PBS & BPM Today:

The maturity of most organization’s, today is around continuous process improvement that is “eye ball” change driven. Process directors/managers watch the outcomes of processes and tweak the workloads and outcomes to match to the goals and policies that executive management have established.. The changes need to support the adapt portion of the PBS cycle in an optempo fashion are pretty much manual, but some BPM capabilities can model alternatives with inline simulation leveraging a “champion – challenger” method to see the impact of potential changes. This will suffice for now, but there is more to come.

PBS and BPM Tomorrow:

BPM, in the future, will be goal driven and will orient itself around goals; ergo reduce the amount of manual changes. In addition process will become more plugged into events both inside and outside the processes, so that processes will become more context aware. In addition, processes are becoming more collaborative, unstructured and plugged into the collective. We are seeing the beginning signs of each of these individually in many vendors forward looking plans. There are a few that will combine many features to support the above, starting in mid 2010. .

A Better Work Experience:

While BPM has proven itself easy to use on the modeling and measurement sides, but there is an increased demand for logical workbenches that are designed by work role with personal customizations. This work experience goes beyond the typical portal experience, but extends that experience to include skills, workload, resource availability and cross process work status in various formats (visual, text, worklists, score card etc.)

Unstructured Processes:

BPM is moving to more aggressively support knowledge workers whose work tends not to be predictive in nature. There is a need to include more collaborative behaviors in process management that will likely leverage social design and processes that can’t be easily modeled. While there may be snippets of modeled process in the end to end process, the overall process will tend to be indeterminate for the knowledge worker.

Discovering Better Practices:

The agility found in BPM is a natural for delivering better practices in its journey to best practices (even if BPM is surrounding a back plane of best practice application services/components). This capability becomes essential in discovering the better behavior of knowledge workers as they drive to desired outcomes in a collaborative fashion.

Pattern Seeking/Sensing Tied to Near Real Time Agility:

The agility usually built into BPM execution technology begs for better management and use. One such method is business rules management that can link scenarios to policies to logical and physical business rules, limitations and tolerances. The other is tying process executions to pattern seeking methods and technologies to keep processes sharply tuned to the context it is running in at any given moment.

Inclusion of Optimization in Seek, Model and Adapt behaviors:

Business Pattern Strategies (BPS) needs to leverage various optimization algorithms in seeking opportunities for decisions to adjust resources including processes. Predictive analysis is an example of one of these algorithms that play well in the seek cycle. Modeling and adapt alternatives also use optimization capabilities such as inline simulation> Interest is growing in how to apply the right optimization technique at the right time.

See past posting  :http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/07/29/bpm-not-only-saves-money-it-is-visually-appealing/

There are two additional areas of usability that go beyond the suite spot of today’s BPM providers. In order to continue mining BPM benefits, which are attaining benefits in the multiple millions for the early adopters, new features that enhance the work experience and unstructured processes will need to emerge going forward.

Enhancing the Work Experience:

BPM has to go beyond just the worklist paradigm to create a better work experience. Yes combining BPM with a portal is a good thing, but there is more expected of the BPM vendors, There is an expectation that the work in a worklist have context and options. This mean that the actual activity scheduled can be viewed in context of the process and all the options available to the worker are pictured in a visual sense. This means that all of the reliable helpers necessary to collaborate on activity is visible in a priority order. This also means that any support videos, forms, available resources with skills/experience profiles, better/best practices, training and help be available in an easy to digest fashion. Managers should also visually understand resource loading, productivity and quality ratings of the resources brought to fore for any activity or groups of activity. There is a ton of opportunity for making the work experience easy and superior.

See a previous posting on the workbench experience :http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/06/25/bpm-based-workbenches-a-notch-above-portals/

Including Unstructured Activity:

Today BPM is really into preplanned and rigid process models. While the underlying technologies are agile and explicit rules and processes are being leveraged, process models need to move from fixed to variable behavior. This will probably start with collaboration points in a mostly fixed process, work to loosely bound process snippets to dynamically created and executed flows that are bound by governance constraints. These kind of processes allow for BPM to extend its benefits to a larger group of work activity that is not so predictable. This will likely include collaboration across organizations and into value chains that touch different legal entities.

