There is the age old argument around technology and history. Does technology drive history? Those who purport this approach would say that railroads enabled America to expand, cars enabled a freedom that matches democracy, that air travel shrunk the world and enabled multinational business and the Internet created the purest form of competition. Those who do not ascribe to technology driving history say that technology responds to a need thus engendering innovative technologies. In fact, there are some business process improvement folks that say that technology is completely unnecessary for great improvement in processes.
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We Don’t Need Any Stinking Technology:
There are many ways of gleaning process benefits that do not involve technology. All one needs is a white board and a felt tip pen to document the existing process in a process discovery meeting and identify extra process steps and unnecessary error cycles. If the process gets real complicated, fill the room with yellow stickies and try different process alternatives. There is a tremendous opportunity to save money and increase productivity without a lick of BPM technologies. If your organization wants to really make some noise without technology, perform a value chain analysis and look across the functional areas and organizations to look for shared processes. In addition linking strategic outcomes to process goals will also drive significant benefits.
Are You Joking?
How in the world will you collaborate with the resulting processes across a large enterprise without some business process technology? What happens if a couple of your yellow stickies fall off the wall? How can you deal without simulating different alternatives? It is naive to think that a process of any complexity can be understood without some edits, cross checks and/or sensitivity of potential changes. Even if you can come up with the ultimate process without technology, how are you going to execute them these days without technologies? Unless you have excess and cheap labor sitting around, how can these processes be implemented? Processes have to be listening for constant signals to keep them in tune in context. There are not enough eyes and brains to keep them going with only human effort.
I believe that there can be great gains in process productivity without technology, but in order to sustain continued improvement with better human interactions without costly labor, we need technology specifically business process technology. There is a codependency that is good as long as the balance is monitored
5 responses so far ↓
1 Jacob Ukelson // Jul 8, 2009 at 4:49 am
Jim,
I think it is the difference between being able to incremently improve your process (something that can, and should be done with no technology), and the ability to fundamentally change your processes, how you think about them and how they are handled.
Adopting the appropriate process technologies enables companies to start thinking about their processes in new ways – and I am sure some of that thinking will enable business breakthroughs – something that an incremental approach usually lacks. In the meantime they benefit from more efficient approachs to their current processes.
2 Frank Castellucci // Jul 9, 2009 at 1:14 am
While I agree 100% that you can seriously accomplish significant gains in process improvement, to dismiss technology except for BPM technology seems, well, naive.
Let’s get primitive. Email is a technology that can positively expedite the hand offs between activities, especially if the “as-is” has people getting up from their desk and walking up a flight of stairs to deliver a purchase order!
Technology is here and should be utilized in whatever form makes sense when developing the “to-be” model. To discard it from the solution would be irresponsible.
3 Matthew Lennarz // Jul 10, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Jim,
The Lean Six Sigma methodology provides a good framework for looking at process improvement. Lean is all about eliminiating waste, reducing errors, and streamlining processes, typically without any technology; while Six Sigma can provide a model to identify defects, their root causes, and potential solutions, including automating processes. In that context, Lean is about process improvement without technology, and Six Sigma includes automating processes with technology.
4 Jim Sinur // Jul 10, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Thanks for your comment. I am very familiar with combination of lean and six sigma. The DMIAC approach is common in manufacturing. There are other apporaches that can lean to similar results. Some folks are very attached to the Rummler Brache aporrach and others use an extended variant of Information Engineering.
5 Steve Bogner // Jul 13, 2009 at 4:25 pm
In some companies, the processes are so bad that you can do quite a bit of improvement without any technology at all. I think you do get to a ceiling, though, above which you really need technology to get additional gains.
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