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.

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.