Sourcing Shangri-La

The End Of The Beginning

New job, new blog.  My new role - Principal Consultant in the Nimbus/TIBCO Life Sciences and CPG team - catapults me into an exciting new area, but with a focus that's slightly out of synch with this blog.

Your feedback suggests that this blog works partly because it has (more or less) been focussed on a single idea: that the essential underpinning for success in shared services, outsourcing and back-office transformation is...drum roll... the right business process management platform.

I'd love to do a Mary Poppins  and announce that my work here is done. You'd laugh me to scorn of course. But I am going to claim that we've reached the end of the beginning.

In the two years since this blog launched, we've seen extraordinary developments.  Now that Accenture has nailed its colors to the mast, we can say in polite company what many feared to openly acknowledge before: that the service management framework that underpins shared services success is the business process management framework.  

The case study from ThyssenKrupp Global Business Services at the Nimbus conference in September provides us with a brilliant example of what that means in practice.

We're not done yet - but we've reached the foothills and can glimpse Shangri-La for the first time.  I'm going to continue to chronicle that journey here, and hope that you'll stay with us. 

My focus going forward though will, inevitably, be my new role and blog. Looking at Life Sciences and other highly regulated industries like CPG, it's their complexity that stands out.  

These industries have the same challenges as everyone else. Relentless pressure to reduce costs, and improve agility, to be able to survive and thrive in ferociously competitive global markets.  But their challenges in operational excellence and collaborative innovation are compounded by incredibly complex webs of compliance, quality and regulatory constraints. 

Every global organization is struggling to learn to dance.  But Pharma companies are having to master the Viennese Waltz blindfolded. 

I planned to call my new blog Ariadne's Thread. Without Ariadne's golden thread, Theseus may have slain the Minotaur but he could never have found his way back out of the labyrinth. It seemed an appropriate metaphor. Process as the cracker of complexity, the golden thread that can enable organisations in Life Sciences to find the way out of their own labyrinths.  

But it turns out that Ariadne's Thread is already taken. So it's eSOPs Fables. The transition from silo-based and document-based ways of managing knowledge [the classic Standard Operating Procedures, SOPs, in Word 2003] to process-based perspectives is a fundamental part of the transformation to come.  

If you're involved in Life Sciences, CPG, or another highly regulated industry, and dream of a life beyond SOPs, I hope you'll want to join the discussion over there as well.

Related Posts

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on eSOPs Fables: Why Process Excellence Will Underpin Next Generation Pharma

 

Cracking Complexity in Novartis

In a video just released, Dr Anne Salètes, Head of Training and Continuous Improvement for Global Clinical Operations at Novartis, brings to life the challenges when precision and attention to detail become barriers to collaboration in complex global operations.

At the Nimbus IP11 conference in London in September, Dr Salètes' presentation told the story of how Novartis has adopted Nimbus Control as its platform for managing processes and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) in clinical development.  Novartis is a leader in process-based SOPs: adopting end-to-end process as its business language, transforming content buried in libraries of Word documents into holistic business perspectives.

Dr Salètes' mainstage interview with Richard Parker on the morning of the conference has now been released as a video. In the course of that discussion, Dr Salètes talks about some of the benefits of a process-based SOP model. 

She describes how patient safety and data validity are, of course, the paramount  concerns. But in organizations as large and complex as Novartis, the precision and risk aversion that underpin that safety culture can become significant barriers to cross-silo collaboration.

She notes the value of visualization and simplicity of presentation:  "Our people are extremely precise," she says, "but it is very difficult to find skilled people who are extremely precise and who can see the big picture. What we are bringing them is a better view of the big picture. " 

By creating an end-to-end representation of Novartis' clinical operations processes: "We are bringing everyone to the same view.  We are all challenging the same view. We can see how we can improve'".  

But the benefits of a process-based approach are not just in performance improvement and Lean programs. 

Novartis now has a common view of regulatory jurisdictions globally, which makes it easier to ensure compliance.  Even more significantly perhaps, end-to-end perspectives also discourage silo-based approaches to compliance - the temptation to think: "This is my little area and that's where I have to be compliant", as Dr Salètes describes it. It enables each person and team to understand and play their part in end-to-end compliance. 

It's a funny thing that when many people think of process, their first thought is of complexity.  But Novartis is another example that process, when it's properly conceived, can be the key to cracking complexity and enabling effective collaboration. 

