Jim SinurThis is going to be a fun blog because there will likely be reaction to this one. I liken BPM journey to states of water. Today processes are like ice slowly melting so that the molecules are more flexible. BPM will become a combination of solid, liquid and gas, all at the same time. Process modeling (Doing by Design) generally represents the solid BPM that softens over time to adapt to changing conditions. http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2010/04/26/process-modeling-doing-by-design/
![MPj04422460000[1]](http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/files/2010/05/WindowsLiveWriterDesignbyDoingAnExtensiontoBPMBehavior_B614MPj044224600001_2.jpg)
As BPM picks up more “Design by Doing “aspects, BPM will reach new audiences such as knowledge workers at various levels in the organization. Gartner is calling this kind of BPM “Social BPM” as discovery and enablement of interactions becomes more important and prevalent.
In processes that are purely collaborative and dynamic, the process goes where it wants, guided by knowledge workers as long as it stays within constraints (special kind of polices and rules) and stays “on point to the desired KPIs. Afterwards the process paths, collaborations and collisions with constraints can be tracked in automated way to discover repeatable success patterns, better practices and worst practices. This, in turn, will give knowledge workers information on patterns that are successful leveraging creative collaboration with individuals within, an organization, within a value chain , specialists outside an organization and sometimes the collective. This kind of discovery is what I call “design by doing” aided by automated process discovery technologies and social BPM that can offer alternatives and additional knowledge for high level knowledge workers.
Some folks in the industry would call this “case management”, but I think folks are trying to fit an older technology pattern to something new and emerging. Calling it “Adaptive Case Management” is better, but it still falls short in describing where BPM is heading.
http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2010/04/22/bpm-is-shifting-into-high-gear/
Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Green Optimization Simulation Tags: BPM, Business Rules, Green, Optimization, Simulation
6 responses so far ↓
1 BPM is Shifting into High Gear May 2, 2010 at 4:01 pm
[...] http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2010/05/02/design-by-doing-an-extension-to-bpm-behavior/ [...]
2 Conceptguy » Blog Archive » Design by Doing: An Extension to BPM Behavior May 2, 2010 at 7:25 pm
[...] See original here: Design by Doing: An Extension to BPM Behavior [...]
3 Keith May 3, 2010 at 1:33 pm
You can talk to people who have lived for generations in the tropics about what it is like to live in arctic. You can explain logically that snow and ice are just “solid water”, but it is very hard for those people to understand exactly what this means. You can show them cubes of ice, and sno-cones, but it will be very hard to anticipate what effect this will have on architecture, on transportation, and on day to day life. You can say a glacier is “just a frozen river” but the practical knowledge necessary (stay away from crevasses) you would never know from experience with a (liquid) river. Most tropical inhabitants won’t grasp initially that you can die from dehydration in the middle of a snow field.
You are right, there is a logical continuum from water to ice if you are a chemist, but the way that water and ice are handled by people, the technologies around them, and all the practical experience you gain are completely different between water and ice. Those with experience constructing structures out of ice (igloos) will find that knowledge useless in the tropics.
I know where you are coming from by presenting BPM as an umbrella over all this. If you succeed in getting the public to understand this, then I can support it. But, there is significant danger of gross misunderstanding by saying that “design by doing” is just “flexible BPM.” People won’t understand that most of the experience they have gained in the “predictable process BPM” is invalid and useless in the “unpredictable process” realm. How can we make this clear? Most BPM vendors have been selling the “flexibility of BPM” for years, so they are likely to say this is nothing new.
But only time will tell, as the bitter winter of BPM thaws into something new and exciting — and decidedly warmer.
http://kswenson.wordpress.com/tag/adaptive-case-management/
4 Dave Duggal May 5, 2010 at 9:14 am
This has been a great series of posts. I thought the ‘perfect blend’ comment from your April 22nd post distilled the challenge and future well – “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.”
This flexibility represents a phase change from fixed flowchart based process technologies, which makes me sympathetic to Keith’s point about the BPM as a catch-all term blurring the distinction.
While its hard to believe that the very broad and descriptive phrase Business Process Management will ever go away, we do need to highlight these discrete new capabilities.
We might be best served by highlighting the technical distinctions between traditional flowchart driven technologies and new approaches, as that could potentially add meaningful clarity for the market.
I submit that the underlying technical change is one from fixed idealized abstractions of a process to the root transaction of the web – interactions. This is an atomic approach where processes are built from steps, instead of steps being predefined parts of a process.
This granular decomposition allows each step to be informed by the context of the interaction, so policies can be applied, and the response can be custom made-to-order for the circumstance.
The Case paradigm is then used to bring order to group of related unstructured and structured interactions (‘process snippets’).
This is certainly more than BPM(N) plus, but maybe it is most simply called new and improved Case Management. In either case, I’m glad its getting the attention.
5 The Knowledge Between Your Ears « Welcome to the Real (IT) World! May 15, 2010 at 10:50 am
[...] I have spent this weekend reading views on the future of BPM by Janelle Hill on workflow, Jim Sinur on ‘Design by Doing’, Alexander Peters on COEs, Connie Moore on BPMS, Keith Swenson on ACM, Sandra Kemsley on CM, and I [...]
6 With an EYE on Goals « Papyrus Platform Architecture May 16, 2010 at 9:08 am
[...] the approach chosen by Social-BPM or other collaborative process design tools, Papyrus pushes for ‘Design by Doing’ where the users are empowered to create processes interactively without analysis and then can [...]