Sourcing Shangri-La

The Language of 'Social Business'

Good to see Esteban Kolsky nail an essential truth in his post today The Confusing World of Social Business over on the influential Enterprise Irregulars blog:

 

"The label social is not good.  It does no justice to what we are doing.  This is not about being social; this is about creating collaborative platforms for users and organizations to co-create value. The whole purpose to “being social” is to collaborate."

He's on the money. Beneath the UX wizardry, 'social business' is about wider and more effective collaboration.

And, most often, the language that enables that enhanced collaboration is process.  Complete end-to-end processes, presented graphically and personalized, and, above all, designed to help people get real work done. 

Blend that with social media, add in governance et voilá - the recipe for sustainable transformation and continuous improvement. Both within the enterprise and across its extended supply chain and eco-system. 

[Worth noting of course  that some variants of the process language are not widely spoken outside the CIO's shop. Regional dialects such as BPMN or UML, for instance, have a purpose - but they are too complex and demanding to work as the language of the collaborative enterprise.]

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IBM Global CIO Study 2011: BPM Slips Back

IBM's Global CIO Study 2011 has credibility.  It reports on interviews with some 3,000 CIOs. And it poses some awkward questions for the BPM industry.

The study report has process running as a thread right through it, from beginning to end.  CIOs are looking to simplify and streamline process; to eliminate redundant process; to standardize process; and to transform value chains with process innovation.

Most commonly, IT is seen as 'the facilitator of organizational process efficiency'. In leading organizations 99% of CIOs say they would personally lead initiatives to simplify process.

So process is on pretty much every CIO's agenda, and in many cases it's even a personal involvement.

And yet - the study reports [p.23] that CIOs do not see Business Process Management as their highest priority. In fact, BPM has slipped back as a priority - from 64% to 60% - since the last CIO Study in 2009.

Which doesn't seem to stack up - unless you read it as a sign of how canny CIOs can be.

Most CIOs have invested heavily for several years in BPM - most controversially, in teams of enterprise architects and process analysts who have engaged in building elaborate enterprise process models.  But CIOs also know how little value this investment has created. 

They can see that the business can't understand the IP that has been so expensively created, seeing it as overly technical and systems oriented. They observe that many times the business simply goes its own way, using Word and Visio, and whatever else is to hand, to manage and improve operational processes in a parallel world.  And many CIOs find it hard to answer the question: If my expensive BPM resources failed to show up for work for the rest of the year, would anyone outside of IT really notice?

The breakthrough comes when BPM is extended to become an holistic view of the enterprise, not just what's automated. When it connects strategy with operational reality, supporting people in getting real work done and enabling them to contribute to continuous improvement. That's the path that leaders such as Nestlé and Cameron are forging.

Even better, this bigger conception of BPM releases the value already invested. By integrating the business operational view, in Nimbus Control, with the IT perspective, in SAP Solution Manager for instance, the BPM capabilities in the CIO's team come into play. They become connected and hands-on, and IT becomes a valued partner in process improvement and business transformation.  

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Simplicity, Process And Effective Communication

We live in a world where simplicity is so under-rated.  Real erudition is surely to be able to explain something simply, in a language that's suited to the capacity of the audience.  It's the genius of the parable.

It must be the zeitgeist because several of my colleagues have posted interesting pieces this week on aspects of simplicity: Janne Eriksson on Design Thinking (if IKEA designed process...);  Tom Molyneux on applying Nudge thinking to process; Mark Cotgrove on complexity as a root cause of failure for most projects; and Chris Taylor on simplicity and user adoption. 

After we'd listened to a presentation at the SharedServicesLink P2P conference yesterday, I turned to face the delegates on my table. It was going to be an embarrassing admission - I was, after all, representing a conference sponsor - but I determined to be brave.  "I'm going to be honest with you", I said. "I don't actually know what ERS stands for".  Turned out that I needn't have worried. Nor did anyone else on the table. And we'd all sat through a half hour presentation in which ERS was a constant reference. Even in the gripping but arcane world of touchless P2P, it pays to keep it simple.

