Sourcing Shangri-La

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. 

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The Social Enterprise: Don't All Speak At Once

Larry Dignan at ZDNet nails it in describing the looming 'social sprawl' in A Few Caveats Ahead of Utopia, his take on Dreamforce 2011:

"Every software vendor has some social hook. Let’s say every IT buyer goes whole hog with the social stuff. Well guess what? Now you have HR social features. CRM social. Business execution social. It’s a social fest. Meanwhile, employees are still using Twitter and Facebook. If social sprawl isn’t an issue today, it will be tomorrow. This emerging issue can go two ways for Salesforce. IT buyers can see Salesforce as the great social enterprise consolidator. Or they can close their ears. At this point, it may just be a jump ball."

He's right about the emerging issue of social sprawl. But I think it has a different resolution. It's not a jump ball between Salesforce Chatter and an alternative of a cacophany of voices. There's a rapidly emerging alternative - a process-based paradigm. And the best example may be the convergence of Tibbr with Nimbus Control, which analysts seem to have underplayed in commentary on Tibco's acquisition of Nimbus Partners.

Diversity in our interactions online is natural, just like in the everyday physical world: as Tom Cortese has argued, focussed and niche social networks will always have a place. But the collaboration and dialog that is at at the core of the social enterprise needs structure if it is going to be purposeful.  Especially because, while we may kid ourselves otherwise, the evidence is that actually we're not very good at multi-tasking. 

So what's the context and framework most likely to encourage effective collaboration in the social enterprise? It has to be the processes of the business.  What else is the social enterprise seeking to continually improve and optimize?  Ergo a business process management platform sits at the heart of social enterprise.

After seeing his social baptism ceremony last week, I'm coming over all funny. So, to channel the extraordinary Marc Benioff for a moment: Beware The False BPM Platform!

Is there a single integrated process architecture for the enterprise, with clear line of sight between strategy and operations?  Is there visibility of end-to-end processes, not just what's automated, and across outsourced activities too - and all in the language of the business, not IT-speak? 

No? Then it's a false BPM platform!

Are real-time performance metrics, business controls, compliance and quality, integrated with the end-to-end processes to create the operating system for the enterprise? Does it ensure that Lean and Six Sigma projects are delivering sustainable benefits?  

No? Then it's a false BPM platform!

Does it help people get real work done? Is it deployed to every desktop and mobile device as a personalised intelligent operations manual? Is it easy for every person and process stakeholder - including especially the IT community - to collaborate every day on operational excellence?  

No - then it's a false BPM platform!

Here endeth the diatribe. ;-) 

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BPM: The Invisible Gorilla

Crowds aren't always right. Today's conventional wisdom about business process management is that is tedious, technical and matters only to IT.  I believe that mindset is about to be inverted.

There's a famous experiment where subjects were shown a short video clip of a basketball game. They were asked to count how many times one team took possession of the ball. When asked afterwards, most observers had not noticed that a figure in a gorilla suit walks into the middle of the court, turns to face the camera, beats his chest and dances a jig before strolling out of the picture.

What we pay attention to guides our expectations of what we are going to see. If it doesn't fit the template we are currently working with, then often we won't see it (consciously at least), no matter how bizarre.

So how do we ever learn anything new? That's where the brain's right hemisphere comes into play.  But before I go any further, let me acknowledge my inspiration here: A bo0k that took over my summer holiday, possibly one of the most interesting books that I've read in thirty years: The Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. 

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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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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23 May 2011   IBM Global CFO Study 2010

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Jay Lillie Fires Up

One to watch: my Nimbus colleague Jay Lillie just launched his blog Pragmatic Business Transformation.

Since he joined Nimbus earlier this year, Jay has been living out of a suitcase: clients are lovin' him. He's consulted with the biggest and bluest chip organizations (as well as the US Army). His experience in IT, and especially in Enterprise Architecture, has already cast fresh light on ongoing strategy discussions with Nimbus clients in the US, where he's based, and Europe.

