Sourcing Shangri-La

The Risks In Social Without Governance

If I were a Chief Risk Officer, I'd definitely have social on my radar.

There's a huge enthusiasm for collaboration and a fascination with the tools and platforms that enable it.   

Which is great. Essential and exciting in fact. But midst the revolutionary fervour, it's easy to overlook governance.  Not completely, of course, but to allow roles, responsibilities and accountability to blur in the excitement; to relax rigour in the quest for agility; and to permit a cultural slide into 'governance-lite' as the new default. 

Unleash social without a complete and joined-up model of the enterprise - one that is owned and embraced by the business - and it's the stuff of CRO nightmares.  Without the right process management platform in place, it's not just easier to incubate a black swan, it's quicker. 

 

Related Posts

15 March 2013  Future BPM: The Enterprise Platform

29 June 2012    Process And The New World Of Risk Management

© Text Michael Gammage 2013

Social Business: It's Culture First

Spotted in a client meeting room. One of several similarly challenging messages randomly posted around the room, each one as refreshingly vibrant. 

A neat reminder that social business may be enabled by technology but it's attitudes and behaviours that matter most.  It's culture that distinguishes truly collaborative organizations.

PS This is the norm apparently across this global organization (and it's in what most would see as a rather conservative industry). I would love to give the credit that's due, if someone can give me permission...

Future BPM - The Enterprise Platform

I’ve argued previously that sustainable success in complex global enterprises depends upon effective collaboration, and that process is the language that best enables it.  I’ve also argued that BPMN is out of the running as a universal business language, and proposed three questions we should ask in assessing alternatives.

The right language is vitally necessary but it’s not sufficient.  Traditionally, we say it needs to be supported by a tool.  I want to make the case here that the real value comes when it is supported a process management platform.

Tool, platform - what's the difference?

Here’s ten ways we can know an enterprise process management platform when we see one:

1. It is the single source of truth. It goes beyond defining what we do and how we do it. It defines as well roles, responsibilities and accountability.
2. It integrates processes with documents, systems, metrics and training to deliver content that is personalised, intuitive and valuable to every desktop and mobile device.
3. It makes it easy for users to feed back improvement ideas to process owners and stakeholders, to get engaged in continuous improvement.
4. It recognizes the need for variants and seamlessly manages them behind the scenes.  It allows global processes to be designed and managed in English (for instance) but displayed to the user in their chosen language.  It manages the ongoing optimization of the variants to a global process necessary to meet local requirements.
5. It is the framework for performance management. It integrates processes with metrics and analytics. It overlays processes with metadata, hidden to most users, with analytical features and reporting that allow process stakeholders and Op Ex and Lean Sigma teams to collaborate on change. It underpins every CxO dashboard.
6. It is the framework for change management. Recognizing that almost every proposed change has ripples, with implications for other groups across and outside of the enterprise, all business change is managed through it.
7. It bridges the IT:Business divide.  It engages business and IT in a rich ongoing dialogue. 
8. It is the enterprise QMS. It enables risks, controls and compliance to be embedded and managed within the end-to-end operational processes.
9. It provides all this within one unified governance framework that is robust enough to meet every compliance requirement yet also automated and intuitive enough to be easy to use. 
10. It is a chameleon. It can be stand-alone, or it can invisibly and intelligently integrate with other collaboration and social platforms, and any other systems, as required.

An enterprise BPM platform of this kind provides direct line of sight between strategy and reality. It links the operating model directly with the operational processes. It reduces the risk in every business transformation, from acquisition integration to major IT programmes. It embeds a culture of continuous innovation and sustainable improvement.  And the Chief Risk Officer sleeps easier at night.

The stakes are high. This is an enormously valuable prize.  There’s a race on to deliver it. Exciting times.

 

Related Posts

01 Mar 2013    Why Are So Many IT Projects Successful?

11 Dec 2012    Process Management And Google Maps

© Text Michael Gammage 2013

 

 

Outsourcing's Secret Sauce

Deloitte's report Outsourcing, Today and Tomorrow, just published, attempts to define the secret sauce for outsourcing. The authors are engagingly frank:

"We wish we could wrap up this paper with a pithy summary of the secrets of effective outsourcing, boiled down into a neat list of easy-to-digest bullet points. Unfortunately, if such secrets exist, no one has yet discovered them."

But they go on to suggest 'one possible candidate' for outsourcing's secret sauce:

"The recognition that outsourcing, like other complex business practices, is a discrete business discipline requiring specialized skills that cannot easily be developed on the fly."

Which may be true - let's agree it's one of the essential spices - but it overlooks an essential ingredient, arguably the foundation for outsourcing's secret sauce: a platform for effective collaboration, which surely lies at the heart of successful outsourcing.

This platform provides a common language: end-to-end process, expressed in the language of the business, not IT-speak. It is comprehensive, not just IT-oriented. It provides integrated perspectives, not just a repository of process fragments. It is wrapped within a robust governance framework to enable process stakeholders - across the enterprise and including especially IT - to effectively manage change. And, crucially, it enables deployment to process users in a way that is personalised, intuitive and engaging.

