Agreed, it's a bit cheesey to start with this: but it's a true remark from an industry veteran and it set me thinking.
A senior client in a global consulting services company paid a completely unsolicited compliment this week:
"You guys at Nimbus are so far ahead. You think what you do is ordinary - but let me tell you: for many of my clients, process as a common language is real innovation, and desperately needed.".
Language is a defining characteristic of humankind. It is core to our wellbeing, prosperity and progress. If you and I want to communicate beyond gestures and signs, we need a common language.
To communicate outside of our native language, we have two options. We can learn the language of the other person or we can use a widely-adopted common language - like French in the 19th century, or English in the 20th century - and like Mandarin might become in this century.
But our common language could also be a simplified lingua franca or pidgin language, or one of the surprising number of man-made artificial languages such as Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua and Laadan. All that matters is that it enables us to communicate, and, ideally, everyone else speaks it as well.
Until recently, Process was like one of those man-made languages that never really took off. Process was used only by IT geeks and quality managers and later by the Lean and Six Sigma crowd. It was a back room language, often quite technical, and certainly never spoken in the board room.
Nowadays, process is embraced by everyone. And process, we are all violently agreeing, is often the key to business success and failure. Two recent examples - you'll be able to list many more:
- Steve Diamond, senior director at Oracle, wrote last week that the long list of CRM implementation failures - by all vendors, not just Oracle - are not to do with CRM technology: 'As I looked down the list, they all seemed to relate to people or process.'
- Mark Trepanier, managing director at EquaTerra, wrote recently that a process focus is one of the four core principles for Shared Services success: ' The secret is to always talk to the customer about service, but to always think about process.'
So, good news - there is a growing realisation that operational excellence means being able to understand and manage the enterprise by function, by region, by product - and by process.
And we're increasingly agreeing that process should be the common language. But there's a problem. Process is actually spoken in many dialects, depending upon the silo of the speaker - IT, Quality, Six Sigma, Compliance. Even worse, the vocabulary of Process varies significantly between the dialects. A 'process' within SAP's widely used Solution Manager, for instance, refers essentially to a specific SAP transaction. Whereas a compliance manager would have a very different end-to-end definition for 'process'.
So Process isn't working as the lingua franca for the enterprise. What each group means by 'process' can vary enormously,and there is not much of a common vocabulary. We've all seen the confusion and frustration in practice: people talking 'process' but in reality using their silo dialect and each having a different understanding.
BPMN supporters will say that V2.0 is that common language, providing a fully featured vocabulary for process description and analysis. But BPMN is a necessarily complex language, intended for business analysts and enterprise architects. BPMN is never going to work as a language to engage a much wider cross-section of the enterprise in process improvement.
Let BPMN prosper as a process language within its own silo. The enterprise needs a pidgin language - a simplified process language that enables communication across silo boundaries.
Nowhere more so than across the IT:Business divide. Clay Richardson and Connie Moore wrote last month on the Forrester blog about 'the storming of the Bastille' - the increasing number of 'populist uprisings' in which business users are wresting control of process improvement initiatives back from IT. There is an urgent need for a common framework for collaboration.
So what's an ideal pidgin process language?
- It has to be simple, and graphical wherever possible, so that everyone can understand it - it's the enterprise lingua franca - and not require a software engineering mindset.
- It needs to offer an holistic and integrated view of the enterprise, not just what's automated, so people can see the whole.
- It needs to be real and 'live' - owned and embraced by the whole business, supporting day-to-day operations and managed as an enterprise asset.
I would say this of course but the Nimbus Universal Process Notation (UPN) has a lot going for it as a common language because it's proven as a collaborative framework across hundreds of organisations, around the world and in all sectors.
The first use of the word 'process' meaning 'a continuous series of actions meant to accomplish some result' was apparently recorded in the 1620's. As my [grown-up] kids keep reminding me, it's kind of amazing that, almost four centuries later, I could be making a living helping people to understand process. 'You mean you get paid to help people understand what they do? Isn''t that obvious?' Well, no actually, not yet - as my client's remarks attest.
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