch off brains of those people who are assigned to perform the process tasks:

"I've discovered a new process design methodology. I call it "Six Stupid."

Everyone knows that a group of people is dumber than its least intelligent member. Six Stupid is based on this insight. Unlike the better-known Six Sigma, Six Stupid requires the collaboration of at least six idiots, to design process flows that defy reason and preclude exceptions. To illustrate:

My wife and I ordered furniture on-line from a prominent multi-channel retailer. A few hours later we stumbled upon a better alternative at a much more attractive price.

The first retailer's website refused to cancel our order so I called customer service, where a polite representative told me she couldn't cancel it either. The reason? It had already been sent to the warehouse for processing.

When I suggested she contact the warehouse, she explained that it had no telephone number to call. Really. The only solution was for them to ship the merchandise and for me to refuse the shipment. When it arrived back at the warehouse, they'd restock it and credit my account.

Which is how it happened.

This wasn't a case of customer elimination management. Quite the opposite -- customer service took care of me just fine. No, this was an example of Six Stupid. Even if the merchandise had been picked and was waiting on the shipping dock, anyone with a gram of sense could have figured out that logging the shipment as departed, then rolling it directly to Restocking would have saved paying UPS twice to ship it back and forth. But policy, and the lack of telephone service, made sure everyone Followed the Process.

Then came the blizzard, and with it a Six Stupid airline experience.

It happened like this: I'd bought round trip tickets to New York City. A week after that trip I'd booked a long weekend in Florida.

Then plans changed and I had to stay in New York an extra week, which meant I'd fly to Minnesota Thursday evening so I could get on a flight to Florida the next morning. The fare rules, you see, didn't allow converting two round-trip tickets into one triangle fare.

Then, the day before I was to return to Minnesota, the weather service forecast snow there, and lots of it. The airline cancelled my flight in anticipation and rebooked me for the following morning, to arrive a half-hour after my flight to Florida was scheduled to depart.

I called customer service, explained the situation, and suggested that under the circumstances, routing me directly to Florida clearly made more sense for both of us.

But the fare rules still wouldn't allow it. The best they could do was to rebook my Florida flight to later in the day. I asked the guy on the phone to check with his supervisor, which he did. No-go: She wouldn't or couldn't override the system. "I guess I'd better speak to your supervisor, then," I suggested. He connected me.

"I know you have complex fare rules that mere mortals like me can't fully comprehend ..." I began. Those were the last words I would successfully utter for at least five minutes.

The customer service supervisor scolded me ... that's the only accurate description ... for (1) being disrespectful to the airline; (2) trying to game their fares to get a cheaper flight to Florida; and (3) now trying to cheat to get the best of both worlds.

I confess that by the end of the call I became somewhat testy. Anyway, the next morning I spoke to a different supervisor, described my previous attempt at resolution, and asked if the airline really wanted to fly me in and out of a blizzard zone when a simple and easy alternative was staring both of us in the face.

She told me the first supervisor had placed a red flag in my records. It said that under no circumstances should anyone help me out. She did anyway, routing me directly to Florida.

It was the opposite of the first Six Stupid situation: The airline's process did allow for exceptions. But I caught someone in a very bad mood who insisted on Following the Process anyway.

The point of this week's tiresome missive? There are two.

The first: Don't use the Six Stupid methodology to design whatever processes you're trying to implement. Make sure every process has a process bypass process to handle situations that just don't fit.

And second, make this rule inviolable:

Turning a new process on does not justify employees turning their brains off."

My take on this

People processes are not integration processes which force machines to do things logically. People processes should always be used by people with the brains switched on. That way execeptions can be handled which lead to customer satisfaction, sometimes even to customer excitement...a term by the way, I haven't heard since the heady days of Total Quality Movement in the beginning of the 1990s.

Saying this, I am back to integration...I will talk about that in a new blog entry...integration of people and integration of systems.

 

"As the new Chief Information Officer you spend the requisite month listening instead of talking, making no commitments, figuring out what's going on. You find a department that operates through oral traditions and improvisation. It needs, in other words, a healthy dose of process.

What's your next step?