Related Posts

17 Nov 2011    Future of BPM: We're in Mesopotamia 3000BC

08 Nov 2011     The Process SOP Blues

Future of BPM? We're In Mesopotamia 3000BC

Adam Deane has set off a discussion on his blog on BPM Visions Of The Future.

My own view is that we are witnessing a revolution in process thinking.  It's similar to the transformation that took place around 3000BC when humankind moved from hieroglyphs to phonetic writing.  It is that breakthrough which makes possible this blog - and poetry and tax returns.

That transformation - the adoption of phonetic writing - too was driven by business needs.  The emerging societies of that time needed governance. Writing was simply the most efficient way to record and report, to establish the bureaucracy upon which control depended.

It was also a global transformation.  Writing seems to have emerged independently in Egypt, China and Central America - but the best evidence we have today comes from Mesopotomia, simply because they used baked clay tablets, which have lasted far better than paper or bamboo. This tablet from Mesopotamia, from the British Museum collection, records the allocation of rations to workers (in the form of beer, an early local currency).

Process is undergoing a parallel transformation. Until recently, process has been about technical symbols, focussed on automation, and intended to be used only by a few.

In the future, process will surely be the universal business language. But it will be holistic, not just focussed on systems. It will be integrated, not just process fragments stored in a common repository. And it will be in the language of the business, so that everyone can understand it - and get involved in continuously improving it.

In short, process will become a polite term. Folks with MBAs won't feel embarrassed to use it. We'll no longer have two terms - process and value chain  -for the same thing.  And it will be inclusive, stimulating a richer and ongoing collaborative dialog: the CIO will sit down with the business user.

And the essential enterprise enabler for all this - the 21st century equivalent of the bureacracy perhaps - will be the process management platform:

... it will integrate process with documents, KPI metrics, risk and controls, quality and compliance,  training and task support.  

... it will provide the collaborative framework and governance that enables process stakeholders, and Lean and Six Sigma teams, to drive performance improvement.

... and it will deliver all this to the desktops and smartphones of people doing real work - in the form of Storyboards and a personalized intelligent operations manual. 

Which is why I count myself thankful to work in such an exciting area.  Phonetic writing gave rise to enormous creativity. You couldn't be reading that blockbuster on your Kindle without it.  As enterprises become more virtual, more outsourced, more socially responsible, more complex and with ever more global supply chains, we will need ever more creativity in the workplace.  And business process management will be a crucial enabler. 

This post inspired by A History Of The World In 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor. Highly recommended (an ideal Christmas present, if you can bear to let it go)

PS you don't have to wait! First editions of the process management platform of the future are available here ;-)

Related Posts

02 Nov 2011    Toxic Processes: Social, Cloud, Agility - And Risk

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Dude - Did You Ever Read This Back?

When HfS Research and PwC issued their rambling Global Business Services report in July, I assumed it was a one-off, rushed into print before the vacations.

But their joint report The Three Tenets of Global Business Services Execution - released yesterday but dated October - blows away that theory. 

It's not just verbose and boring. Much of it seems close to nonsense.  The opening sentence is typical: 

"While global sourcing has long been recognized as a complex activity, solutions have matured in a variety of categories that are frequently addressed as part of a Global Business Services strategy."

OK, I've only been working with clients in this space for a few years, but I have no idea what this means.

It seems a bit churlish to criticise a free report.  But other folks, equally well qualified to comment, are publishing reports for free that are simply much better written - Accenture's report last month, for instance.     

It's a pity because there's some good ideas buried under the wordage. But most of the thinking is confused, and, for my money, misses one crucial point: that process management - what Accenture terms the essential 'service management framework' - is central to success.

Disclosure - I spent six happy years at PwC's predecessors - at a time when text like this would have resulted in a court-martial ;-)

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Value Chain Or Process? The Costs Of Confusion

Here's a conundrum. Listening to Paul Harmon of BP Trends on Becoming A Process-Centric Organization yesterday, I fell to wondering...

How can it be that process maturity is good (which CEO wouldn't want flawless execution and a culture of continuous improvement?) - and yet, by whichever scale we choose, most organizations are pitifully low-scoring, and only a handful of the Fortune 2000 are at, say, CMMI Level 5?

