This is the topic of a question posted on ebizQ forum. I posted a comment there, but thought I will also re-post it here as mobility is one of the major disruptive trends that are influencing business and ultimately business processes. Here is my reply to the question on the forum
I don’t think it is a question anymore if Mobile BPM is essential to business but rather what is it best suited to. Not all aspects of BPM are useful on all form factors of the various mobile options out there.
Mobile can mean a “mobile worker” that is out in the field using a conventional notebook device (doesn’t that sound weird, that notebooks are now “old”) to connect to a cloud based BPM solution (private or public cloud) and access their conventional browser based user interface to do work. They may even do some process modeling (or agile BPM changes) if their solution allows remote access to the modeling environment. They are likely to access process performance dashboards to look at key metrics or process improvement opportunities.
That “mobile worker” can be someone who accesses their BPM solution from a tablet/slate device like an iPad and even though they can access all of the features of the notebook, they will probably use it for quick response “always on” type customer relationship processes. They may even do the odd leave approval here and there. These devices are great for doctors on their rounds updating patient records or, as in the case of one of our customers, the funeral arranger that sits with a family to plan the logistics of a funeral. By the way, this is a pretty unstructured process. It is also great for social BPM where discussion threads in transactions, for example, need quick response. They may have some key process metrics as graphs on the process form but are not likely to do complex process analytics on their iPads for now. It will mostly be operational metrics.
The chance of them using the touch, pinch and slide to model or change processes are highly unlikely at the moment. That doesn’t say it won’t change in the future.
The “mobile worker” on his or her smartphone is likely to use it almost exclusively for approvals of customer facing or high priority processes. The user interface is optimized for the small form factor and only shows the relevant information to make a quick decision. It is designed for the “always on” employee to will quickly check their email on their phone at a Saturday morning kids soccer game or the manager who needs to approve customer credit notes while waiting to board a plane. Requisitions and purchase order approvals are often candidates for “smartphone” BPM. They are unlikely to have any process analytics capability, but the order approvals process may, for example, have some predictive intelligence in the form.
They are also highly unlikely candidates for mobile modeling. The form factor makes it just too hard.
Mobile BPM is here and used in many processes in many industries and verticals. Mobile BPM is, however, not just a case of taking and existing process and looking at it on your iPhone. The form factor should suit the requirement of the “mobile worker”.
I just read Gartner’s Jim Sinur’s blog post and he has started writing more and more on the social aspect of business process management.
Jim has always been one of the analysts that gets the heartbeat of these things right. We’ve been talking about Social BPM for a while (not sure if it is Facebusiness or Processbook) but when the likes of Jim join the conversation we know that it is more than just a tweet (pun intended).
His blog post addresses the fact that business process management is not about the features anymore. It is not about dynamic processes, rules, content/data, BI or complex event management but how all of these are needed in BPM technologies that tie human and machine interaction together. Processes of the future need to cater for answers where the questions are not defined yet. It requires new social interaction.
This new paradigm that business finds itself in is not unique. I received a newsletter from our local school today where the principal quoted a book, The ABC of XYZ, by social commentator Mark McCrindle that had this to say in a chapter on ‘Educating and Engaging’:
Age is no longer a factor in learning. We are all students in this information age. While younger generations are now staying in formal education for longer, older generations are continuing their learning experiences well past middle age. Today’s younger generation have been born into a time that has seen the printed word morph into an electronic form where communication is not restricted to the spoken and written word but is multi-modal. The age of reason has given way to the age of participation. It is not the era of experts but the era of user-generated opinion. In these post-modern times statistics don’t influence with the same power as story. It’s not content but process that dominates.
While schools structure learning by subject, Generations Y and Z live life in a hyperlinked world. Teachers deliver formal lessons, yet students are experiential and participative. We test academic knowledge and memory in examinations yet they, with the always-on internet, are living in an open-book world, only ever 20 seconds from any piece of information.
Generation Z is highly intuitive and confident unaided users of digital technology who are too young to remember its arrival. And while the majority of today’s learners are not yet employed, in a decade they will comprise approximately ten per cent of the workforce.
Therefore the future of education depends on understanding and engaging with these 21 century learners. Whilst our schools and structures are very traditional in form, we need to move with steady creative certainty toward many new modes of delivering curricula and co-curricula activities
I don’t think that it is just the education system that is seeing these changes to how people react and interact. I could not help but think of how accurately the quote describes “Gen Me” in the current business context. We may not be there yet and we are all thinking about and working on next generation BPM technologies but our requirements for work management systems are changing.