Here's what the answer isn't: Design and implement great processes.

One of the stranger aspects of organizational change is that you can't often fix a problem by trying to fix the problem. At least, you usually can't fix problems directly, for two reasons. The first is that most of the problems you see are the symptoms of other, less apparent issues you don't see. The second is that the number of levers you can pull and buttons you can push to influence the behavior of the organization you lead is surprisingly small.

If an organization is underperforming, its processes aren't working as well as they should. This is a matter of definition: Process means how employees do their work.

That doesn't mean you can fix an organization by fixing its processes. Far from it. If you want stronger processes, starting with process design doesn't work very well. The buttons and levers lie elsewhere. Among the more useful:

Changing the business culture, to encourage a process state of mind. If you need an organization that's more orderly -- one that operates through well-defined, continuously improving processes -- begin with culture change. Otherwise, everything else you try to do will wither and die, killed through the passive resistance and malicious obedience of employees who just don't see the point and who like the less-bureaucratic way things are right now.

Educating process managers in the niceties of process management. Just as employees, left to their own devices, generally prefer informality to well-defined processes, process managers, left to their own devices, often prefer managing the work to managing the processes that manage the work.

Nor is this necessarily a bad attitude. You can, in theory, manage processes by watching key performance indicators, dashboards, and exception reports without once interacting with a live human being. To manage the work you have to interact with the people who do it.

If you want process to happen, process managers must learn the discipline of process management. If you want process to happen without doing more harm than good you'd better make sure they understand that process management isn't an alternative to leading people -- it's a complement.

Fixing the policy manual, most often by throwing out most of your policies. If the policy manual is thick it almost always means compliance has replaced strategy as the force driving the company.

It also means that whenever anything goes wrong, most managers instinctively try to prevent recurrence with a new rule. The result: A stifling, choking bureaucracy in which following the steps, filling out the forms and above all following the rules matter much more than achieving anything that resembles a useful result.

Once you've finished clearing out the policy underbrush, institute one new policy: Whenever possible, institute a guideline instead of writing a policy. Guidelines do the same sort of work that policies do, but they leave enough flexibility to get the job done.

Reorganizing. Many executives reorganize the way Correge models change attire -- frequently, as the mood takes them, to stay in fashion. Doing so has, as the saying goes, much the same effect as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. A roll of duct tape would be more useful.

One reason the tool of reorganization is so often used incorrectly is that organizational structures are mis-represented whenever anyone draws them. Showing them as a hierarchy does a fine job of presenting reporting relationships. It fails to depict something far more important: An organizational structure is a set of boxes packed within bigger boxes set within even bigger boxes.

The rule for business processes is straightforward: Processes break in proportion to the number and height of the organizational barriers they have to cross. The challenge for organizational designers is that however you organize, the total number of boxes ... and therefore the number of barriers ... won't change very much.

So when you reorganize you aren't going to remove the barriers to all processes, because you can't.

All you'll be able to do is to decide which processes you improve, and which you make more difficult.

Choose carefully."

 

On another note:

For all of you who are waiting for Part 2 of the Business Value article by Stephen Alexander, this is due to be published at the beginning of May 2007.

 

We love Easter. In Australia it is the time after a hot summer and marks the beginning of autumn but it still has around 24 lovely degrees (Celsius that is). It is a time for celebration and relaxation before the project work has us in its grip again.

We thought we start Easter by giving you, dear readers, something to laugh about. The video shows a somewhat disturbed relationship between a computer geek and a business person; we find it hilarious.

Have fun and see you after Easter !

 

 

Fun aside, watch this truly inspiring video featuring Bill Clinton in the spirit of Easter:

You may remember that we blogged in January about the annual TED 2007 conference to be happening in March

this year.

Today, Good Friday 2007, TED published videos of outstanding speeches given recently in Monterrey, California.

Watch and listen to Bill Clinton giving his acceptance speech of the TED 2007 award for his accomplishments with the Clinton Foundation.

This is powerful stuff as William J Clinton is a dedicated and passionate humanitarian today. He is very

successfully helping to make our world a much better place with social responsibility, business acumen and great

technology.