One of the biggest barriers to higher levels of process literacy - and to wider C-Level engagement - must be confusion.  The false distinction between value chain and process perfectly illustrates this.

Let me make a claim which some will consider heretical.   Value chains (and value streams) are the same thing as end-to-end processes.  They have a different provenance, and vocabulary, but their purpose is identical: they provide a framework for collaboration on performance improvement.

I see nothing in Wikipedia's description of value chains that Nimbus clients are not already doing in their business process management programs.  Paul Harmon used the two terms interchangeably in his hour-long discussion - as indeed many others do.  

It's not just that we have two ways for describing the same thing.  If you call it eggplant and I call it aubergine, then it's confusing, and does nothing to help us collaborate in the kitchen, but as long as we are both aware that they are exactly the same thing, there's no harm done.

But we're well beyond simple confusion because all sorts of folks have created 'competing' methodologies and vocabularies. There are Value Chain and Value Stream frameworks and methodologies, with Lean and Six Sigma variants, that seem to be quite separate from everyday process improvement.  Whereas, to all intents and purposes, they are all doing the same thing.  

This confusion matters. It's a fruitless distinction in a world which is often already ridiculously complex. At the C-Level, it sounds like a cacophany of voices competing for mindshare.  Whereas the truth is that all of them are about building capability to manage the enterprise in a new dimension: end-to-end process, or value chain, or value stream - call it what you will.  

Tim Leach, Director of Competitive Excellence at Northrop Grumman, speaking at IP11, described the reality for many organizations when he said (of the situation at Northrop Grumman before adopting Nimbus Control) :

"How could it be that we have 7,000 people trained in Six Sigma and Lean yielding so little in terms of sustainable cost reductions and service improvement?"

If we want wider process literacy, and wider C-Level leadership in building process maturity, we have to fuse the existing disparate and apparently 'competing' approaches.  The start point must be to standardize our vocabulary.

I doubt that the UN or the US Supreme Court is going to take this up and make a definite pronouncement, so it's up to us.  Value chains have a proud heritage - but in reality they are about understanding and optimizing end-to-end processes.  Simplicity demands that we choose one or the other. 

No disrespect to Michael Porter, but I favor the wider adoption of process over value chain, and here's some reasons why.

End-to-end business process...

dovetails with compliance. Risks and controls, quality and compliance, can all be integrated within the business process management platform

can be integrated with real-time performance metrics, so process improvement opportunities can be more immediately identified

is the language of outsourcing and shared services, which are rapidly transforming the back-office of every organization

bridges the IT divide and enables business-led systems implementation

can be integrated with documents, systems and training - and delivered as a personalized intelligent operations manual to every desktop and mobile device.

Even better - there are already proven enterprise process management platforms, which provide a complete collaborative framework and governance to enable top-down process re-engineering as well as bottom-up continuous improvement - and they are becoming more widely adopted.

Process literacy is growing. The idea of process excellence is gaining currency.  Process maturity models such as CMMI are gaining ground, and even becoming mandatory in some public sector procurement. Let's go with process and get far wider engagement, at C-Level and across the enterprise, in performance improvement.  Let's embrace the Global Process Owner role now found in some visionary organizations - and expect that it will increasingly be recognized as a senior management leadership role. 

Related Posts

02 Nov 2011    Toxic Processes: Social, Cloud, Agility - and Risk

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The Process SOP Blues

It seems very odd at first. Why should Life Sciences organizations be so resistant to a change that is so self-evidently valuable? Why push back on something that makes things better, faster and cheaper? 

Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) are the basic building block of Life Sciences organizations. Almost always simply a library of lengthy documents, SOPs set out how the organization understands what it does; how it assures itself and its clients and its regulators that it is following Good Practice.

Even in the best managed Pharma organizations, the costs of compliance can be 16% of operating costs; more typically, they will be 20%+ and may even be towards 30% of operating costs.

So - if there was a better way of managing SOPs, how can there be such indifference? How could smart people be so unenthusiastic about a new way of working that would, say, make clinical trials safer while, at the same time, reducing their cost?

At the European SOP conference yesterday, the evidence from several speakers - none of them linked to Nimbus - was compelling: in many ways, some serious, SOPs don't work:

Susan Ollier from QED Clinical Services noted that SOPs may be missing, or contradictory, or out-of-date or uncontrolled. 

