Q: Why is it such a hot topic right now to discuss alternatives to BPM?

It is the right time to discuss, if classical BPM has delivered on the promises. BPM is now around for some while and has been applied in many projects. BPM technology has been used in practice. It is a natural process to ask: what have we learned from it? Where did BPM work and where did it not work as expected? What are the reasons? Which basic BPM assumptions are there, which are limitations that should be questioned?

It turns out, that one basic BPM assumption was that work is to some degree repetitive. And some work is. BPM proved successful within processes which are repetitive and the profit of BPM is the economy of scale – i.e. the more often a BPM process is executed, the more profit comes from it. But on the other hand it becomes obvious, that a growing percentage of the work in today’s industry is not repetitive – especially knowledge work is not. Furthermore unpredicted events lead to discontinuation of previously repetitive work and the need to manage the unpredictable. Therefore alternatives to BPM should be discussed right now.

Q: What is knowledge work, and why does it require a new approach?

A knowledge worker is a professional – that is my personal definition – whose flow of work depends on decisions based on knowledge, which he or persons of his professional network create, collect and distribute. Therefore by nature it is not predictable a priori, because succeeding work depends on the outcome of preceding work. It is a chain of processing knowledge, decide based on the acquired knowledge and process knowledge again. The work is explorative, not prescribed. A new approach is needed, because classical BPM assumes, that a flow of work can be designed a priori and executed later.

Q: How important is knowledge work?

The number of knowledge workers is constantly increasing. According to Thomas H. Davenport (Thinking for a Living) it was about a quarter to half of the workforce of the U.S. in 2005. In my opinion it is decisive for the developed countries, to make knowledge work more effective in order to stay competitive.

In my personal opinion it is no question at all, that there is a overwhelming amount of knowledge work which can and must be made more effective. In my opinion the problem so far was and still is that the technology needed to make it more effective was and is not available yet. As soon as the technology is available, it will certainly be needed.

Q: What is a specific example of the kind of knowledge work that might be supported?

A specific example is described in my chapter “Improving Knowledge Work” in the book “Mastering the Unpredictable”. There is Leona who works for a telecommunications company as an engineer and she needs to do phone support. The work she does in the support area is described with examples, as customer complaints need to be solved. Some tests need to be executed and some countermeasures need to be taken. The work is unpredictable, because the tests and the countermeasures depend on the situation. However the work can still be supported with Adaptive Case Management.

Other exampled mentioned by Davenport are:

• Management
• Business and financial operations
• Computer and mathematical
• Architecture and engineering
• Life, physical and social scientists
• Legal
• Healthcare practitioners
• Community and social services
• Education and Training

I will discuss more questions in other posts.

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.

I have come to the conclusion in the meanwhile, that the appearance of IT will change.

As noted in the article, there is a sense of IT limitation in the offices at the one hand and the reluctance to change in the IT departments. “Never touch a running system.” – an old proverb that contains much wisdom. Of course the problem is cost of change.

As noted in the article, everybody installs one or some forbidden tools on his office computer, much to the discontent of the IT departments. We can’t help – in the end we have to have the best tools for our work.

In the end the article shortly touches on cloud software, but does not elaborate its potential. But when I think of it, it overcomes many of the difficulties mentioned. There is nothing to install on the office computer. Just use the browser. Neither does it disrupt existing systems. There is no big change project. Just use it. Ok – if there is a project group or department they need to decide which one they would want to use and how they organize it.

I expect IT’s role to change over time. Instead of being responsible for making the systems run, they become the central point of governance which services are good to use and which they will veto against. They will have quality criteria that they will apply. This will relieve the IT department of much of today’s burden and let them concentrate on their core competency. Also it will release budget for interesting forward looking projects.

That’s not only, because individuals want to use the best tools possible. It’s also because other forms of work are strongly emerging, among which I want to emphasize Knowledge Work and Collaboration between organizational entities. More and more project groups emerge that work cross enterprises and organizations in non-standard – i.e. in unpredictable or only partially predictable processes and collaborations. Why is (was?) there such a hype about Google Wave? Isn’t that the reason? Google Wave is just a small forerunner of the tide to come. Completely new forms of applications will emerge that will offer functionality for organizing these new kind of processes. Multi-Enterprise Business Applications may be a good name for them.