I have a dream - A truly inspiring speech by Bill Clinton in Monterrey

Happy Easter !

 

The internet is no longer just a bunch of fancy online marketing brochures, repositories of downloadable documents and e-business applications. It has further developed into a communication platform, sparked by new technology commonly summarised with the term "Web 2.0", the second generation of the internet.

In short, Web 2.0 can be classified as technology that allows people to easily communicate (i.e. read, write, speak, watch) over the web. The hurdles are low and almost everybody can do it; a real challenge to professional communicators such as journalists and professional web designers.

In Nov last year we blogged that Web 2.0 already spilled over to the business world. First mover CEO's and company members write weblogs (blogs), companies set up wikis and entrepreneurs form online communities using social networking platforms. The media sometimes classifies this development as "Web 2.0 for enterprises". Last year Harvard Professor Andrew McAffee coined "Enterprise 2.0 (or E2.0)", a term which has been widely accepted since.

In contrary to Web 2.0 the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 has proven not to be an easy ride. There are a number of concerns attached to its further adoption in organisations of the private and public sectors, a few of which are:

Legal issues

Companies have to be sure that blogging employees represent their organisations in proper ways in openly accessible blogs and wikis. Since blogging became widespread, there have been several cases where people disseminated confidential information about their employers and clients.

One way how to deal with this issue is, to set up blogging policies (e.g. similar to our own) and train employees in communication and compliance behaviours as well as the proper use of blogs and wikis.

Issues of alignment between IT and business

Enterprise 2.0 is user driven, in that employees know Web 2.0 applications from their private use of the internet and request similar capabilities in their work environments. Traditionally, though, IT departments under the leadership of the CIO drive the selection and implementation of enterprise applications.

With Enterprise 2.0 this is going to change. Business users assemble tools, even put together applications themselves without IT involvement. This includes personal starting pages such as Pageflakes and Netvibes, or application builders such as Coghead and Teqlo. These tools don't require much IT know-how and are relatively easy to set up.

Commercial IT vendors already respond to this trend and provide tools for end-user development; e.g. IBM recently released QEDWiki. Find a list of white-label social networking applications that organisations can deploy with their own brands here.

Organisational hierarchy issues

Enterprise 2.0 doesn't know of any hierarchies, it is an even playing field. All users have the same right of writing about or comment subjects they are passionate about. This can present a not always welcomed trait of the internet for more hierarchically oriented organisations. The history of intranets has this story to tell: Typically there is not much communication going on on the intranet; yet the same people working for the organisation privately blog passionately and communicate regularly on social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.

Prof Andrew McAffee says that the E2.0 technologies really are something new under the sun. "They’re not extensions or enhancements to previous generations of corporate tools for collaboration and knowledge management; instead, they’re radical departures from them". They offer new communication opportunities with all stakeholders to organisations:

What if organisations would activate their people's passion for communicating via enterprise 2.0 tools with their colleagues about matters that concern their companies and the sector they are in?

As a practical example, what if Australian corporations would encourage their employees to use Enterprise 2.0 communication tools to start or further their engagement for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) ? How much money could be saved, business processes improved and positive PR generated ? Given the current public discussion about climate change this would definitely improve on communication within the organisations and across company boundaries.

A related, more personal, example: Two years ago I purchased a small fuel efficient car and financed $3,000 of the purchase price with a discount earned through my credit card sponsored by the manufacturer of the car. That was the only reason why I kept on using the card even that their interest rates are considerably higher than their competitors'. I am ready to replace my car now, but surprisingly received a note from the card company that they've decided to grant the full rebate of $3,000 from next month only to the large sized cars of the manufacturer. What's interesting is, that the card company is eagerly pursuing a corporate social responsibility program through public ads.

How handy would an E2.0 social networking platform come into play where I could discuss the issue of them promoting larger less fuel efficient cars via their credit card benefit program.

The more people that apply the new communication capabilities Enterprise 2.0 has to offer, the better they get at communicating with one another about company matters and the better the new tools are being actively applied. This will definitely affect organisations' bottom lines positively sooner or later.

