Frank Michael Kraft's Blog

It is a pleasure for me to announce this new book “Mastering the Unpredictable: How Adaptive Case Management will revolutionize the way that knowledge workers get things done”.

Knowledge worker productivity is the biggest of the 21st century management challenges. In the developed countries it is their first survival requirement. In no other way can the developed countries hope to maintain themselves, let alone to maintain their leadership and their standards of living.” – Peter F. Drucker

The facilitation of the knowledge workers and knowledge work, what is increasingly known as “Case Management,” represents the next imperative in office automation. The desire to facilitate work within the workplace is not new, yet recent advances in Information Technology make the management of unpredictable circumstances now a practical reality.

Over the course of the past few months there has been a groundswell of interest in a more flexible, dynamic approach to supporting work. Here are examples of what recognized experts have recently written on the topic:

“Advancing to support more knowledge work is the goal of many organizations, thus there is a new swell of activity around unstructured processes.” – Gartner VP of Research, Jim Sinur, Jan 2009

“I think a sea change is coming in the process world.” – Forrester Research Vice President, Connie Moore, July 2009

The sea of change Connie Moore refers to toward technology which is able to support knowledge workers. The work of a knowledge worker is by its nature unpredictable and can not be handled by more formalized process definition techniques.

For executives and managers of knowledge workers, Mastering the Unpredictable:

• Explains the need, and why previous trends don’t meet the need
• Explains the current technology gap, and the new technology that is coming to fill the gap
• Lays out the options have at their disposal to increase efficiency of their organization
• Equips them to best take advantage of this evolving trend

The book is a collaborative work of authors from industry which are process experts and thought leaders. The chapter I have written is titled “Improving Knowledge Work”. This is the chapter description:

Elsewhere in this book, the challenges facing an increasing number of knowledge workers are discussed. This book is about how information technology can leverage the abilities of individual knowledge workers. This is not about individual tools; it is about a holistic approach: Adaptive Case Management (ACM). But the approach will only work if individual knowledge workers draw immediate benefit from it. In this chapter, I argue that knowledge work will become easier, more fluent, if the right technology is provided. This is the basis for success within a network of knowledge workers, which in turn will yield the return on investment for the companies they work for. To accomplish this, the characteristics of knowledge work must be directly reflected within the information technology so that the use of such technology feels natural. I will discuss the technology needed to achieve this goal. In closing, I will sketch the full long-term potential for ACM.

It should be possible to pre-order soon at Amazon.

Usually I leave the predictions to analysts and prophets. That’s because it is so much work to achieve, what they already have predicted – or to find out, that it did not work.

Nevertheless this is a conviction, that has grown over time and a goal to which I can even see the path to the solution already now.

My prediction is, that in the future there will not be Applications on the one side and Business Process Management on the other side. But Business Process Management enabled Applications.

My prediction is, that in the future, there will not be the decision “Should I implement it as an Application or model it in a Business Process Management Suite?” any more. Because with BPM enabled Applications this is the same thing.

Business Objects will be Process Objects and Processes will be Business Objects.

And it will solve many of the discontinuities we have today trying to unify the two worlds.

This is my prediction.

Understanding Modeling Element of a modeling language – like BPMN 2.0 – is a necessary condition for successful modeling, but by no means sufficient.

Models must have a meaning within a context in the end, otherwise they are useless. For example what does a model mean, where there are acitivies like “go to the shop” and “buy some milk” and “pay”? It is a modeled description of what a person sometimes does, if he needs milk. But nothing else. The process model is to be used as documentation only. This is the context of the model. Such a model can not be used as a workflow. There is no need to create a workitem “pay” for buying milk. This is done by the shop’s design anyway. Also it can not be a web service orchestration description, because there is no web service “go to the shop”.

Modeling a process makes sense, if the context is know, in which the process will be embedded. The context is what I call an architecture. An architecture is a set of rules that determine under which boundary conditions a software system is to be designed. As part of such a design the design of a process makes sense. For example the architecture could be to design a system that is capable of performing the functionality of a milk web shop, that milk order and milk delivery are business objects that expose web services like “order” and “pay”, that there will be a workflow system that is able to compose these services – for example. The architecture are the rules that describe the creation of the system, the business objects, the web services and the workflow. These first need to be professionally defined and confirmed. They need to be obligatory for the whole project.

Only after that it makes sense to create models, which then will have a meaning within the context of the defined architecture. And therefore it is of very limited merit to “just model” or to train or coach modeling of a modeling language without a reference to a defined architecture or without the preceding process of professionally defining the reference architecture before. On the contrary – if the architecture is defined, then it perfectly makes sense to coach and govern a modeling process, because then there are the rules, that are needed for coaching and governance.

This is my opinion.