Steve Nicholas from PharmaAcademy presented supporting evidence from the UK's MHRA regulator. He went on to point out that the SOP document fails because is written to meet two mutually incompatible objectives. SOPs are supposed to be concise and easily understood (to support the process user), while at the same time being an exhaustive training document for a new starter with no experience. 

Gareth Turner from PAREXEL noted that 'a lot of what we do is actually quite simple. We've just created a way of making it extraordinarily complex. We need to get back to simplicity.' 

The answer, the future for SOPs that was served up in different ways by different speakers, is to adopt a process-based approach. 

Going beyond document-based SOPs to thinking in terms of end-to-end process can offer huge advantages. It's the kind that would grab any CEO's attention:  

Risk Management - it exposes the gaps and the overlaps that arise from silo-based SOPs. It also provides a comprehensive framework for managing outsourced activities. 

Productivity- it makes work easier. Storyboards deliver content, in an easily digestible format, through a personalized intelligent operations manual.  And it enables more extensive, and successful, automation.

Governance - it brings together Quality, the QMS and all compliance activities into an integrated management platform.  

Performance Improvement - it connects SOPs with KPI metrics.  It integrates Quality and compliance with Lean, Six Sigma and other performance improvement programs.

At the Nimbus Inspiring Performance 2011 conference, Novartis shared a brilliant example of an organization that is forging this future, leveraging Nimbus Control to create a smart, holistic perspective on its clinical trials programs.  

So WHY is the progress towards process-based SOPs so incredibly slow? It's a question I've never satisfactorily answered until yesterday when the penny dropped. I realised that people's resistance to a process perspective is not job-protection or an inability to think creatively.  It's because whenever they are shown process (and we saw many examples of this yesterday) it looks awful.

They know process as swimlanes, pools and numerous symbols (ie the language of BPMN). They see it as technical, in the IT domain, with no sense of design.  They see governance processes separate from operational processes. They see process as bottom-up fragments of understanding. So process for them is a loaded and negative term. Presented like this, who would want to use it? It's really no surprise that they push back and switch off.  

I wasn't the only one bored, I think. I found this rap on a scrap of paper as I left the conference:

 

 

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Toxic Processes: Social, Cloud, Agility - and Risk

There's a looming crisis that's being driven by the headlong rush into Cloud, Social  and Big Data in pursuit of the Agility agenda. Like the financial crisis, the signs are clearly evident well ahead of the crash.  And just like every actor in that sorry tale was acting rationally within the confines of their silo, so too this time everyone's busy.

At the heart of the financial crash was the accumulation, over many years, of  toxic assets purchased in vast quantities by over-leveraged banks. The risks were not clearly visible or understood.

On the smaller scale, many global enterprises are busy working on their own sub-prime crisis. They are relying on toxic processes. As a result, their risks are not clearly visible or understood.    

Organizations are rapidly building a future that is far more virtual, where an empowered workforce manages service delivery operations that are far more complex, fast-paced, and largely outsourced.

Cloud promises the frictionless enterprise.

Social promises employee engagement and the capability to turn on a sixpence.

Sourcing and supply chain innovation promises low costs and rapid response.

Within each program silo - Cloud, Social, Sourcing - it makes perfect sense. It's the agility that CEOs are looking for. But this new level of agility comes with new levels of risk. Two examples:

The complexity of existing supply chains  makes them vulnerable. Car production was halted in several factories around the world when the Japanese tsunami struck the remote Tohoku region: it turns out that the Renesas plant there produces 40% of the world's microcontrollers. Building resilient global supply chains will require even more complexity. The increasing adoption of outsourced services from multiple suppliers - the growing virtualization of the enterprise - will exacerbate this complexity, and therefore the vulnerability.  

In customer relationship management, IBM's Global CMO Study, out this week, shows CMOs living in a world of high complexity and unpredictable interdependencies. It calls out customer intimacy as a strategic goal for CMOs. But it's to be delivered as rapid response in a world of real-time social media by empowered employees - many of them working for outsourcing partners - dealing with empowered customers, and by complex, rapidly-changing, business rules applied to Big Data.  So much higher levels of complexity and therefore vulnerability.

It's easy to get carried away with the potential benefits in Cloud and Social (and Big Data). But the execution risks are correspondingly high - and largely overlooked. In complex, fast-paced and global organizations, increasing agility correlates with increasing risk. 

