Jim Sinur

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Jim Sinur
Research VP
2 years at Gartner
42 years IT industry

Jim Sinur is a vice president in Gartner Research after a short stint with a BPM vendor. Prior to that, Mr. Sinur was with Gartner 15 years and helped establish the BPI/BPM areas at Gartner and is considered a thought leader. His research and areas… Read Full Bio

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Resolving Process Conflicts at the Edge

by Jim Sinur  |  June 19, 2011  |  1 Comment

While processes have proven that they save money and time, they also introduce challenges at the boundaries where they interact with other processes, applications and people roles. See for processes at the edge. http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2011/06/13/process-opportunities-are-around-the-edges/ It can be a real bear to resolve goal and role conflicts between processes, people and organizations.

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Processes should be more about “we” than “me”:

Processes do make things more repeatable plus efficient and are great at coordinating resources within their respective scopes. The challenge, however, is that process designers have a hard time envisioning the full contexts in which these processes are likely to “run in” and spend little time thinking about process to process resolution. Now it is not reasonable to predict every potential interaction, context and reaction, but more thought should be aimed at anticipating the base interactions.

Watching Patterns of interactions can give clues: 

Some managers like to implement and evolve, but the really smart ones anticipate likely interactions for the major friction points and let the rest evolve. This is why discovering patterns of behavior and interaction is so important. This is particularly helpful where there is no structure for some behaviors. One can use automatic business process discovery and social network analysis for some of these patterns.

Net-Net:

If organizations really want to include/combine processes in bigger “end to end” processes like value and supply chains to service business networks, they need to get better at this emerging issue.

1 Comment »

Category: Applications BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Cloud EA ERP Green Optimization Simulation Social Strategic Planning Virtualization     Tags: , , , ,

1 response so far ↓

  • 1 Chris Taylor   June 19, 2011 at 4:53 pm

    This challenge of ‘process at the edges’ is made tougher when the organization lacks the ability to put process into a larger context so that it becomes end-to-end. If an organization takes the time to implement a framework, they’ve taken a first step toward having context for how things are done. The second step should be to keep every process in a centralized place with visibility for those who need it. That creates a communication platform that can enable conversation that help fix the friction at the edges. While these seem very basic, most large organizations don’t have this pattern in place.