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Attaining Touchless P2P

My first time at the Attaining Touchless Purchase-to-Pay conference in London this week - now in its fifth year. 

Great hands-on (touchless - geddit?) presentations from Vodafone, BG, Diageo, Pearson and others.  But the star of the show for me was Ericsson. After almost a decade of relentless transformation, it has migrated from 100+ national P2P processes into a global P2P process delivered off a single instance of SAP. Along the way, it has shed one third of its FTEs, reduced F&A costs to 0.2% of opex - and is approaching 'touchless' in many areas. 

As ever, it was the shared learning that was most valuable.   The Ericsson presentation highlighted four lessons that recurred in other presentations across the two days:

1. Automation has to follow after process standardization and optimization [encouraging that process standardization was a top priority in the pre-conference delegate survey]

2. Never under-estimate the value of collaboration and investment in change management; never make the mistake of thinking 'this is an IT project'

3. There has to be one process - integrated across the enterprise and down to the task level - and a shared understanding by all the stakeholders

4. Governance is breakfast, lunch and dinner - especially with respective to policing process variants. [Ericsson's ongoing program on 'deviation reduction' must frighten the life out of those who would dare argue for special treatment]

Ericsson is also among the leaders in fusing AP and Procurement, having just moved its global Supply Chain into Finance.  Vodafone too has a single integrated global operating model across Finance, Supply Chain and HR.

But most organizations are yet to make real progress here. It was a major theme of the conference. As Susie West, CEO of SharedServicesLink, put it in her keynote: "Automation alone won't achieve much without standard processes and alignment. If there's one take-away from this event, it's this: how are you going to get alignment? "

Collaboration, standardization, alignment, variant management, compliance...  I would love to say that Ericsson leveraged Nimbus Control as a process management platform to deliver its success. But, alas, I have to report that they built an in-house toolset (which looked uncannily familiar!).  

For those who admire Ericsson's pioneering spirit but would prefer to adopt a proven platform for process management and performance improvement: please come and check us out at Inspiring Performance 2011 in London in September.

PS haha - just heard that an Ericsson speaker won a prize in the end-of-conference raffle, donated by one of the conference sponsors: Nimbus! Dear Reader, are you going to believe me when I claim that this is not a stitch up? 

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Real-Time Process Governance

There's a fascinating struggle being played out as Facebook thinking meets the Chief Risk Officer. The disruptive force of 'social business' against the ever more pressing requirements of compliance.

Eugene Lee, CEO of SocialText, summarised the emerging enterprise reality in an interview yesterday:

"What enterprise social networking does do is empower people to enhance and extend business processes on the fly – and that is very disruptive for companies any way you slice it. Companies – and their technology – were designed to execute and uphold a certain set of business processes. Unfortunately, business conditions change so quickly — overnight in many cases — that these processes won’t work the next day. By letting people either change these processes themselves, or easily suggest modifications to people who have the power to change them, a company can respond faster to change and serve customers more efficiently. The ability to consume, modify and share information on enterprise social networking platforms facilitates this in a way that was never possible before in the past."

Two things stand out here. Firstly, he's right: the focus has to be on end-to-end process. It's the only language that enables effective collaboration across diverse groups at this pace. The enterprise of the future is process-savvy, and process management is its heart beat.    

Secondly, no business that manages its risks sensibly (ie any organization with aspirations to survive) can possibly allow its people to simply change processes outside of an approval cycle of some sort. 

True, process changes today are often offline and protracted (and even alarmingly disconnected from operational realities). But any enterprise with an eye on the future is looking for a robust process governance framework that can also facilitate change efficiently and at pace.     

I think there is a happy ending - where the buzz and rapid learning inherent in social business are reconciled with the demands of risk and compliance management. (register for our Inspiring Performance 2011 conference and hear why!).  Meantime, today's Dilbert yet again nails the current reality:

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Building A Robust Global Services Organization

Rick Lucas and Drew Wright at Everest Group sounded an alarm last week about the challenges in building a robust global services management organization.