Business process management is unglamorous next to Cloud, Social, Big Data and Agility.  But a BPM platform is the essential foundation for success.  The first step in mitigating risk is transparency. (It's also the key to unlocking potential innovation as well, of course).   

Pause please while I step up to my soapbox again. The BPM platform that can leverage Cloud, Social, Big Data fully, while properly managing risk, must have three fundamentals:

Holistic perspective. This means visibility of the enterprise that is complete, integrated, rigorous and realtime.  Transparency here is like the capability to run a three-dimensional CT Scan for the enterprise at any time.

Effective collaboration. That means a common language, across the internal functional silos and the extended enterprise. The only plausible language is end-to-end process - but, and this is critical, in the language of the business, not IT-speak, to ensure shared understanding.  It also requires a governance framework that is robust but practical, otherwise collaborative innovation will stall, or undermine risk management.

Ubiquity. It must connect strategy directly with operational reality across the enterprise. There's a compliance gap if the enterprise process model is simply an abstract managed by IT or the Quality function. It has to support real people in getting real work done.  So it needs to be personalized, and deployed to desktops and mobile devices as easy-to-consume process content.  This ensures the real-world integrity of the process model. It also engages the workforce and so channels Social to where it's most productive: fostering continuous improvement within the process context.      

Some organizations recognize these risks - we are seeing new levels of interest in a BPM platform that can deliver this capability - but most don't yet. Some put their faith in complete and 'perfect' IT process models - but they focus only on what's automated, and are understood only by a handful of people. Most organizations rely on incomplete, duplicated and overlapping process fragments in a variety of tools and formats, and with no governance beyond email.  Either way, IT models or myriad fragments, these are toxic processes.

If we continue our current trajectory, Gartner's prediction earlier this year that ten global companies will be toppled within three years by basic process defects looks safe.

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The Socially Optimized Business - And Process

I love the positive energy and openness of the Dachis Group and the Social Business Council - their one page graphic summarising Attributes of a Socially Optimized Business can be downloaded here - so I don't want to be picky.  But there's a flaw in their manifesto - at least, as I understand it - that may seem nerdy but is, I think, actually quite crucial.

I've huge sympathy for the call for a Renaissance in business:

"After decades of mechanistic, dehumanizing, process-oriented management dogma, progressive organizations are waking up to the disturbing truth that they’ve squeezed all the creativity out of their business. When companies embrace organic, passionate, socially-savvy initiatives, they blossom. Who benefits? Everyone."

What worries me is the way we seem to be trashing 'process-orientation'. 

Agreed, process has for too long been articulated in the form of technical gobbledegook. And it's rarely exciting. 

But - if we express process simply and holistically, so that people across the socially optimized enterprise can understand it, then we have a universal language that can get everyone talking. 

And if we support it with an enabling process management platform, then we have:

connected the creativity with how work gets done.  So we ensure that social business is not an ivory tower, it's about engaging with everyone's ideas

the ideal framework for Lean, Six Sigma and other process improvement programs - and for sustainable continuous improvement

the governance framework that ensures collaboration will be effective, across all the functional silos and the increasingly virtual extended enterprise  (it also allows the Chief Risk Officer to sleep at night). 

Great ideas -please sign me up for the Renaissance. But let's see process as part of the solution and so make it practical.

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Re-inventing Work: The Feminine Balance

Friday Philosophy...

You don't have to be camped out in an Occupy protest to know that some of the biggest challenges facing humanity are in the world of business and employment. 

Hearteningly, it's not just people on the streets who are asking big questions.  In the FT, Luke Johnson, a very successful entrepreneur, even quotes Animal Farm in lamenting income inequalities. And on MIX this week, Gary Hamel, ranked by the WSJ as 'one of the world's most influential business thinkers' interviews Lynda Gratton, a professor at LBS, on restoring values to work - and references 'building spiritual capital', a term that would have earned him derision only a few year ago. 

It's time to re-invent work.  What it's for. Why we do it. How it helps achieve the prosperity of humankind in its fullest sense.

