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.
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
17 Nov 2011 Future of BPM? We're In Mesopotamia 3000 BC
20 Sep 2011 BPM: The Foundation For Operational Excellence
on eSOPs Fables: Why Process Excellence Will Underpin Next Generation Pharma
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