Highlighting the increasing complexity of global services delivery, they make the point that today's world demands different expertise and new capabilities. Relying upon the skillsets that have worked for the last twenty years could be, they warn, 'catastrophic'.  

It's not just new leadership that we need. As I've argued elsewhere, the complexity and pace of managing global services - the challenge of service integration - demand a similar revolution in process thinking.

The tools and methods that we've used for process management for twenty years won't deliver in today's world either.  They are too technical, fragmentary, ungoverned and disconnected from real business operations. 

Successful global services organizations will rely on process management platforms that can:

- provide line-of-sight between a target operating model and operational realities

- enable effective collaboration, especially between IT and the business

- wrap governance, compliance and controls around the operational processes

- deliver at the front line and engage the organization in continuous improvement.

Everest makes the case for recruiting the right talent 'to execute with excellence and deliver the next generation of value from global services'. But even the best talent can't deliver sustainable excellence without a joined-up view of the business.

Optimizing service delivery across supply chains that are global, cross-business and cross-service providers, demands transparency, shared understanding and clear accountability. Cue the enterprise process management platform, the crucial enabler.

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Making 'Social Business' Productive

The redoubtable Dion Hinchliffe just published summary advice on Social Business Strategy, in a checklist for CIOs 'trapped between the CEO wanting innovation and the CFO needing compliance'.

It's all good stuff but what stood out for me is this little nugget of wisdom:

"Along the way, don’t lose sight of the fact that systems of engagement aren’t just the social applications, just like IT systems aren’t an entire business solution.."

Which seems on the money to me. I love chatting like anyone else. And work is a social activity, so we need space to be ourselves.  But too little attention is being paid to the ROI on 'social business'. Why invest in Yammer or Chatter if it's just to enable people to chat for hours about their favorite bands on YouTube or swap football yarns?  We can all do that via Facebook anyway.

What's need is a way to get conversation going - but to direct it towards useful outcomes for the business.

Cue the enterprise process management platform.  What's everyone involved with - as owner or stakeholder or executor or consumer? The end-to-end processes of the organization. So integrate 'social systems of engagement' with business process management et voilá - the CEO is smiling. It's a complete social business solution that fosters collaborative innovation and continuous improvement.

The CFO grins as well because it's all within a robust governance framework where risks and business controls are embedded within the processes.  It's inherently more sustainable too, so cost cuts and service improvements are far more likely to stick. 

CIO as hero. Job done.

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Inspiring Performance 2011

Last year's Inspiring Performance at the BFI lived up to its name, with client case studies from Nestlé, Best Buy Europe, Barclays, Cisco, Achmea and many others.  But this year's Nimbus global conference promises to be best ever by a long way.  Do plan to be in London 27/28 September and come join us.

The conference highlight of course will be on the morning of Day 2: my workshop session on Shared Services Optimization. Don't even think about registering for one of the other five tracks ;-)  

Full details and registration at the Inspiring Performance conference website.  If you have a story worth telling at the workshop, or ideas on what you'd like to see covered, do please get in touch.   

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Process: How To Break Out Of Binge Culture

"We're about to start another process documentation binge" said the prospective client I was talking with, a shared services director. 

"It's across the business, driven from the center" he went on. "The trouble is that we define the processes but nobody seems to bother about following them.  They're too difficult to understand. So we have a lot of compliance issues."  

Dear Reader, I'm not making this up.  This is a major European energy group.  [I'm even resisting naming and shaming the process tool mandated by the center because this malaise is not unique to this tool - it could any one of the technical process tools.]

I share the story as a brilliant example of the dysfunctional state of so many organizations when it comes to process management.  Stuck in a wasteful and dispiriting 'binge' culture.

At the other end of the spectrum, leaders like Nestlé, Cameron and Carphone Warehouse join up the dots.  They see process as an enterprise asset which underpins risk management and provides one of the keys to sustainable change. They want an enterprise-wide process management platform that gets everyone collaborating effectively on continuous improvement. They aspire to be fluent in end-to-end process.

Which isn't just good for their stockholders: it makes for a much more inspiring place to work.

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