And the processes they cover will differ from those processes that we know today and that are commodity. As I already stressed those processes will be agile, adaptive, unpredictable, partially predictable, collaborative, creative, knowledge oriented. I hesitate to call them processes, because “process” implies: First do that, then this. That is not the kind I am speaking of. A Knowledge Worker complies with such a process only in rare cases. Neither is it desireable. The Knowledge Worker needs enabling for the goal he wants to achieve and the he or she best knows how to achieve – and to have the freedom to try, to fail, to retry and to succeed. So we might call the new work pattern Workstream instead of Process.

So which IT department would be responsible for such a Multi-Enterprise Business Application? The natural answer is: It will be served as “Software as a Service” by an independent provider and the individual Enterprise will purchase users. That is another strong reason, why the IT will change – because there is practically no other way to address this emerging demand.

For example someone has an internet site. However the provider is raising the fees. You have do decide between different options, but all are worse than today. There is another provider, that is cheaper. But you are not sure with the new options – how long the cancellation period is there. Also you don’t want to pay twice for too long. Furthermore it turned out, that you don’t like your domain name. But of course there is traffic on your current domain name. And you currently have difficulties finding one, because all good ideas you have are already occupied and the free ones you don’t like.

You have to perform some steps like

• Create e new domain name that you like and is free.
• Order the new domain name.
• Decide about the new conditions with your current provider.
• Cancel your current provider.
• Engage with the new provider.
• Migrate the data from the old provider to the new.
• Redirect your current visitors to the new domain.

So when to do what? There are some natural constraints. You can’t order a new domain before you have made up your mind for the new domain name. You can’t migrate the data, if you don’t have the old site as well as the new site. If you don’t decide about one new option with your current provider you loose the data and the traffic.

Others are not so clear. Will you move from the old provider to the new one still using your current domain name to get more time to think for a better name? Will you want to avoid taking one of the options of your current provider, and move quickly? Or do you first want to create the new domain name and apply to the new provider only after you have created one. Then you would need to choose one of the options with your old provider.

This is a relatively simple case. So your job is to find out more information, more details about the conditions, the technical capabilities of changing the domain name later, the cancellation period. And you have to make up your mind as of how long you will want the time to think about a new domain name. After you have made those decisions, you can order the activities into a definite order. But after you have made these decisions, the difficult part of the work is done. The technical migration is business as usual, because you have done this already earlier.

So the workstream starts with

1. Find out information about provider options
2. Find out information about cancellation period
3. Find out information technical possibilities of late domain change.
4. Decide
5. Order the remaining steps
6. Do the rest in an yet unknown order

Later, when step 1-4 are completed, “Do the rest in an yet unkown order” can be broken down into a definite order of the steps mentioned earlier.

So in essence there is no “Process Design Time” and “Process Run Time”. Because the Workstream is already running, while it is still being designed, if you will. That is a characteristic of Knowledge Work.

I agree with Richard Florida, that Creativity Work is and will be the driving force of present and future economic development.

I believe because of philosophical and metaphysical reasons that one of the abilities of humankind that makes them most human is their ability to create – to be creative. It is always stunning to see what humans can create.

The economic crisis is not a crisis for creative people. Yes, there are ups and downs in each life and career. But lack of ressources incites creativity with creative people, it always did. Therefore they will find better ways to solve problems as there are today. And these better ways will be more effective. And that’s what will account for the profits of tomorrow.

Why is this relevant for a BPM site? It is very relevant. The reason is, that we need to ask what BPM is able to do and if it is sufficient for what is needed for the creative worker, the knowledge worker.

In my opinion the answer is: “No”.

What is BPM good for? It is good for modeling standard processes for mainly repetitive work. This is not the creative work. The creative work is for most part unpredictable. That’s what BPM falls short of. But a growing share of the value of our economy is created in the creative class of workers – and the economic crisis even does give this a boost, as I believe. So – what will be the methods and tools that will help those people and improve their daily work experience? There is nothing to improve? Far from true. Do creative people execute processes? Not in the sense we understand it today. But still what they do is somehow related to what they did yesterday and will do tomorrow.

That should give us something to think about.