Jim SinurThere are a lot of forces behind BPM now. The expectation is for continued savings, but also innovation and better customer interactions, particularly over the mobile experience on the web. In addition BPM is starting to take advantage of its flexibility in new ways. BPM is shifting from “Doing by Design” to “Design by Doing” in its efforts to reach the knowledge worker.
![MPj04432360000[1]](http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/files/2010/04/WindowsLiveWriterBPMisShiftingintoHighGear_B89CMPj044323600001_2.jpg)
Doing by Design:
Traditionally processes are modeled and run until something new evolves and adds some new twists. The model is build for expected exceptions and has to be altered when the unexpected occurs. Though this is not as much of a drag on organizations as going through IT to fix applications or beating on application vendors, it takes valuable time and makes organizations appear to be unresponsive to constituents. This might be fine for routine work and normal roles, but the world is changing swiftly, so strategies and responses need to be ready to roll.
http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2010/04/26/process-modeling-doing-by-design/
Design by Doing
Some work is just not fully predictive and requires significant collaboration This is where case management has had some success, but I submit that it is not enough alone. We must be able to leverage process discovery technologies to find better practice patterns and offer alternatives for knowledge workers by observing successful evolving process patterns and giving knowledge workers a choice of multiple and dynamic patterns.
http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2010/05/02/design-by-doing-an-extension-to-bpm-behavior/
The Perfect Blend
I fully expect that the long running and “end to end” processes will employ both kind for process behaviors. The trick will be to know when a prepared and modeled snippet of process activity should be used instead of re-inventing the wheel and where flexible and free processes are necessary. We are on an exciting journey
Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Green Optimization Simulation Tags: BPM
18 responses so far ↓
1 uberVU - social comments April 22, 2010 at 6:02 pm
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2 BPM Quotes of the week « Adam Deane April 24, 2010 at 10:22 am
[...] the forces behind BPM – Jim Sinur BPM is starting to take advantage of its flexibility in new ways. BPM is shifting [...]
3 Jacob Ukelson, CTO ActionBase April 25, 2010 at 9:11 am
Jim,
I could agree more. The ability to actually discover what is going on beneath the covers in an emergent “Design by Doing” process is a very powerful notion.
Doing this means being able to let people work as they see appropriate, and track and monitor their work as it is being done – even when they do it outside BPM systems (e.g. in email and documents).
Being able to capture both types of processes (both structured and unpredictable) opens the way to a real enterprise wide “process warehouse” that can be leveraged for process understanding, optimization and analysis.
Jacob Ukelson, CTO ActionBase
4 BPMの進化について « 徒然モデリング April 26, 2010 at 9:06 am
[...] BPM is Shifting into High Gear [...]
5 Keith Swenson April 26, 2010 at 12:09 pm
Jim,
I really like the phrases “Doing by Design” and “Design by Doing”. I think that really helps get the concept across.
These are two very different methods for supporting office work. Each method is used by different people with very different skill sets, for ultimately different purposes, using tools with different user interfaces, and most likely different underlying data structures.
Doing by design is performed by a process expert on a predictable process, well in advance of use, and the goal there is to perfect the process so that it can be run thousands of times without fail. This practice is like programming, and requires all the simulating/testing/debugging capabilities that normally come with programming toolkits.
Design by Doing is about ease of use for non-technical people, without the need to perfect the process, but instead the ability to trow something together with minimal effort, on an unpredictable process and without needing to test / debug.
I worry that when you say it is “BPM” that is “Design by Doing” that people will think that they will be using something like the BPM systems they have today. For most people, BPM is synonymous with BPMN graphical notation, and do you really believe that people are going to use BPMN for the design by doing? BPMN has specific features and capabilities that make it more about design by design. Furthermore, many people (and many books) cite that the core of a BPM product should be BPEL, but in fact BPEL is nearly useless for the “Design by Doing” case … since BPEL, which is primarily about calling web services, is not a convenient paradigm for an office worker trying to get things done. You know I have argued for a long time that BPM can be far more than this, and I hope you are able to stretch BPM to include these concepts, but the public impression is strong that BPM is for programmers.
That is why I and many other have switched to calling the Design by Doing situation “Case Management”.
http://kswenson.wordpress.com/tag/adaptive-case-management/
-Keith
6 Process Modeling: Doing by Design April 26, 2010 at 8:52 pm
[...] ← BPM is Shifting into High Gear [...]
7 Jim Sinur April 26, 2010 at 9:54 pm
Case Management might be a good name for it, but it has baggage like workflow does. We do agree however that todays BPM will have it expand to include more social, unstructured and indeterminite process behavior.
8 Scott Francis April 27, 2010 at 11:36 am
like Jim, I see merit in 80% of what you said, Keith. But the fact that there exists a vocal BPEL advocacy group doesn’t make design by doing not a business process management discipline (in my view).
Also, Lean process advocates have been “design by doing” for a long time (I observed a really interesting manifestation of this at Boeing once) and in some cases they even used (gasp!) traditional BPM tools to aid in the process. You posit that there can be no code/testing/etc. But I’m not sure that everyone is interested in holding themselves to that standard of purity. The Lean folks we worked with had as the gold standard “no investment in tech until the process is right”. But for our white collar processes we had to have some tech involved. But we kept it VERY light while we worked out the right process, and we executed some fun swivel and paper-based portions while we worked out the flow of work.