 

I have been aware of a new milestone of the digital evolution creeping upon us over the last 18 months and increasing in its intensity since everyone returned from the Christmas break:

Concentrating on the public sector, I will address this development in two blog posts, starting with the challenge of interconnected services and with a further post by presenting ways how to unlock and generate value for stakeholders involved.

Unlike in the past, where IT departments or middle ranking e-zealots were often the driving force for the adoption of new technology, this time it’s coming from the very top; in the private sector from the board of directors and in the public sector directly from the ministers and their advisers.

With this blog post I specifically address readers from the public sector, though the subject certainly may interest readers from the private sector as well !

Senior managers frequently experience external advisers directly influencing those who assess the value and relevance of their organisation’s worth. In the public sector we see this trend where for example government agencies are being introduced to the dreaded notion of contestability...if they can not meet new expectations to deliver better services using interconnectivity then they can suffer major budget cuts or even see their agency stripped of responsibilities.

I have seen this battle over the last year in Canberra from the front row with the reorganisation of the Human Services sector. Widespread rationalisation is now occurring driven initially by the previous Minister who had a very good grasp of consumer trends and expectations of on-line service delivery.

If they can’t offer a convincing qualified explanation then it’s very likely that they will not get the funding. So why is this happening now and what are the drivers?

Well my take on this is that as organizations find themselves part of an interconnected sector, where a critical mass of adoption of e-transactions between multiple parties has occurred, a new expectation will burden managers with potentially career-stunting consequences, unless they can identify and articulate where the end point is and how to get there using rapid incremental cost-justifying steps.

This is because for the first time corporate board and Government Cabinet members have worked out for themselves a few basic rules. I am sure this is motivated by the countless excuses given to them as to why greatly anticipated cost benefits from very costly projects, they signed off on, did not eventuate.

But the real challenge has come from the realisation that once the organisation links up to other parties using infrastructure and networks (like the internet) that is outside of its direct control then it can not (in the case of Government) mandate these changes.

Corporate board members have also been quick to realise that getting 3^rd parties to adopt new services in this ecosystem environment requires something new and compelling: A tangible, measurable and meaningful value using specific criteria for each core stakeholder. They have also started to realise that the implications of not achieving the anticipated adoption will have major strategic implications for the organisation's market position and for corporations, even its share value.

An interconnected sector brings about a situation where a new set of rules and principles will be ignored by managers at their own peril. For example, in a business ecosystem everyone becomes dependent on each other to some degree. So the notion that adoption of any offering can be mandated or induced by traditional means is nonsense, as many managers have already experienced.

Regardless of the costs incurred and often hidden by the organization most attempts to generate sufficient adoption without a meaningful value proposition, that can be understood and trusted by all the parties to the business process, are frustrating and often thwarted.

So unless senior business managers can confidently predict the value of a proposed service, through acquiring a new capability, to each party then they risk to be seen by their superiors as driving blind.

There is a growing interest in the use of value frameworks and methodologies and the use of business process simulators as prerequisites to predict the outcomes of any value based proposal. Some of these tools can also export the structure of an agreed process directly to a new breed of aggregation exchanges saving months of work from teams of analysts and code writers.

But hanging all this together for aspiring CEO's without drowning them in confusing layers of complexity is the key to achieve a top down strategic approach to the migration of businesses in the digital environment.

The next blog post will offer practical recommendations based on a range of case studies on how to coach an organisation along this transformation pathway in small incremental self justifying steps. (stephen@alexander.name)

"People who think that the internet is just print in a different medium are wrong. (Is your brain rejecting that statement?) Here's my little 'a-ha' demonstration

You are reading a book: read - read - read - backup to re-read a difficult passage - read - read - lick thumb to turn page - read - read - read - and so on.

You are reading a newspaper: scan - scan - read - read - scan - read - turn to page 8A - read - back to page 1 - scan - read - turn page - scan - continue.

I am reading a newspaper: find the comics - scan - skip - read (just the funny ones - why do they call the boring ones 'comics'?)

You are reading engaging a web site designed by someone who believes that web sites are just like print: scan - scan - read - look for nav link - look some more - click - scan - wrong page click back button -find another nav link - click - scan - read - click - back to search engine.

