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BPM 2.0 Enables People in New Ways
By Jim Sinur | June 12, 2008
Traditionally, people have been an afterthought in business systems and processes. In a world of standard processes and well-accepted and automated best practices, this makes sense; maybe.
Today, the world is changing to require evolving work patterns and the enablement of people as they encounter unique/ new conditions that require rapid response without violating governance and accomplishing stretch goals. Learning the evolving best practices, evolving polices and business conditions will be the economic driver to reach for BPM 2.0.
The BPMS took us down the road to help some of these evolving conditions, but a more people-centric process environment needs to be added to the BPM platform. I would call this a people-oriented architecture (POA), but we shall see what the pundits call this. (See Democracy: AKA Collaborative BPM).
People Need a Personal Workspace:
There is a need to allow people to create their own work environment around the intersection of the job roles that they are fulfilling at the moment. This implies a dynamic and easy-to-use workbench that delivers an awesome user experience balanced with productivity assists and suggestions. This could mean working in a different visual 3D way that goes beyond traditional portals and BPM work lists to leveraging mashups and animation. I expect to see some real creative people-interaction environments popping up within the next year or so combined with BPM.
People Need to Connect:
To handle the issues facing the people who are managing and executing processes, there is a requirement to support collective intelligence that leverages the right roles, the expertise, the reputation and knowledge of individuals to form a collective team. The new BPM will have to intelligently identify the right people with the right reputation and situational successes, understand their preferred way of communication, their availability and their access to the tight resources in order to deal with a problem within a time window needed to attain specific goals. I imagine that unanticipated communities will sprout with this kind enablement.
People Need an Understood Presence:
It is imperative that the new BPM understands who the individuals are and the current state of their connected presence so that the proper team can be assembled. I believe this will happen through rich participant profiles and tagging.
The profiles will contain current and past roles, skills, interests and backgrounds leveraging profiling techniques that employ user specification, system attributes, feedback and mining techniques. Connected presence will show what people are doing at the moment, what is the participants preferred channel matched to what is the best available channel, the need for recording and the estimated length of interaction time.
People Need Context:
The real leverage for influencing performance lies in the feedback structures that generate events and patterns within the context of the process and the environments the people and their supporting processes are operating in at the moment. Great care will need to be applied so as not to react to the present state to the detriment a balanced set of goals . The new BPM must support trending, correlation, instant feedback for precursor events for anticipated outcomes, understand the consequences of actions, anticipate delayed effects, improve mental maps/best practices, deliver better anticipation, and improve collaboration outcomes. This is an evolving science around decision management that leverages policies, rules, data, information, content, knowledge and complex events.
People Need Guidance:
People need to constantly make progress towards goals while learning new skills/behaviors without going out of bounds leveraging the best/current information. For the early experiences with process one could imagine leveraging E learning, Wikis and content. Advanced participants will additionally need advanced search, blogs, bookmarking, social tagging and team collaboration. Both kinds of participants will need to be guided by polices and constraints established by management and trained on how to recognize the need to provide feedback to the policy makers.
Bottom Line:
BPM has to change to enable knowledge workers, and the requirements are fairly demanding. The benefits to organizations that want to differentiate themselves is incalculable, but identifying repeating best practices for evolving conditions will certainly suffice for a cost benefit. Making people more productive in a dynamic world that requires a personal touch is the stuff that drives the GNP of countries and the bottom lines of organizations.
Topics: BPM |