We just have to remember there is a whole spectrum of what can be done to improve (or discover or build) processes, and not get locked into the “One True Answer”.
9 Alberto Manuel April 27, 2010 at 11:51 am
I don’t agree with Keith when he says that “BPM is synonymous with BPMN graphical notation”. Many people continue not to understand what BPMN is all about. Geeks say it’s mandatory to execute BPEL in order to authoring BPM processes inside a BPMS suite, but as I far my experience goes I never saw any BPM suite doing it magically without a lot of hard code work.
On the other hand, I see BPMN as a door to process oblivion, once people start using it incorrectly, I mean with all the stuff,and complex symbols attached (please don’t read 2.0 draft, because it is more and more complex). By the way, I tested IBM’s Lombardy that can’t import true BPMN diagrams. This means that BPMN never become a standard at all.
When designing something new, I prefer to use storyboards. I assemble a team with process facilitators, process members and end users. I take special care to user experience and end users voice using process walktrough. Nowadays I use less and less diagramming. I can use it for requirements specification. For process mashup I prefer storyboarding and I use raw forms I can design using the BPMS system.
10 Andrew Smith April 27, 2010 at 12:06 pm
This is a conversation on the web that has been going on for a while now. I have always been a strong supporter of Case Management for unstructured processes and ad-hoc situations. This is nothing new, nor really any new thinking…What is new, is BPM solutions that allow unstructured processing to build actual processes….BY that I mean BPM platforms that are highly adaptive…
This post looks at “design by doing”, but isnt this really a dulled down term / version of fully adaptive BPM? Processes emergine from actual users?
Essentially if a BPM platform can be adaptive, then it is very easy for the workforce to describe the process as they go. There has already been strong discussion on this kind of thinking – which can lead to BPM solutions without the fixed “design to work” process mapping tools.
You can join the discussion on adaptive BPM and no maps at
http://andrewonedegree.wordpress.com/2010/03/24/adaptive-bpm-no-mapping-tools/
Thanks for this post, I think this is an area where BPM really needs to improve – though I hope work to design doesnt catch on as a term…
11 Alberto Manuel April 27, 2010 at 4:00 pm
One last thought:
If you look only to process flows in order to identify process improvement opportunities you will miss most of them. Typically you will identify low hanging fruit, things like loops and duplication.
Regards.
12 Should We Redefine BPM? « Thoughts on Collaborative Planning April 28, 2010 at 2:43 pm
[...] Sinur wrote a couple of interesting blog posts recently mentioning two distinct types of [...]
13 Carole-Ann Matignon April 28, 2010 at 3:53 pm
Jim,
As always, another thought-provicative debate you initiate. I really like the terms you picked (like others in the comment thread here) because they do not have any loaded connotation — like BPM or Case Management. And yet, they are very telling.
I am looking for more conversation around the concept of “Design by Doing”… This is brilliant.
Carole-Ann Matignon
http://twitter.com/cmatignon
http://TechOnDec.wordpress.com
14 Design by Doing & Doing by Design « Thoughts on Collaborative Planning April 28, 2010 at 4:59 pm
[...] 28, 2010 · Leave a Comment Jim Sinur wrote a couple of interesting blog posts recently mentioning two distinct types of [...]
15 Keith April 28, 2010 at 9:08 pm
@Alberto: I *wish* that BPM was not synonymous with BPMN, and you make some very good points about BPMN. However, I am only saying that the “public” views it this way, and if we hope to communicate to the public at large, we need to use common terminology.
Also, really good point about the diagram not representing the most important opportunities for improvement.
@Andrew: design by doing is not just “BPM on the fly”. I agree case management is not new, but it is not just BPM with a lot of flexibility. See this post:
http://kswenson.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/design-by-doing-doing-by-design/
@Jim: agree that BPM suites are adding more social and support for unpredictable, and that is good. (Looking forward for a missive from you on Social BPM — soon?) BUT the “practice of case management” is not the same as the “practice of BPM” and will drive toward different configurations of the underlying technology.
http://kswenson.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/should-we-redefine-bpm/
@Scott: don’t understand the point about “standard of purity”. If a doctor draws up a treatment plan for a patient don’t expect the doctor to use a BPMN modeler and test the process the way a BPM professional would. If a judge wants to adjourn the case for the day don’t expect this to be done using a process modeler. If a lawyer wants to call for an injunction, don’t expect him to draw a BPMN diagram and test that it runs. Doctors, judges, and lawyers are the kinds of people who will be “designing by doing” and the kinds of tools they will use will not look like the BPM tools we are familiar with today. That is what I mean when I say it has to work without simulation and without testing / debugging.
http://kswenson.wordpress.com/tag/adaptive-case-management/
16 Redefining BPM? Who wants that? « Welcome to the Real (IT) World! April 29, 2010 at 5:00 am
[...] BPM? Who wants that? Various posts by David Moser, Keith Swenson and Jim Sinur have covered the subject of redefining the meaning of BPM or Business Process Management. I have [...]
17 Nobody Raises Their Hand | ActionBase Blog - Thoughts on Collaboration Process Management Unstructured Compliance and Audit April 30, 2010 at 12:15 pm
[...] for most knowledge workers. They consider their work (at least the important part of it) as “Design by Doing” as Jim Sinur so nicely worded it in his blog. BPM as they understand it (and I’m sure [...]
18 Design by Doing: An Extension to BPM Behavior May 2, 2010 at 4:00 pm
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