You are engaging a web site designed by someone who believes the web is different: scan - read - click - scan - click - scan - read - read - click - scan - click - type - click - type - click - wait for UPS truck to deliver merchandise."

• The know-how keepers of the old systems and business processes have walked out the door, often without having been asked to pass on their know-how to the new generation.
• The expectations towards the new systems are typically very high and hard to fulfil.
• The external and internal promoters of the new system typically overpromise future availabilities.
• Users hope that the new systems will solve their specific business process challenges because of the promises that everything will be better in the future.
• Attention is centered on new IT solutions and away from the more pressing business challenges.

• select an integration solution that is agnostic to infrastructures
• select a BPM solution that allows graphical design and output to BPEL
• select an integration solution that drives process execution via BPEL

"Working days and working hours
For realistic throughput and cycle time, especially in financial organizations, it is essential to be able to model working time (9:00 - 17:00) and working days (no weekend, no vacation days).

Timed batches
The possibility to define a batch. A process instance comes to a certain point, and then needs to wait for the night batch to continue. The batch can be modelled as a resource, that will execute one of more tasks from the process instance (but then I need to be able to allocate a resource availability!). After these steps, again, the process should wait until the next working day, to continue...

Process instance allocation of a shared resource
In certain processes, there are resources that have their own schedule and maximum size.
As an example - let's assume we have a process that produces plates. Plates need to be painted (activity by a resource), and then placed in a drying room. A drying room has a certain capacity, and will take up to X plates (aka process instances, each for a certain plate). Again, I need to feature to model this resource, that is able to pickup a set of process instances, execute an activity (dry) in each of them, and then release them....

Grouping of process instances based on certain shared elements
Factories usually have production schedules, where certain tasks are combined (first we do all the products XYZ, then ABC), to minimize machine setup and improve efficiency⁄focus. Again, where is the possibility to do this.

Machine maintenance and setup
In more factory setting processes, we will have machines (resources), that will need setup time (when processing a certain process instance that is for a new type of product). And these machines need maintenance, leading to downtime. So, when triggered for use, a resource as a machine, should be able to take out time from the waiting process instances, due to setup time and maintenance time.

More advanced resource selection and allocation
All types of features to be able to select resources (people, machines) based on business rules, driven by (random) data in a process instance (type of product, level of investment, etc)...."

The theme of integrating systems following the BPM+SOA path is close to our hearts and minds and keeps us busy throughout many of our consulting days and nights. If you would like to learn more, please give us a buzz.

1. Productivity (e.g. Charles Schwab managed to improve by 30% since introducing their new way)
2. Simplification (e.g. Charles Schwab simplified from 3 brokerage systems to one)
3. Business partner satisfaction
4. Availability
5. Employees engagement and development

Read the transcript of the interview here.

• The company can set the agenda for new themes on the web
• More visibility through Search Engine Marketing
• The publication of new content is much quicker and cheaper than through traditional media and PR
• Effective (online) dialogue with customers and prospects
• Effective dialogue with the interested public, i.e. establish⁄improve business contacts online
• Effective (online) dialogue with employees and business partners
• Quickly retaliate against negative trends or rumours concerning the company and its products⁄services
• Enhance brand equity over the web

• A good blog keeps a web site fresh and interesting (to the reader and the writer)
• Genuine content is king
• One person has to drive the blog otherwise it is not going to happen
• It is easier to comment something than to come up with something completely new
• Blogging is about text not pretty pictures
• Writing good copy gets easier and takes less time with each blog
• Reader comments add valuable content to the blog (e.g. the current year-end flash backs and predictions for the New Year)
• Sadly, negative comments increase over time. We chose to allow comments but eliminate the real bad ones, which are like spam
• The technology space is so dynamic that our BizTech posts tend to address technology more than business matters
• With blogs and wikis the internet is finally turning towards what its inventor Tim Berners-Lee always wanted it to be; a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information and not just publishing fancy brochures in a different format
• Someone else always has a more insightful and better blog. We can all learn from each other, all the time

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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These days, presentations to any audience without PowerPoint slides are almost not thinkable. The slides are guides through condensed knowledge and can make dull presenters appear lively.