Process management tools will have to stretch itself in many ways to handle the social and dynamic requirements that “Gen Me” users will have in the months and years to come.
I am taking the title from Peter Drucker’s 2002 book “Managing In the Next Society“. Why would I be reading a 2002 book now? Well, I am probably only starting to understand Peter Drucker’s predictions now. His foresight into the Next Society is only now starting to hit home with me. The Next Society is almost here and I start to recognise the signs. So what is it all about and how does it apply to business process and performance management?
The book is divided into four sections and covers his views on:
- The Information Society;
- Business Opportunities;
- The Changing World Economy; and
- The Next Society.
Drucker sees the Next Society different to the New Economy. (More on that in a later post) To him the Next Society is a knowledge society. “Knowledge will be its key resource, and knowledge workers will be the dominant group in its workforce”. The main characteristics of this Next Society will be :
- Borderlessness, because knowledge travels even more effortlessly than money. (I think the information freedom that the Internet brought accelerated this trend);
- Upward mobility, available to everyone through easily acquired formal education (I think that informal education through the Internet may have surpassed the formal mediums); and
- The potential for failure as well as success. The fact that you can acquire the knowledge doesn’t automatically leads to successful outcomes, according to Drucker.
He also states that IT is an enabler that helps information spread near instantly and makes it accessible to anyone. This now results in organisations that need to be globally competitive while still operating in local markets. Just think of the local bookstore that needs to compete with the prices on Amazon.
So how does this Next Society impact our organisation’s competitive advantage? What has it got to do with my business processes and how they work in my organisation? According to Drucker the success and survival of every business will depend on the performance of its knowledge workforce. He makes an observation that it is impossible, according to the law of statistics, for any but the “smallest” organisation to have “better people” and the only way an organisation can excel in this knowledge economy is to manage its knowledge workers for greater productivity. So how is that different to the “old economy”?
Well, what made the traditional workforce productive was the system. The factory style, assembly-line “system” was popularised by Taylor and followed by Henry Ford and Demming. The system embodied the knowledge, or the knowledge was “built into the system”. It is the reason why McDonalds can run a fast-food restaurant with a bunch of fifteen year olds. Drucker’s view is that the system is productive because it enables individual workers to perform without much knowledge and skill. According to him, greater skill on the side of an individual worker is a threat to co-workers and the entire system. It is also the way that we design and implement business processes today. We automate “the system” and leave little or no room for workers to deviate from this. It enforces repeatable, consistent and measureable output. But we leave no room for individual contribution.
In knowledge-based organisations it is the individual worker’s productivity that makes the system productive. In a traditional workforce the worker serves the system and in a knowledge workforce the system must serve the worker, according to Drucker. This means that we have to change the productivity tools that we use for the Next Society. It means that the way we designed, implemented, automated and measured organisational processes must change. Processes can’t be as prescriptive and restrictive as what we’ve done in the past. It needs to support the productivity objectives of a knowledge worker and it needs to be dynamic and flexible while providing the necessary organisational control.
Drucker remarks that it would be difficult to overstate the importance of focussing on knowledge workers’ productivity. “For the critical feature of a knowledge workforce is that knowledge workers are not ‘labour,’ they are capital”. There is a shift from labour as a cost to a view of ROI on “labour capital”. Drucker calls it the Productivity of Capital.
The move to the Next Society is here. We have seen the borderlessness of information, the upward mobility of knowledge workers and the way process work changed. Knowledge workers need Next Society tools to support their productiveness. They are not bound to the constraints of an assembly line, either physically or in their contribution to the processes. They require IT enabled productivity support tools that allow them to work anytime, anyplace. The key to Competitive Advantage lies in enabling the Next Society to work in a way that will give a positive ROI on our knowledge capital.
The LinkedIn BPM groups is a good place to find topics to blog on. I just look for those with lots of comments and it sparks ideas. This question had more the 62 comments added in a few days and I thought I’d add my few cents. I also decided to post my comment to this blog as these groups don’t have open access. The question was : “Why do you think BPM could not take off like ERP or CRM?”. Here was my reply.