For me, one vital aspect of this transformation is the advancement of women. Indeed - full Op-Ed disclosure here - as a Baha'i, I believe women's full participation in society is one of the essential conditions for world peace. Women bring different, richer, and often more balanced, perspectives into play.  [if you're uncomfortable with this as wishy-washy thinking and you need the ROI - I am going to resist the temptation to say 'stuck in male mode' - then McKinsey has compelling studies on how women's participation is crucial to US economic growth]  

So why am I disappointed to read the advice to women in Four Ways That Women Stunt Their Careers on the HBR Blog? Women are advised to avoid modesty and make more efforts to ensure that 'they get the gold star next to their name'. They should also get used to talking over the top of other people: 'It's not easy to get a word in during meetings, especially when six other colleagues are all fighting for the floor'.

I'm sure the authors are well-meaning.  I even accept that they may be tactically right.  But it's depressing. We don't need women to behave more like men. We need women's participation because that will change work for the better.  Men often pay lip-service to ideals of teamwork and collaboration, but quickly default to highly competitive environments.  We want women fully involved because they don't boast so much, because they listen as much as they talk, because they are more inclined to collaborate.       

It's not that men don't have any of the strengths that we usually associate with women - intuition, empathy, compassion, thinking holistically and long-term.  But women's equal participation - as women - is the best chance of releasing, in all us, our feminine side.  That balance alone can transform our workday world. The bird of humanity will only soar when its wings are equally developed. 

It's ours to create a new world of work.  I see the full participation of women is an important  part of it. I've raved about Iain McGilchrist before. He's recently featured on TED and closes his talk with Einstein's remarks that: 'The intuitive mind is a sacred gift. The rational mind is a faithful servant'. 

As Iain McGilchrist observes, we've created a society which honors the servant but has forgotten the sacred gift.  This balance between the intuitive mind and the rational mind, between feminine and masculine perspectives, seems central to our wellbeing and true prosperity.  

PS you might think that IBM's appointment of Ginni Rometty as its next CEO demonstrates that this is old hat. My take is that it's another heartening development - but that we've a very long way to go yet.   But what do you think?

How Not To Implement Shared Services

A shared services center to deliver HR, finance, procurement, IT and other services for the UK's seven Research Councils. It seemed like a Good Idea when it was announced in 2006. 

Five years on, a review by the UK's National Audit Office (NAO) makes gloomy reading. Overspent £130m against a budget of £79m, and projected savings significantly less than expected. 

How did it happen? The NAO report highlights three fundamental flaws:

Lack of Clarity

"A key factor contributing to escalating costs was the early lack of clarity about how the service would operate. An outline design, known as a target operating model, was not agreed until August 2008, nearly a year after implementation had begun, but it was incomplete and lacked detail. Some elements of design were still ongoing during transition and system launch."

Confused Governance

"Early governance structures were complex. Reviews commissioned at various points during the project showed that responsibilities and accountabilities needed clarification."

Poor Management of Outsourcer

"A contract with Fujitsu to design and build the systems and ICT was "poorly managed".  It was eventually terminated at an additional cost of £13m."

Each of which could, of course, have been avoided, or at the very least mitigated, by the adoption of an appropriate process management platform.

No surprise that developing process maturity is an NAO theme - and runs through the NAO's recommendations in this case: to harmonise processes further, to strengthen end-to-end process management, and to embed continuous improvement.

Hear stories like this one, and other shockers in the Process Hall of Shame, and it's bewildering how organizations can still be in denial about the need for a process management platform at the heart of any shared services project.  As though it was a 'nice-to-have'.

Whereas actually it's the key to clarity at every level; to effective collaboration within a robust governance framework; to IT alignment; to drive process harmonization; to controlling a multisourced environment; to making life easier for the SSC workforce; and to enabling a culture of continuous improvement.

Related Posts

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To Be, Or Not To Be...That Is Not The Question.

A frantic call from a managing consultant at a Nimbus partner, asking for help on his way into a client meeting, reminds me of our own little Da Vinci code. Only we, the process cognoscenti, know what Shakespeare really meant. Hamlet's original soliloquy was not merely about the most noble course to follow. It directly addressed the more fundamental issues in process discovery:

'To-Be or As-Is, that is the question...'

My friend's client may be at the bottom of the process maturity curve but they have aspirations, and an urgency (hence my friend's assignment).  But, as is so often the case, they only want to focus on the future.  When your organization is largely dysfunctional and you have finally gathered the energy to act, it's natural to want to focus on the sunlit uplands of process maturity: 'Let's not waste time with the As-Is, let's just focus on the To-Be processes'.

