Jim SinurTraditionally, people have been an afterthought in business systems and processes. In a world of standard processes and well accepted/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 going forward 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 platforms
![MPj04225930000[1]](http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/files/2009/06/windowslivewriterbpmenablespeople-dc2cmpj042259300001-2.jpg)
People Need a Personal Workspace:
There is a need 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 be needed to be applied as to 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, events, 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.
BPM has to expand 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 personal productivity, the GNP of countries and the bottom lines of organizations.
Related posts:
http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/16/social-nets-and-bpm/
http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2008/12/02/collaboration-is-where-bpm-should-shine/
http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2008/09/23/the-challenge-of-bpm-for-knowledge-workers/
Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Tags: BPM, Business Process Improvement
7 responses so far ↓
1 Jerome Breche June 2, 2009 at 11:10 pm
Very well put. The component is critical and, as the article states, often an afterthought.
While it’s not BPM-focused, the same afterthought realization is what drove the creation of TimZon which I like to think is one of the “creative people interaction environments” that will help refocus on people.
It’s a visual collaboration solution specifically focused on helping teams interact through recorded conversations.
The idea is to create a face-to-face like interaction a la a video conference, but with the convenience of email.
I would be very interested in your feedback on this solution.
Regards,
Jerome.
2 Jim Sinur June 3, 2009 at 5:57 am
Jerome,
Any method that would help people disciver best practices for collaboration, process discovery and/or knowledge acquisition would be helpdful. I have used similar techniques in the past with crude technologies with some success. Thanks for your helpful comment
Jim
3 David Davies June 3, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Jim
Very interesting insights. What you are describing echoes what we are seeing as a key application of enterprise mashups to plug a gap in BPM projects that rely on user performance.
As you say, portals and worklists can only go so far, and in many cases we see users relying on “swivel chair integration” across the other systems they need to perform their tasks, meaning that critical activities take place in a zone that is outside the scope of – and thus invisible to – the BPM solution. Enterprise mashups can eliminate these “black holes”, by combining application building blocks in a way that is analogous to applying process orchestration to the user interface. The result is that crucial human activities can now be as visible, streamlined and controlled as the rest of the business process.
It would be great to know if you are seeing mashups used in this way.
4 Jacob Ukelson June 4, 2009 at 8:18 am
Jim,
Hi. I think I could summarize some of the requirements you list above as “Google Wave for the Enterprise” (anyone who hasn’t seen the demo of google wave can view it here http://wave.google.com/). If you look past the different terminology I think a lot of the concepts are similar to what you are suggesting (though without the BI capabilities). Google wave is too web 2.0 oriented (webmail, wikis, blogs, IM) and missing some basic enterprise features for wide spread enterprise adoption in the next 5 years – but I think the idea of linking documents, email, conversations and content collaboration is right on. I was struck by how much of the thinking described in the Wave video is similar to the way we view unstructured business processes at ActionBase (www.actionbase.com) and how we handle them through email and documents. I do think ActionBase is the closest thing that exists today as an enterprise version of Google Wave.
5 Steve Ardire June 5, 2009 at 2:56 pm
> Google wave is too web 2.0 oriented (webmail, wikis, blogs, IM) and missing some basic enterprise features for wide spread enterprise adoption in the next 5 years
Hi Jacob – Gee that sounds similar to what Ray Ozzie said about Google Wave. I also think he believes Groove which will be incorporated into Sharepoint is closest thing to Google Wave
6 Ian Gotts June 8, 2009 at 3:10 am
Jim
Couldn’t agree more. As you know this is the key proposition behind Nimbus http://www.nimbuspartners.com
Interstingly the demand is for access on mobile devicves (iPhone, WM6) and different ways of accessing process related content such as ‘training walkthroughs’
7 Sylvain Astier July 2, 2009 at 5:18 pm
Thanks for your post. I can’t help thinking this is the kind of article that initiates a paradigm shift in an industry. And gosh, do we need one in BPM! To paraphrase Harrison-Broninski, we have to stop treating humans like another cog in our BPM systems. Obviously, standards bodies such as OMG or OASIS already realize this–they’ve improved the human role in standards such as BPMN 2.0 and BPEL and participated in early discussions on case management, et al.
Home computing has revolutionized the world of professional software. Knowledge workers refused to spend eight hours a day on interfaces less attractive (and often less reactive) than the websites they used at home. So we software vendors had to rise to the challenge and produce a new breed of software interfaces. Then Web 2.0 came into play, and we had to adapt once again. But that time it was different, because Web 2.0 included social networking aspects.
Everything one can do at home using Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, et al. can certainly benefit one’s work. So we are moving from traditional portals to real collaborative systems taking into consideration the different dimensions you have identified.
Also, if you don’t mind, I would add one more dimension to your list: people need ownership of their documents, their communities, their reputation networks, etc.
Thanks, Jim, for sharing your insights and thoughts with us.
Sylvain Astier
Product Manager, BPM
Axway