The Deloitte report - which polled 100+ sourcing professionals earlier this year - provides ample evidence that this need for a common language, a framework for more effective collaboration, is real and growing:

Outsourcing is big - a $480bn industry this year - and set to expand. So too is offshoring.  But operational roles and responsibilities are often amazingly unclear. [There is far too much focus simply on contractual negotiations]

Cloud will vastly increase its complexity. [as will Social, Mobile and Big Data] 

Churn is increasing: half of clients have terminated contracts for convenience, sometimes to insource, most often to re-outsource. [Managing complex dynamic multisourced service delivery environments is becoming the norm]

Innovation and sustainable success in continuous improvement can't work without it. [Innovation and continuous improvement is the area where organizations report that they are least effective in working with service providers]. 

 

Related Posts

21 Aug 2012    How To Simplify Global Shared Services

20 Jun 2012    Process: The Emerging Global Business Language

ROI And The Value Of Time

There's few organizations willing to forgo an ROI calculation and instead back a hunch. So huge kudos to GE, whose investment in CoLab, its social media platform, did exactly that, as GE's Ron Utterbeck explained in the latest MIT Sloan Review :

"We haven’t tried to come up with an ROI. Haven’t wasted a moment’s notice even thinking about it."

But the GE team is absolutely on the ball, tracking every aspect of CoLab's uptake across GE - recognizing that adoption is where its true value lies:

"It’s not a system that people have to go to, but people still come back every single day. They come back because it makes their job easier, because they’re getting value out of it. Going and spending money on ROI would be, honestly, in my opinion, just a waste of money because your true value of this is people are coming back".

Most organisations of course don't have this kind of self-confidence and insist on seeing the ROI.  And that's where the difficulties start for projects - like social media - which deliver more effective collaboration.

I've been involved in ROI exercises with several clients where time savings have underpinned the business case.   We often use only the most conservative of assumptions, and constrain the benefits to what can be properly quantified.  But even these savings are often perceived to be flimsy. Faced with justifying it to the COO, stakeholders readily fall back to apologising that 'it's just time savings..'

Which is curious because, as any economist will tell you, the value of time underpins most transport infrastructure investment. It's time savings for users that have driven the development of roads and railways in many countries for at least the last thirty years. [I happen to know because I started life as a transport economist, calculating time savings for Asian highways, African railways and the Channel tunnel].

Maybe it's because the time savings are measured in seconds and minutes rather than days and weeks.  Saving a day is obviously valuable. But when it's the summation of five minute savings, people fall to wondering whether it won't be wasted. 

Whatever - we need to recognize that time matters, and that we should value it appropriately (as individuals, of course, we do it every day: paying for express lanes and priority, or for toll charges to use a shorter route, for instance).  Otherwise we are choking off initiatives with potentially very substantial ROI.  Even better, we need more GE-like chutzpah.

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29 Oct 2012    IT Project Failure: How Did We End Up Here?

28 Aug 2012    The ROI On Process Visualization

Translating An Operating Model Into Real Work

Bringing in a Big 4 firm to create a new target operating model (TOM) has become de rigeur. But how many operating models are ever put to work? Not many. Some are just displayed reverentially on a pedestal in the C-Suite.  Most are 'executed' - by an expensive army of consultants - but with very mixed results.

It’s a big issue. Social, mobile and cloud technologies are driving ever more rapid business model innovation and associated process change. But many organizations are locked into 'a tragic pattern' (as Brad Power has discussed on his HBR Blog): The CEO launches a new change program with great fanfare, only to shelve it a few years later with little to show for great expenditures of time and consulting fees. 

The capability to execute well must be one of the keys to breaking out of this cycle.

Why are so few grand plans well executed?  The swirling fog between the TOM vision and the operational realities, for a start. There is no line of sight between the TOM as a ppt deck and the real business.

The primary mechanism for translating strategy into reality – integrated, holistic perspectives and end-to-end processes – doesn’t exist. Instead there are a myriad process fragments, in multiple tools and formats, ‘managed’ in functional silos within a feeble governance framework. 

So the exec team has a TOM roadmap, steering wheel and dashboard – but only tenuous linkages to the engine, transmission and brakes.

A process management platform provides the multi-dimensional matrix within which an operating model can be executed - reliably, efficiently and, in compliance terms, safely.

It’s the ability to execute that really matters. It's what underlies sustainable improvement. In a complex and fast-moving world, that just can’t be done efficiently any more with ppt and email...

Related Posts

20 Jun 2012    Process: The Emerging Global Business Language

02 Nov 2011    Toxic Processes: Social, Cloud, Agility - And Risk

 

 

Process - The Emerging Global Business Language

Anyone working on business transformation in a global organization will recognize McKinsey's assessment in research published this week:

"The structures, processes, and communications approaches of many far-flung businesses have been stretched to breaking point."