It's fair to say that consultants themselves often disagree on how important it is to capture the As-Is processes.  But none that I know would ignore them.  You can't plan a journey without a startpoint. Transformation plans without an adequate understanding of the As-Is processes are very likely to fail.  So, at the very least, capturing the As-Is processes reduces transition risks. 

But paying attention to the As-Is processes helps in other important ways too. It can expose gaps, overlaps and inconsistencies that were overlooked because the organization's focus has been on heroic fire-fighting. It reveals connections and hidden dependencies. Often it throws up new ideas for the future state, and highlights issues that will be need to be addressed in the transition^*. It grounds the definition of the To-Be processes. Above all, it gets people collaborating across functional silos, using the language of end-to-end process.  

Process maturity is ultimately founded on an organization's cultural mindset.  Jumping straight to the To-Be processes is a quick-fix mindset.  We'll always need to execute quick fixes - but process maturity requires the organization to be able to operate in a more detached and analytical mode as well.

My friend's client of course doesn't see it this way (hence his call for help).  So he will take on 'the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune' and risk arguing that his client needs to do an elementary capture of the As-Is processes, just to reduce transition risk.  And be confident that the client will gradually come to realize that time invested in capture of the As-Is can be consulting budget very well spent.  

Which we all know is pretty much what Hamlet would have advised in the circumstances:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action...

* Nimbus Control is the perfect tool for this because it has several ways to capture these ideas without disrupting the flow of the discovery workshop - and to easily analyse and report on them later. 

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Deloitte Shared Services Insights: Could Do Better

Accenture's report earlier this month did a good job in advancing the debate about shared services. By comparison, Deloitte's latest shared services insights disappoint. It's a commendable report - but it kind of misses the point.

Overlook the waffle and the sloppy thinking: Accenture's report does nail the essential truth - that a service management framework is vital for sustainable success:

There needs to be a “system around the system” that includes the people, discipline in procedures, communications, service expectations, performance measurement and key cross-functional processes, such as continuous improvement and client relationship management. It’s this broader shared services system around the system— which Accenture calls the service management framework—that sets shared services organizations that have achieved high performance apart from those with a sub-optimized centralized service delivery model. The service management framework is the keystone...

I've argued elsewhere that Accenture needs to go further and recognize that the service management framework for shared services, in its best developed and most valuable form, is the business process management platform at the heart of the enterprise. 

But, that qualification aside, the idea of the service management framework is a crucial advance and deserves to be adopted.   It provides the context by which we can understand that Deloitte's latest list of worthy insights - on the importance of change management, IT alignment, governance and enhanced controls - are in fact all inter-related.  And jointly soluble, once we frame this correctly. 

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Are You Siri-ous?

Check out Siri, the revolutionary new voice recognition feature on the iPhone 4S.  As Apple says: 'Siri understands what you say, knows what you mean, and even talks back'.

It's amazing. Omniscient and with attitiude. It even has a Transcript button - here's an extract, so you can see how it works: 

...

Me: Well, that's great news. I'd completely given up on my pension fund. I thought it would never recover.  So when can I retire?

Siri:  You'll need to continue working until 16 June 2043.

Me:  Sheeesh! So I need to stay employable for another 30 years... What am I going to do? 

Siri: Stick with process. Right now, we've discovered the theory of business DNA. We cracked the double helix, we know how the base pairs work on the chromosomes. And we've pretty much done with mapping of the complete business genome.

Me: So it's all over. I should re-train as a therapist?

Siri: No, idiot, this is just the start. Process will become the universal business language. Every CEO's iPad will have a business process architecture - integrated, complete and in the language of the business, not geek-speak. It will be the startpoint for M&A and business restructuring. 

Me: Not just executive bling? Not just a fad that will leave me jobless in my early seventies?

Siri: No, Bozo.  CIOs will see it as the startpoint for every systems project.  CFOs will demand the transparency that comes when risk and controls are embedded in end-to-end processes.  COOs will leverage it to orchestrate increasingly complex and multisourced operations. 

Me: OK, I get it. Business genetics.  The enterprise grid.

Siri: Much more because it's not just for execs and stakeholders focussed on performance management. It will connect with people doing real work.  It will simplify and help people be more productive.  And make it easy to get involved in continuous improvement.