Funny enough, some colleagues are so happy about mastering Microsoft's PowerPoint program that they plaster each slide with Copyright notices, even that contents have been pinched from someone else.

In the middle of these random thoughts arrived the following piece about "Powerpointing" by our dear colleague Bob Lewis, president of scenic Eden Prairie, Minnesota based IT Catalysts, Inc.:

"PowerPoint is no different from speaking - if someone's point is foolish, either will make the fact more public. So the first rule of good PowerPointing is the same as the first rule of speech: First, think.

Many bytes have been expended providing other PowerPoint guidelines. Some have provided marvelous self-referential warnings -- dull and poorly constructed presentations explaining how to avoid creating dull and poorly constructed presentations.

Most of the "rules" are, by the way, contextual. For example:

PowerPoint Rule: Never use anything smaller than a 16 point font. It's terrific advice, when you're building a presentation that will (a) be projected in a large room, (b) to an audience that has not received printed copies of the presentation, and (c) won't have access to a version that can be scrutinized later on.

Let's start over. PowerPoint and its competitors are more than packages for developing presentations that will be projected in a large room. They're general-purpose communications tools. Presentation software and word processing software differ in one important respect: Presentation software enforces a discipline of telling a complete story on each page.

That, in fact, is the only hard-and-fast rule of using presentation software correctly: Make each page tell a story.

A few other thoughts and notions:

Respect the tool. Presentation packages provide sophisticated facilities for helping you achieve consistent formatting. Take advantage of them. Use the Title placeholder to contain slide titles, the built-in, automated slide numbering feature instead of manually placing slide numbers at the bottom of each slide, and tab stops or separate text boxes instead of the space bar for fine positioning. Among the advantages: When you change templates, your slides will require less clean-up.

Don't use clip art to liven up slides. Inserting clip art of a detective with a magnifying glass onto a slide whose title is "A closer look," is something less than highly original. It was hokey the first time and hasn't improved since.

Do use illustrations to tell your story, instead of simple bulleted lists. A list of bullets is a fine way to present a handful of parallel ideas. A graphic gives you the opportunity to show their interrelationships as well. If, for example, your bullets present the sequence of seven steps you'll follow to complete an assignment, place seven boxes on the screen, positioned diagonally from upper left to lower right. Connect them with arrows -- right-angled ones that descend from the bottom mid-point of each box to the left-side mid-point of the next one. Label each box with one of the steps.

Have too much to say about each step for this format to work? Create a row of seven block arrows across the top of the slide and label those as the steps. Below each position a rectangle and put bullets in each to explain the specifics for each.

Use small fonts for fine points. Complex slides will sometimes require 10-point type. That's okay, so long as you provide print-outs to your audience. They can read the big-fonted labels on the screen to keep track, and the fine-pointed details on the printed page.

Don't just read your slides, except when you do. When a slide contains more than three bullets, say, "I want to focus your attention on a few points on this slide," and then do so. If it contains a complex graphic, all of which matters, say, "This slide is complicated. Let me walk you through it."

Sometimes, stop referring to your slides altogether and just talk to your audience. Your presentation is there to assist you, not to imprison you.

Use agenda slides. The first occurrence lets your audience know what to expect. Repeat it at transitions, bolding the upcoming topic. Doing so helps your audience keep track.

Never, ever apologize for your slides. If a slide contains a typographical error, your audience might find it mildly distracting. By apologizing you interrupt yourself, which is much more distracting.

Here's what matters most: Excellent PowerPoint presentations are, before anything else, storytelling. Good presentations have a narrative flow. Each slide follows naturally from the one that precedes it and leads naturally to the next one."

I hope you liked Bob's piece. If you intend to dive deep into Powerpointing, take a look at the great book "Beyond Bulletpoints" by Cliff Atkinson on our bookshelf, second page."