Well I’d like to rephrase it for myself to “Why do I think BPM cloud take off like ERP and CRM”. It also pre-supposes that CRM has taken off (which is a different debate).
I believe BPM will take off but not in the form or shape that we understand or think off today. I wrote a blog post on my BPMJournal blog titled “On Evolution, Darwin and BPPM” and no, BPPM is not a spelling mistake, it stands for Business Process and Performance Management. In the post I discuss the Richard Koch’s theory on “Evolution by Natural Selection” and how it applies to business process management and the “Progress from Order to Chaos”.
In summary (and I suggest that you read the post if you want to understand the context) it states that there is variation (we breed new adapted species), then selection (only a few make it in the new conditions), then more variation based on those that survive, the selection and so on. Being successful or “surviving” is based on fitting the “conditions of life”.
ERP systems in particular didn’t just arrive overnight. It evolved into the technology based systems that we see today through the same natural selection process. It is interesting if you trace the history of the double entry accounting system that a transactional ERP system is fundamentally based on.
In 1494 Frater Luca Bartolomes Pacioli, friend of Leonardo da Vinci, published his fifth book, Summa de Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita (Everything About Arithmetic, Geometry and Proportion). It was written as a digest and guide to existing mathematical knowledge, and bookkeeping was only one of five topics covered. The Summa’s 36 short chapters on bookkeeping, entitled De Computis et Scripturis (Of Reckonings and Writings) were added “in order that the subjects of the most gracious Duke of Urbino may have complete instructions in the conduct of business,” and to “give the trader without delay information as to his assets and liabilities.” He acknowledged in his book that thirty-six years before him Benedetto Cotrugli wrote Delia Mercatura et del Mercante Perfetto (Of Trading and the Perfect Trader), which included a brief chapter which described many of the features of double entry.
The point I am making is that ERPs evolved over an extended period of time and will continue to change in future. ERPs didn’t start selling that well in 1500 or 1700 or 1900. I remember large Kalamazoo hand written “accounting systems” in my dad’s offices in the late ’60s, early ’70s. Today we wouldn’t contemplate starting his type of business without at least the standard modules of a manufacturing ERP. We just won’t be competitive and survive. I think the shortcomings of ERP have spawned the “next generation” and growing emergence of BPMS systems. But is all part of the evolutionary process.
BPM systems are evolving in a similar way to address ad-hoc, dynamic process requirements. The emergence of systems like Facebook disrupts the behaviour of people that use ERP, CRM and BPM systems and will change the face (no pun intended) of business systems forever. I’ve always held the view that future ERP systems will be based on a type of “BPMish” tool and I think that SOA, BPM, ERP, BI etc. are all converging to new ways of using technology to get better at getting work done. This is in the end the main objective. It will not look the same as what we know right now. It will be better adapted.
I think it is too early to say that BPM won’t take off like ERP and CRM systems. That is, if you see BPM as the technology component and not the management science. I think it can and will take off, maybe just not in the form that we see it in now. It is all based on how well it is suited to the “conditions of life”
Double entry system source: http://www.canhamrogers.com/HDEB.htm
I posted a question to various LinkedIn groups with “What is your biggest frustration with BPM?”. The idea was to get some users’ perspective on processes in their organisations. I got quite an interesting reply for the CEO of Planwell, Matthew Barnier, that triggered some ideas.
One of his comments was “Deliver what is needed just in time and account for change – but manage change, design to account for it, deliver “good enough” to account for the evolution”
We often see analysis paralysis where customers want to define all combinations, permutations, exceptions and business rules upfront that they are so fatigued after that exercise that the processes stay in document form and never gets digitised in process automation tools like XMPro. It is a pity because the real benefit is in making processes executable.
Processes should never be static. They should be designed for change as new process requirements “emerges”. Process management is continous discovery journey that requires an adaptive process approach. Start off with basic processes that add value quickly and improve them as the real requirements emerges. The benefits of “getting it started” far outweigh the perceived benefits of “getting it perfect”. Real process performance improvement can only be leveraged by management action.
One of his other comments was that if you can’t create a solution in 90 days or less for a specific process problem, you are doing it wrong. I have to agree but more on that in a next post.
I’m typing this from my iPhone and I am getting close to my bus stop. Let me quickly press this (read more on mobiles for process management on the eXomin website) before I miss my stop.
What are your biggest frustration with business process management?