Me: So where do I want to work? Who's going to win here? The BPM vendor that offers an integrated platform, a collaborative framework and deployment as an intelligent operations manual to every desktop and mobile device?

Siri: Doh! No - whoever integrates Siri first.

.... 

 

Placing A Big Bet On Global Shared Services

"The companies you work for are placing a big bet on your success. Your job is to scale fast...". Deborah Kops's presentation captured the moment at this week's Finance Summit.

Shared services is set for very rapid growth. There is a convergence around an SSOS model of shared services implementation: Stabilize - Standardize - Optimize - Source. It's a model that's driving the expansion of shared services into global business services operations, delivering not just the traditional Finance & HR services but others such as Procurement and Supply Chain - and doing all this in an increasingly multisourced mix.

Unsurprisingly, change management featured heavily, reinforcing the importance of a service management framework. One organization reported 28 change initiatives running concurrently in its P2P process alone in this FY.

The challenges are changing as shared services moves up several gears, and beyond the easy wins in automation and labor arbitrage:

Customer Satisfaction. The pre-conference survey showed service improvement was on a par with continuing cost reduction. Several SSOs are using KPIs based on the Net Promoter methodology to measure client satisfaction.

Continuous Improvement. There's an new focus on continuous improvement programs. CI was one of the delegates' top budget priorities for 2012. 

Talent Management. There's a lot more focus on people, morale, motivation, engagement and retention. 

No surprise that there was a lot of interest in Nimbus Control as a service management framework that can orchestrate complex change and enable continuous improvement.  It was in the challenges of ERP projects that the visualization of process, in the language of the business, seemed especially powerful. Stakeholders in most organizations simply don't have proper visibility of the current and future state, can't do easy gap and impact analyses, and have no governance framework, beyond email, for managing change.

My conference highlight, by the way: sharing a table with a global P2P owner spending $52bn this FY. Awesome.

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Continuous Improvement - Made Easy

Naturally, I would say that Emitra Nelson from Cameron stole the show on Day 1 of the Summit for Finance Leaders in Dallas today (you can hear her story on a SharedServicesLink webinar on 18 October - more details here).

But if I couldn't vote for Emitra, on the grounds that hers is a Nimbus success story, my choice for the most thought-provoking presentation would be Andrew Simpson, Head of Business Services in America for BP, whose case I summarised in a doodle in my notes as this:

 
(my maths is shaky, so I'm hoping this means what I was thinking!)

Andrew defined Continuous Improvement (let's call it CI) as 'operational excellence through process improvements' , or, more informally, as 'stopping business insanity'. He listed the 20 most common excuses he's heard about why CI can't be done, the funniest being the manager who claimed that it would be 'against corporate policy'.

He then proceeded to show exactly how he has implemented CI, and went on to make a totally convincing case that, in the long run, 'background' CI can be even more valuable than high-profile transformation programs.  And a CI culture, he argued, will also make any major transformation program more likely to succeed: people are engaged and energised by change, not simply resistant.  In shared services terms,  CI is 'the critical success factor for any SSO that wants to stay relevant'.  

What's really interesting is how few of the organizations represented in the audience have a serious CI program.  There's lip service but little commitment. How can that possibly be? At the end of the day, CI is pretty straightforward. 

Maybe the clue lies in a video Andrew used in his presentation to illustrate resistance to change (can't find it on YouTube, but it was like this).  The hamster keeps getting on the wheel, spinning faster and faster until it's out of control and finally gets flung out into the cage - then does it again, and again and again... 

Maybe the hamster enjoys the adrenalin rush - just like the business enjoys the thrill of firefighting.   And when, after a while, the hamster is punchdrunk with concussion and unable to think clearly, well that's like the business getting so used to living in firefighting mode that it too can no longer see clearly - and so resists the CI initiative that is ultimately its way forward.

Finally, a great endorsement for CI: people from BP's Business Services unit are sought out by the rest of the business.  It's career-enhancing because it has a carefully thought-through and well-executed CI program that encourages people to bring their brains to work. It breaks out, he noted, of the analysis paralysis of left brain thinking, the belief that life is a machine and we just need to understand how the cogs fit together to get it to work perfectly.  It recognizes the special and unique value that diverse perspectives, working intelligently together, can create.

There was a ton of other good stuff too of course.  More on that later in the week, I hope.

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