Ed Yourdon posted an interesting blog about Powerpointing and Mindmapping here

• Establish business intimacy
• Demonstrate knowledge and engender trust
• Demonstrate value add by use of BA's, their skills and tool sets
• Be pragmatic and practical in approaches to requirements and solutions
• Use good interviewing techniques which keep the interviewees interested in the project
• Maintain good relationships
• Escalate what you can't control

• Dictate solutions before analysis is done (sometime happens under vendor pressure)
• Similarly, no quick fix ("window shopping syndrome")
• Overemphasis on governance, process and documentation ("tick the boxes")
• Not concentrating on making the outcome happen
• Failure to adapt to new circumstances

Our colleague Bob Lewis, president of scenic Eden Prairie, Minnesota based IT Catalysts, Inc., did it again. He wrote a great article about business writing skills that we love to pass on.

BTW, if you live around Sydney⁄Wollongong, our friend and colleague Graeme Philipson, an experienced analyst and high-tech journalist, is offering business writing classes among many other professional services. Find GP here.

Here's Bob's grab-bag of mostly easy techniques that can help business writers (including ourselves) improve.

Avoid the passive voice. Of all the egregious sins of business writing, the passive voice is the most pervasive, and the most damaging. Sentences like, "A project will be chartered," are common, and awful.

Beyond their utility in inserting dullness, they compound the damage by preventing accountability: Everyone knows someone must charter the aforementioned project; use of the passive voice allows all readers to leave the doing of it to others.

This characteristic of the passive voice is, undoubtedly, what makes it so popular.

Support your statements. Follow assertions with at least three supporting facts or arguments, because: (1) doing so provides a compelling reason to agree; (2) even for those who disagree, three supporting statements demonstrates that those who agree aren't simply sheep; and (3) your ability to provide three separate reasons to accept the proposition demonstrates your clear-headedness.

See?

Avoid etc. When following an assertion with three supporting facts or arguments, don't make "etc." one of them, because "etc." doesn't support anything. It's equivalent to saying, "trust me" -- the favored phrase of those who sell used cars. Every time a writer uses "etc." to end a list, readers have every right to infer that he or she is intellectually lazy. If you find yourself tempted and can't simply stop the comma-separated list with its last concrete entry, replace "etc." with something more informative, like "... and other bits too numerous to mention."

Differentiate "less" and "fewer." Few among us really care if you say, "Less people use good grammar than bad," instead of "Fewer people use good grammar than bad." Nonetheless, getting this right makes you appear to be a clear thinker to just about every listener or reader, and with very little effort. The choice is easy: If the items are countable, use "fewer," otherwise use "less."

It's a minor point, (another is to never modify "unique" -- if you do, you should have said "rare" in the first place) whose primary value is what it helps you say about yourself.

Use your vocabulary. "Thing" appears far too often in the average business report, and only because the writer was too lazy to think of a more specific noun. The same can be said of "do" as a verb, and "good" and "bad" as adjectives. Careful word choice gives you the opportunity to make careful distinctions. Take a new application for example: Designing it is different from either describing it or engineering it.

So take the time to find the right word. It's an easy thing to do.

Avoid superfluous modifiers. Whenever possible, choose nouns and verbs that require no adjective or adverb to clarify them. When you do use a modifier, ask yourself if it adds information, or just length.

Keep paragraphs short. It's easy to get lost in a long paragraph. The blank space that separates paragraphs provides a visual marker that helps readers keep their place. The practical result: Readers only read the first few sentences of a long paragraph.

Order your thoughts. Streams of consciousness are self-indulgent. They give readers the impression that you're either unable to think clearly, too lazy to organize your thoughts so as to make them clear to others, or simply indifferent as to whether anyone else should care what you think. They say, "Here are a bunch of random notions I've had. It's up to you to make sense of them, although the only reason you should assume there's sense to be made of them is your personal affection for me."

No matter what you're trying to say, presenting your ideas in a logical order makes them credible. Failing to do so makes you, not incredible, but non-credible.

Organize your presentation. And use formatting to help readers follow the organization. Bullets keep separate, parallel thoughts separate and parallel. Headings and sub-headings help readers find what they're looking for. Boldface and italics isolate the most important ideas.

Every communication you produce serves two purposes. The first is its overt reason for existence -- to inform, persuade, or both. The second is to present yourself. This is more than exhibiting your talents in the best light. Each e-mail, memo or report is an opportunity to project whatever image you wish others to have of you. Creative, analytical, informed, imaginative, bold, careful ... the way you write conveys an image.