I spent half a day with Jay when he first joined - mostly, it's true, at Starbucks in picturesque Chichester. [First time the barista there had an order for a quad-shot espresso!]  Passionate opinions, and unafraid of controversy: makes for a promising blog. 

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No ROI in BPM? You're Kidding Me!

A question I hadn't heard for a long time: 'Where's the ROI?  You, Nimbus, are ultimately just a BPM presentation layer. You don't automate anything. Nice to have, but really - where's the value?'

It's rare nowadays because every week brings new evidence of the hard ROI delivered  - across every corner of the enterprise - by an holistic approach focussed on process adoption.

Which is a sharp contrast to what's happening elsewhere.  There's a breathtaking waste of time and resources being expended on 'BPM' projects that seem unconnected to business value.  

The confusion that lies at the heart of this waste is still widespread.  Even the BP Group on LinkedIn [6k+ BPM professionals] has a discussion running on 'If process is the means, what is the end?'   

The most egregious example though must be this discussion, also on LinkedIn, started last week:

"I have most of my processes modeled in ARIS? What's next? What is the value-add of modeling processes other than just for illustration purposes?"

Which would be laughable if it wasn't so common. How did we get to a situation where so many people are doing 'BPM' projects and delivering little or no value?

I see things rapidly changing for the better. There's a new vision emerging, a new recognition of the potential, and a new sense of engagement from the business. It's coalescing around the idea of process management as the platform that underpins operational excellence, compliance and risk management, and continuous improvement. Complete, integrated and dynamic, and in the language of end-to-end process, the BPM platform orchestrates every aspect of change to the corporate DNA. It enables the full potential for process automation.

BPM is moving from being the domain of the CIO, to become the concern of the COO (Lean and operational excellence across an increasingly virtual sourcing environment ) and the CFO (risk, controls and compliance) and the CEO (continuous improvement and M&A support). 

And in the course of this transition, BPM is moving from being obscure and nerdy [eg Adam Deane's amusing take on the IT process modeller] to being strategic and cool. 

This wider perspective is echoed by Gartner's David McCoy in a blog last week on the three essentials for process excellence: cross-silo thinking, metrics integrated with process, and end-to-end process visibility.

And it's reinforced in off-the-record comments in a discussion with a senior exec at a global investment bank last week that "probably 40% of our operations costs are wasteful - and can be eliminated without any major IT changes".   

See  it in this light and BPM has extraordinarily high value.

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Activity-Based Costing Makes A Comeback

After years of apparently ineluctable decline, suddenly it's ABC everywhere.  

Shared services organizations are becoming more interested in ABC as they move towards commercial business models. It was a recurrent theme at the SharedServicesLink.com Future Finance 2001 conference last week. 

ABC enables a shared services organization to understand its costs better, and so enables more sophisticated transaction-based pricing of its services. 

We've had ABC features in Nimbus Control for a decade. Nimbus clients such as Steria have presented on how they use ABC in the design and delivery of their F&A outsourcing services. 

But we're noticing a new level of interest in ABC, which has driven the recent product enhancements in this area.  The capability to draw data into ABC direct from transaction logging systems now provides FS clients, for instance, with a simple way to overlay their production statistics (trading volumes) in the context of the process.  Add in the cost-driven KPIs, and the risks and business controls, and everything is being presented, and managed, in one context: the end-to-end process.   

When you start seeing ABC used in these ways, you have to wonder why it was out of favor for so long. It's going to be another core capability for any BPM 2.0 enterprise process management platform. 

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Why Is BPM Delivering So Little?

Gary Comerford has posted a thoughtful and widely circulated piece on his Process Cafe blog about The State of BPM.

It makes dismal reading. After looking at the competing definitions of BPM, and the high rate of BPM project failures, he concludes: 'Is it any wonder BPM is in such a state?'

So why is BPM delivering so little? 