See for a previous posting on unstructured processes http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/08/06/getting-painted-in-a-corner-by-structured-business-processes/

In order to reach to new heights, BPM will have to evolve have better and unstructured work experiences.

Best Practices Should be the Goal

It’s so much easier just to buy pre-built best practices than anything and deal with changes as they come. Sure these best practices will have to be maintained and extended over time, why not start with the best known practices and surround them as needed. Packages are getting better at up grades, so why switch to BPM? Just surround best practices with BPM extensions. The world is static enough to stick with this strategy.

Better Practices are More Practical

BPM delivers ideal approaches to sneak up on best practices by starting with a “good enough” process and have the process evolve to the best practice over time. If the target for best practices changes, because of changes in the business environment, your better practices are moldable and changeable along the way. The BPM approaches avoid “lock-in” and surround strategies. You are not stuck with major application upgrades and inflexible technology bases. If you want to start with a more solid better practice, you can model and simulate processes alternatives ahead of time. You can even leverage automated process discovery to shorten the modeling efforts and use live cases

While not all aspects of a business process are volatile, it is hard to predict where the volatility will strike precisely. This is why BPM powered by BPM technologies comes into play. They are built for change. You can make them even better by leveraging “jump start” frameworks/templates of better practices that can evolve to “Your” best practices. Keep in mind these are not mutually exclusive ideas.

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/03/03/double-your-pleasure-application-packages-and-bpm-together/

Twitter-Trivia:

This stuff is pretty funny at first. People start twittering on how they need to clip their finger nails, the experience of bad gas they had after eating artichokes, or certain color neon lights cause them angst in full moonlight. You see certain individuals do this time after time. Maybe if it was Brad Pitt or Meg Ryan, someone would care, but most of the folks twittering are just not that interesting, If you have that much time to do “naval gazing” maybe you need to try something different like: “GET A LIFE”!!!! I’m feeling better already

Minutia-Trivia

I never find this stuff funny at all. There are some people, in life, that think that finding errors instead of thinking up cool new stuff or helping people be successful and happy is the way to win friends and influence people.. They go around and “Nit Pick” everything they see and usually have a “Cheshire Cat” grin on their face because they caught something wrong. If these people would all become editors and practice this approach, everything would be fine, but we all know they like it haunting those that are trying to move the ball forward. Remember “Any mule can kick down the barn, but it takes someone smart to build one”. Again “GET A LIFE” !!!! I’m feeling quite elated now.

Now that I’m back into the path of Karma, I want to apologize if I offended any one and was not perfectly politically correct. “GET A LIFE” 

I always wanted to be a “Parrot Head”, listen to Jimmy Buffet songs and sip Island drinks all day, but the workaholic in me beat me into submission. Tweeting is a start down the “bird path”. If my next painting commission wasn’t a cactus, I might paint a parrot as well to take me further down the bird path. Anyway, I will be practicing the Island drinks thing on St Maarten this coming spring, so my dream is closer than I think

I would propose we need to start thinking about unexpected exceptions and processes that are less structured (unstructured) to adapt to change and to include work that is more fluid. There are a whole lot of benefits in dealing with unstructured processes.

Unstructured Processes for Knowledge Workers

There is a huge opportunity for benefits in enabling Knowledge workers with collaborative and dynamic communications technologies that are tied to processes. Today Knowledge workers leverage structures process and collaboration technologies/features in a vacuum. There is little that brings these things together in a workbench pattern for job types. By combining snippets of structured activity and unstructured activity in a hybrid unstructured process, money can be saved enabling knowledge worker productivity.