Take control of it.

We start this blog with a definition of Business Process Architecture (BPA): "BPA is a subset of Enterprise Architecture (EA) which is the practice of applying a comprehensive and rigorous framework for describing a current and⁄or future structure and behavior for an organization's processes, information systems, personnel and organizational sub-units, so that they align with the organization's core goals and strategic direction." 

Jared Diamond's brilliant book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed analyzes five ancient societies that imploded horribly, attempting to find insights useful for the modern, increasingly interconnected world.

Diamond identified five factors that lead to collapse. Always, the unsustainable overuse of environmental resources was one, and the society's failure to appropriately respond to early symptoms was another. They were sometimes coupled with climate change, the loss of a critical trading partner, or the presence of hostile neighbors -- singly or in combination.

Businesses being societies too, I thought it would be worthwhile trying to apply Diamond's conclusions to the world of business (did you wonder how I was going to justify the tax write-off for this book?).

Unsustainable overuse of environmental resources

Easter Island was the home of a thriving society that relied heavily on its extensive forests. Diamond asks, "What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it? Like modern loggers, did he shout 'Jobs, not trees!'? Or: 'Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we'll find a substitute for wood'? Or: 'We don't have proof that there aren't palm somewhere else on Easter, we need more research, your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering'?"

Now that you're either offended or delighted (depending on your political proclivities), take a step back and apply the question, not to global warming or depletion of the world's oil supply, but to the company in which you work. In business, the unsustainable use of environmental resources can take several forms.

For forest products and mining companies it's obvious, and part of the strategic plan (I hope!). It's just as real for companies that build growth on information technology that's inexpensive but can't scale. When too many customers overload it, the company gets a bad reputation and its customer base collapses.

It also fits the U. S. steel industry, which collapsed in the 1970s from failing to maintain and modernize its factories.

Climate change

One reason the Norse colony on Greenland failed is that the Norse settled Greenland during an abnormally warm and hospitable period. They based their society on the expectation that it would continue. When it turned cold, they were over-extended for the new conditions.

How many businesses only work in a hospitable economic climate, and collapse when it cools?

Loss of a critical trading partner

Pitcairn and Henderson islands hosted thriving societies for centuries. They depended on trade with each other and another island, Mangareva. For complex reasons the trade stopped and both societies died, unable to sustain themselves without it.

I'm reminded of the advertising agency responsible for the original "Speedy Alka Seltzer" campaign. The agency lost the Alka Seltzer account and failed. I've known systems integrators that suffered similar fates.

Companies that have outsourced IT, which has a high switching cost and lengthy transition, are also vulnerable. Imagine how many would die if EDS (for example) were to close its doors.

Presence of hostile neighbors

Hostile neighbors didn't cause any of the collapses Diamond documented, but contributed to some. In Norse Greenland, for example, the Norse worked hard to make their relationship with the Inuit hostile, and persistently failed to learn anything from them about how to build a sustainable society in Greenland's difficult environment. When the climate cooled, the Inuit were attackers instead of trading partners, contributing to the elimination of the always-small Norse population.

More broadly, history is filled with examples of societies that failed to anticipate the possibility of invasion: The Aztecs, for example, had no idea Spain even existed. A business parallel: How many hardware store chains failed because they never envisioned the type of competition that Home Depot and Lowes would create, and could not figure out how to respond to it?

Not to mention what's currently happening to Red Hat.

Societal response

Every Collapse is a story of unsustainable growth -- growth built on habits that led to the over-harvesting of one or more resources, reducing productivity while the society's success and population growth increased demand. All are also stories of clinging to invalid assumptions -- a failure to adapt to the necessities of the situation, often because of leaders who were distracted by the need to maintain their levels of privilege and demonstrations of prestige.

Some other societies -- Iceland, Japan and New Guinea, for example -- did develop sustainable societal solutions. The small societies worked "bottom-up." The larger ones were driven by leaders who took a long-term perspective.

The business parallels are too obvious to require explanation...