Actually it's not. From where I sit, every day BPM is demonstrating its value as the key to successful business transformation:

In SAP implementations, for instance.  And Finance Transformation. And Supply Chain.  And Outsourcing and Shared Services. And in boosting knowledge worker Productivity.   

BPM has gotten hijacked by vendors many times over the past decade and forced to perform some unnatural acts. But everything I see points to a return to its roots.

There's an emerging consensus that BPM is an enabler for operational excellence and continuous improvement. Which means, as a happy consequence, that the long separation between BPM and the mainstream Lean and Six Sigma practitioners is coming to an end.  

Process is the language, and the BPM platform is the essential enabler, for the effective collaboration that underpins operational excellence and continuous improvement. 

It's a framework for collaboration that is comprehensive.  How could it be otherwise? It's an enterprise framework. It enables collaboration across the IT-Business Divide, across functional and organizational silos, across the extended enterprise, even pulling in the Risks and Controls teams. And it's not just documents, email and shared folders: it includes the governance features that make it a sustainable framework.

That BPM is finally discovering its true self is good news for everyone.  It provides the framework for collaboration that will make BPMS automation projects bankable in the eyes of the CFO.  It will draw EAs and BAs, and the technical BPA vendors, into the real world and get them walking in step with the business.  It's the key to working together to achieve something. 

Normally at this stage I would issue an appeal to Gary to please step back from the ledge. But I see he's got two more posts to come on The State of BPM ;-).

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21 Feb 2011    Now That's What I Call BPM!

 

19 Jan 2011    Reaching Out To BPM Platform Skeptics

Now That's What I Call BPM!

Beat this for exec engagement in using process as the language of business transformation. Even better, it's a turn-around where BPM has been the pivot.

This was an $80m SAP project heading for a derailment. The client's SI had configured 'vanilla' SAP without much reference to the business requirements (which had been 'captured' in a Word document).  

So when the SI presented the business with a preview of what its new SAP world would look like, there was panic: the business didn't recognize any of it.

One month later, the client and its SI are using Nimbus Control - delivered as a Cloud service - to describe the end-to-end processes, with Storyboards showing role-based views of typical user activities.  Everyone now speaks the same language.

Now there is shared visibility and understanding: across the client organization, especially between IT and the business, and between the client and its SI. Requirements are rapidly becoming precise. Process improvements are being identified. And the user experience is being transformed so that processes will be integrated with Storyboards, documents, metrics, risks and controls to create a personalized 'intelligent operations manual'. 

The next step is Visualization Workshops to fine tune the design and the SAP configuration requirements.  Then the same Storyboards created for the Visualization Workshops will be used for UAT, training and user support - so there will be no gaps and no overlapping teams re-creating the same thing slightly differently.

But what's really interesting is that both the CEO and and CIO now carry iPads - and not as bling. They use them to pull up the latest versions of the processes and Storyboards in their discussions with the various program stakeholders as they move around the office. 

Nimbus clients such as Carphone Warehouse adopted the iPad early on to support their Lean process excellence people walking the floor.  But hats off to this client: this is the first time that I've come across a CEO and CIO rolling up their sleeves and getting so involved with process in this hands-on way.  

The bottom line is that this client has, in one month, turned an IT-led systems implementation that was heading for disaster into a business-led transformation program that will be enabled by SAP - and with every chance of success. 

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The Process Hall of Shame Re-Opens

It's true that the Process Hall of Shame, which opened its doors just a year ago, has been closed for a while.

I faltered. I was worried that I might identify an organization and cause embarrassment (not to mention litigation!).  And there seemed to be others far more expert than me writing on project failures.  And frankly we're all suffering a bit from failure fatigue.  There are just so many examples where a failure to communicate effectively leads to project failures, cancellations and over-runs.     

I'm inspired though to push open the creaking door, brush the cobwebs off the candelabras - and announce the grand re-opening of the Process Hall of Shame.

Inspired by two things. Firstly by Adam Deane's brilliant description of FDBPM, the 'new mainstream' implementation methodology for process projects. 'Faith-Driven BPM' would be hilarious if it wasn't so on the money.