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/01/15/knowledge-workers-and-unstructured-processes-go-together-like-wine-and-cheese/

Unstructured Process for Goal Attainment:

Process may have to flex as goals change, so coupling dynamic goals with dynamic and unstructured processes will allow the change of process composition, sequence and outcomes. This may be accomplished by management decisions supercharged by optimization technologies and decision platforms that learn toward a more real time nature. The decisions and goals could easily be affected by complex market events and management responses or a trend in an organizations collective customer/prospect base.

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/20/oh-process-how-do-you-flow/

Unstructured Processes for Examining Best Practices

By observing unstructured process, with technologies deemed as automated business process discovery focused, organizations can organically evolve best practices and change them dynamically. This is opposed to frozen best practices in purchased or built applications and structured BPM processes. This is a new area that is just starting to unfold, but I predict good growth as we migrate to unstructured processes.

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/03/12/automated-business-process-discovery-helps-visually-optimize-processes/

Structured BPM processes can play a part as a useful snippet of activity and the resulting cementing of certain best practices for those employing unstructured activity. This is a very exciting new area of growth for BPM.

Let’s think about where most organizations start with BPM. They either want to model their processes visually to see the reality of their processes and get hooked on trying to make them better while more visually appealing or they want to monitor them to have some technology draw a jump start model. It’s because for the most part humans are stimulated through their visual senses. It could be good looking people, good looking fashion, sleek cars, environmentally seductive home sites, art on the walls at home and the beauty of a little child. Face it, BPM is just good looking. Some times it’s difficult to differentiate vendor offerings because they do stimulate the visual senses, but believe me, there are lots of differences. While the modeling and business activity monitoring components are quite similar, there are significant differences in how each vendor deals with agility, optimization and change.

While BPM has not reached semiotic perfection, it is moving towards visual beauty. As optimization techniques start to include more sophisticated optimization algos (mathematical algorithms) to help organizations get more out of their processes, they will unwittingly move to math that can generate artistic forms. The recent IBM acquisition of SPSS adds the power of predictive analytics. Examples include fractals. I have tried to paint one myself as my first painting project.

See: http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2008/12/19/happy-holidays-fantasies-and-fractals-dance-in-jims-head/

I have to admit that I am biased as a budding artist toward the visual world. See some more of my stuff:

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/05/28/setting-a-foundation-for-bpm-extends-jump-start-benefits/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/02/10/trees-on-my-mind/

I believe that competing with BPM will lead to gaming interfaces to represent the power of the BPM adventure. Tomorrows leaders will come with a bent towards gaming and I bet BPM picks it up. Since I really believe that BPM will become more visual and two of my sons, Andy and Dave, are in the games industry I have dug into computer animation. The first foray was in a movie that I produced where my son did some of the special effects (The Falls)

See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382687/

I believe one of the subtle reasons that BPM moves forward is its evolving visual appeal. Visual appeal is a pursuit worthy of the journey in my biased opinion.

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/03/31/processes-enable-early-warning-for-emerging-business-scenarios/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/04/20/oh-process-how-do-you-flow/

Pro:

We are living in a fast changing world where markets, geo-political, partner networks and competitors are in constant change. The Internet powered by cloud will allow for the creation of competition quickly. This calls for the institution of creative scenario planning and the listening for signals that might lead to the cataloged response to these scenarios. Even if these scenarios are not planned and events dictate change, goal driven flows will be necessary going forward. This will put a premium on rapid response, acute listening and creative scenario creation. These are skills that are starting to emerge in organizations today. Ignore this trend at your own peril.

Con;

Just because most of were surprised by events like the financial adjustment and several switches in business environment should not lead to huge problems. Business value chains are still in tact and we have plenty of time to adjust. We are working our way out the latest financial crisis. We will learn and adjust our policies to deal with things. Yes, we may have to make better forward looking decisions (more up tempo), but why waste all this time planning for conditions that may never happen? There is no need to be paranoid and business will always find a way to survive.

I believe that it may take another round of events to shake the “Con view” towards scenario planning linked to process responses to environmental changes, but there is an increased premium on searching for potentially impact laden events and planning for outlying conditions

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