Last week I wrote about three essential ingredients for sustained enterprise-wide process improvement:
"The essential elements are cultural change + more sophisticated social structures + increasingly, an enabling process platform that glues it all together and makes it 'the way we do things here'."
My inclusion of 'an enabling process platform' sparked a surprisingly skeptical challenge, and from people whose insights I respect. So here's my justification for why an enabling process platform is essential - and some hard evidence.
It's not that it's impossible to achieve sustained enterprise-wide process improvement without an enabling process platform. It's just that it's far easier with one, and far more likely to succeed in the long run.
It's possible to navigate a cruise liner around the Caribbean using pen, paper, compass and a sextant. It's far more efficient to use GPS. [probably helps the passengers sleep easier too]
There are examples everywhere of 'knowledge platforms' that facilitate collaboration across complex, silo-based and dynamic endeavours.
A timetable is at the heart of operating any railway. A screenplay is the key to the collaboration of the many people and skills involved in creating a movie. The menu is the platform driving the collaboration of the chefs working in a top kitchen.
More exactly, perhaps, as it's a fast-moving scenario: imagine running a rolling TV news channel without a scheduling platform. It would be possible to coordinate the reporters, the VT editors, the guests, the presenters, using fax and phones. But it's far more efficient to use a scheduling system that pulls it all together and enables effective collaboration.
It's true that timetables, screenplays, menus and studio schedulers don't focus on process. But ultimately process is the language for effective collaboration across the enterprise.
It's possible to try to deliver sustained enterprise-wide process improvement without an enabling process platform. That's where most organizations are right now. They may have a myriad of ungoverned process fragments in Visio or Word; or they may have enterprise process models understood only by an IT cognoscenti; typically they have both, and more. And in Phil Gilbert's phrase, they manage most process 'using Excel over email'.
It's far more efficient to use an enabling process platform that gives line of sight between strategy and operational reality; that enables effective collaboration across the extended enterprise, providing a single source of truth on process but with different views for the different stakeholders; that is made real by end user adoption and linked to real-time KPI performance metrics; and all wrapped within a governance framework that is robust but easy-to-use.
Many organizations recognize continuous improvement - the goal to which they are striving - requires cultural change, and needs new ways of thinking and structure. But few organizations (dare one say it, even analysts) see yet how an enabling process platform can accelerate implementation of a target operating model, and embed a culture of continuous improvement.
For platform skeptics wary of fancy ideas, there is hard evidence and real ROI.
Nimbus clients and global leaders such as Nestle and Chevron are investing in an enabling process platform as a vital underpinning for their operational excellence initiatives. At the Profit Through Process conference in Orlando this week, Best Buy announced $80m in savings and revenue growth, achieved through a relentless process focus that is enabled by a process platform leveraging Nimbus Control. Nimbus clients such as Royal Bank of Canada presented recently on the savings and other benefits achieved through adoption of an enabling process platform which wraps risks and business controls into the 'live' end-to-end business processes.
Cost reduction, speed to implementation, customer satisfaction: the hard evidence is accumulating to endorse what intuition suggests - that an enterprise process platform is a critical enabler for sustained enterprise-wide process improvement. Not essential - you can go a long way with 'Excel over email' - but efficient.
You probably have far better analogies than the ones I've suggested. Do please comment with your own ideas. If this is all one tenth as important as I'm saying, then the sooner we agree on a definition, and get on with making it happen in the real world, the better.
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Mike: You raise a fascinating possibility: that there's an IT system that can easily capture and share standard descriptions of work. The reason people use Excel and e-mail, or Word and e-mail, is that they know how to use e-mail and Word. E-mail and Word are part of their everyday communication. Probably they don't even think about the tools very much.
My experience is that IT people involved in BPM don't talk much to people in the lean world. My friend Tom Davenport wrote a column about the "Missing Middle" of people who bridge between these two groups. Lean people have a congenital aversion to using IT, which they feel limits flexibility and real person-to-person communication where work really takes place (the gemba).
I would propose an experiment to test the power of your IT platform for supporting continuous improvement which follows from your blog post: (1) find someone who is a lean expert in capturing and using standard work, a central step in problem solving and continuous improvement in the lean world. (I have some friends whom I could recommend.) (2) See if you could convince them of the ease of your tool. Especially work with them to overcome their concerns about the social aspect of cold IT systems. (3) Get them to pilot it in some of their real company situations and see what happens.
Posted by: BradfordPower | 19 January 2011 at 11:31 PM
Brad: excellent, delighted to take up the challenge. An experiment with you as the independent (and quite sceptical) arbiter, and free to publish your findings on your HBR blog.
Posted by: Mike Gammage | 20 January 2011 at 07:35 AM
Mike, thanks for a great post. You may have heard that I am a technology empowerment 'freak'. I think BPM is a waste of time without technology and it certainly is with 'Social BPM' because 'Social Collaboration' requires technology!
Bradford Powers bemoans the lack of communication between business, IT and analysts and Tom Davenpoart now reluctantly accepts the need for a collaborative aspects in process management.
Continuous improvement as suggested by LEAN (with or without SixSigma) won't happen! One can't enforce bureaucracy to reduce bureaucracy!
Yes, the enterprise-wide driven process movement will require a platform to empower people, but it will most certainly not be a typical BPM platform using BPMN and tacked on social chats.
It will require a step-by-step defined business architecture, top-down transparency on objectives and goals, IT defined business entities and services, defined business capabilities and the related process owners and provde the tools to them to self-define and adapt goals, activities, rules, content, and user-interfaces. To optimize and adapt it needs bottom-up transparency on goal-achievement and customer outcomes right within the process platform, not some after-the-fact BI. Can we leave out any of this? it is the utter minimum needed for such a platform to succeed.
The simple declaration of processes, collaborative or not, is ok but nowhere near enough ...
The future and reality are defined by ACTION and not by process definitions, plans or strategies.
Posted by: Maxjpucher | 06 March 2011 at 09:54 AM