And then by hearing of a project which almost defies belief.

I hesitate to tell this story because I have some dear friends working in IT who will wince at this. But it's true, and genuinely surprising because it's a throw-back to twentieth century thinking - in an organization large enough that it really ought to know better.        

I have to be careful in disguising this, so I'm not not even going to reveal on which continent this little drama is taking place...

This is an organization that is planning to go live shortly with a major SAP implementation that will transform its business.  Except that it's totally being driven by IT. It's a software implementation, a technical project. 

So some of the details have been overlooked: like what exactly are the end-to-end processes and the business requirements; what are the potential improvements that this project could enable; how the transition will be made between the existing processes and the new processes; and how the operational people will use the new SAP capability in practice.  Admin details, really, you can see how they might easily get neglected in the excitement of the software...   

We have been called in at the eleventh hour by business people aghast at the train wreck they can see about to happen.  They can see only one connection between IT's new SAP system and what their people actually do: the desperate calls that their people will be making to the IT Helpdesk when it goes 'live'.

But what takes the biscuit - and prompts me to throw open the doors of the Process Hall of Shame once more - is the resentful attitude of the IT folks involved, who are, you'll never guess, totally invested in one of the technical BPA tools and see no need to change. 

One of my colleagues was harangued last week by one of the client's IT team, who was keen to point out that Nimbus Control was inappropriate because it isn't designed for data modelling. No, it's designed to enable effective collaboration, right across the business, on operational excellence and continuous improvement. Oh, and to support people in doing real work more efficiently, which might arguably be this organization's bigger priority right now. [And anyway it integrates with SAP Solution Manager, so the IT perspective is well covered.]

Let's have a bit of hush please, ladies and gentlemen, so we can hear the drum roll - and then put your hands together please to welcome this new entrant to the Process Hall of Shame - Ta Dah!

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Reaching Out To BPM Platform Skeptics

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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Michael Krigsman on IT Project Failure

If you've any interest in the causes of IT project failure, and how to bridge the Business:IT Divide, you'll want to catch this podcast interview with Michael Krigsman, CEO of Asuret Inc and and an acknowledged expert in this area.  Michael's IT Project Failures blog on ZDNet is widely followed.

Michael and I have a very 21st century relationship: we've only ever met over Skype.  One day I hope we'll get to do that old twentieth century thing of meeting over lunch, in Boston or London. Meantime, Skype is awesome.  

Michael estimates that between 30% and 70% of IT projects fail.  The reasons are very rarely technical – they are about how people work together.  As Michael makes clear in this interview, effective collaboration, linked to a sound process management framework, are the real fundamentals of project success.

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Adios, Swimlanes. Hola, Process Adoption...

As I write this, I'm packing to head to my underground bunker.  Because I know from past experience the passion that surrounds swimlanes.  To question the swimlane is to toy with some very deep emotions, so watch out.

But it's Friday and I'm exhausted, so a weekend in the bunker seems quite appealing. I'm emboldened enough to pass on stories from three clients just this week, which reinforce the view that the ardour for swimlanes is cooling. 

A consultant colleague was telling of a process he has been commissioned by a global manufacturer into translating from a monstrous Visio diagram including 15 swimlanes into Nimbus UPN, so that it can become accessible and useful to all.

A banking client was telling of the impact of translating 180 processes in a Finance Shared Services in India from swimlanes into Nimbus  UPN, rescuing this process from geek-speak and turning it into universal knowledge.

Another banking client is wrapped up in knots trying to present regulatory information in swimlanes that are so complex you would need to be a quant to make head or tail of them.

Straws in the wind of course, but perhaps swimlanes just aren't hot anymore. And that's - let me put my tin hat on first - that's a good thing. Because as soon as there is any complexity or connectivity, swimlanes obfuscate rather than illuminate.  They're not how most people think.  Not only that: they can't be integrated with documents or KPI metrics or business controls; they can't be personalised or rendered multilingual; and they usually have little or no governance wrapper so they are a change nightmare.   

It's true that swimlanes can have value in certain circumstances, especially in IT systems configuration.  Ultimately, the orchestra does need a score showing the notes that each instrument is playing, even if most people are only interested in the complete musical effect (or just tapping a foot to the melody).  

This shift away from swimlanes is inevitable and healthy.  It rescues process from obscurity and makes it accessible. It's part of the shift towards higher levels of process maturity - which requires a more universal engagement with process, and the capability to manage the business in the process dimension.   

A year's a long time in BPM. Twelve months ago, the upcoming launch of BPMN 2.0 with its methodology of pools and swimlanes was The Next Big Thing, set to take over the world.  But actually it hasn't.  In fact, it's been a bit of a damp squib because attention has shifted, thankfully, to BPM as the platform for operational excellence and collaboration on continuous process improvement. 

Worth reflecting that this year, of course, Social BPM is the hot property. But that seems far more likely to stay current because it's more perennial. It's about enabling effective collaboration, which we've been striving to do since caveman days, and arguably we've got some way yet to go on that.

PS for the avoidance of doubt: Nimbus UPN does not require the abandoning of swimlanes. Nimbus Control can generate dynamic swimlane views, as required, from the Storyboards used for design, testing and training. It also supports BPMN notation, so BPMN swimlanes can be used wherever required in a process.

Related Posts

4 Jan 2011           BPM Truths We Hold Self Evident

17 Dec 2011        The Tube Map: Process Made Easy

27 Jul 2010        The Language of Process As A Strategic Issue

 8 Mar 2010        Swimlanes: The Tide Is Turning

 

 

The Tube Map: Process Made Easy

Hat tip to Adam Deane for another entertaining post today BPM: Mind The Gap , on the London Tube map and BPM process maps.

It's a helpful analogy, and deserves to be taken a stage further. 

The Tube map that we know and love is a simplified representation that works for us as passengers or end users. 

Behind the scenes, London Underground has all sorts of 'map' representations of its network - rail engineering maps, electrical engineering maps, signalling maps and geographical maps.  There is even a temperature map. Each map is different because it serves a different purpose. 

But the Tube map and all of LU's internal maps relate to the one operational reality. They are multiple integrated views of one reality. 

In the corporate world, end users need simplified representations of process.  They need process to be as simple as the Tube map.

Behind the scenes, and especially in IT, there may be all sorts of process maps in different formats to meet the needs of enterprise architects, Lean and Six Sigma teams, system testing teams, risk and compliance teams. 

What matters is that, wherever they may be, all these process maps are multiple integrated views of one operational reality.

It's the integration that's crucial - it's at the core of BPM 2.0 thinking. It's why the integration of Nimbus Control (the business operational perspective) with SAP Solution Manager (the IT perspective) is so significant. It's a sign of where the future lies. It has to be the foundation of sustainable operational excellence.

The reality of business process is that most organizations have very incomplete and multiple views, that are not integrated and in a variety of formats. They are also often out of date. And they are especially hazy when it comes to the extended enterprise, to activities that are outsourced.

Which is like London Underground using different and unrelated maps, in different formats, for its engineering and signalling teams, and with quite a lot of the stations and lines missing.

Even worse, the process equivalent of the Tube map often looks like gobbledegook.  Small wonder that end users ignore it in favor of asking a mate if they can help. 

The future is not just Tube map thinking to support process end users and other stakeholders. It's about higher levels of personalization as well - so that I get process as I need it, in the form and language that I need it, on the device that I need it, and wrapped around all that I need to do my job well.   

In exactly the same way that the Tube map is increasingly personalized and interactive: stepfree maps for wheeelchair users, maps for riverboat users and cycle hirers, multilingual maps for visitors, Zone 1 maps for central London passengers - even a Tube map optimized for the iPad.

Related posts:

8 Nov 2010        BPM 2.0 on a Napkin

11 Dec 2009        Rethinking BPM as SatNav for the Enterprise