In Organizing for an emerging world, the McKinsey authors set out survey results - from 300 executives in 17 major global companies - together with their ideas for coping with 'the cumulative degrees of complexity' that globalization entails. 

Process, in one guise or another, is a recurrent theme. It's further evidence that a business process management platform is coming to be seen as the essential infrastructure to enable effective and enterprise-wide collaboration on innovation and continuous improvement.   

The McKinsey authors dismiss, quite rightly, the view that it's as simple as global standardization. Benchmarks, standards and industry models are invaluable guides but, at the end of the day, it's often a complex calculus. Every organization is on its own journey: "No company's restructuring should be viewed as a blueprint for that of another."

McKinsey's respondents themselves identified process as one of the 3 weakest aspects of their organization (from a list of 12, so it's serious). 

McKinsey's conclusions are sound, and, again, process is the leitmotif throughout:

- Don't standardise more than is necessary.  Which makes it vital to have a platform to manage effectively the ongoing tension between global processes and local variants.

- Fit technology to the process, not vice versa. Break out of thinking that automation and systems are, in themselves, the answer.  Which makes it vital to have a platform with an holistic and end-to-end perspective, capable of driving business-led global ERP implementations.

- Listen to all the voices involved. Worry about adoption and communication. Which makes it vital to adopt a process management platform that engages everyone - not just process owners and IT. It must connect with process stakeholders and, as well, support those who execute process and encourage their feedback. 

- Implement from the top. Make clear accountability and strategic direction, and don't be afraid eventually to mandate a new process.  Which makes it vital to adopt a process management platform with a top-down implementation methodology, and a robust governance framework, capable of blending top-down command-and-control methods with bottom-up continuous improvement.

So perhaps it's like this. Today, global businesses typically adopt a company-wide business language to ensure effective communication.

What we're moving towards is a future where global businesses typically adopt as well a more advanced language to ensure effective collaboration. And the language that enables collaborative innovation, within a governance framework that makes clear roles and accountability, is end-to-end business process.

Nowhere is this more true, of course, than in Global Business Services, where the capability to provide end-to-end process perspectives within a complete governance framework, integrated with documents, real-time KPIs, risks and controls, is rapidly emerging as a critical success factor.

Related Posts

29 Feb 2012    Why Process Improvement Projects Fail

17 Nov 2011    Future of BPM

7 Oct 2011      Accenture: What's Holding Back Shared Services

10 Jul 2011      Managing The Downside of Global Processes

Hello Checklists, Goodbye Process?

My little world wobbled as I read Atul Gawande’s bestseller The Checklist Manifesto.

It seemed to challenge head-on my conviction that process matters most because it provides the language that enables effective collaboration amidst complexity.

It’s superbly well written (Dr Gawande is an eminent surgeon but he’s also a staff writer on the New Yorker). It was ravishingly reviewed in the FT, the NY Times and The Economist, whose reviewer described it as ‘a meditation on the growing complexity of the world, and how to cope with it’.

The book sets out the evidence on the value of the humble checklist in saving lives (and much else – injuries, time and costs) in even the most highly complex activities – in the operating theater, on skyscraper construction sites, and on the flight deck. It is utterly compelling.

Why do checklists work? Firstly, because ‘they get people talking’, suggests Dr Gawande. They break down hierarchical barriers and encourage the teamwork that can ensure the best possible outcomes – in surgical teams, among construction engineers, even in due diligence teams working for private equity investors.

Checklists also encourage discipline. They recognize that, in a fast-paced world, we can all too easily forget the obvious. Kitchens in top restaurants use them. Checklists can ‘force reflection’ says Dr Gawande, even in complex and dire situations like the loss of an aircraft engine.

As I read the book, I feared I was hearing the distant rumble of a paradigm shift. It seemed entirely plausible that my approach had been turned upside down, that process had been a wasteful diversion – and that checklists were the new process.

The truth though seems to be more subtle and interesting. Checklists and process may overlap but they are essential, and complementary, in enabling us to deal with our enormously complex world.

Both enable collaboration and ensure compliance. 'Checklists are not comprehensive how-to guides', says Dr Gawande, 'they are quick and simple tools to buttress the skills of expert professionals'. Sometimes a checklist could be easily substituted by an end-to-end process and a Storyboard. In other circumstances, only one of them will work. What’s appropriate will depend entirely upon the context.

Context is one of the exciting themes of the book. The best checklists work because their creators are painstaking in understanding the context in which they will be used. They care about the tiniest details because they know that it matters in effective communication. Those who have advocated ‘publishing’ business processes that are static, generic and described in technical gobbledeegook might want to read and ponder these sections.

It’s also, in an odd way, heartening to read of the widespread resistance to checklists, despite clear evidence of their value. Organizations and individuals, across all industries, often applaud the idea of checklists - but have some reason why they are ‘special’ and should be exempt. They have to be won over – even if they subsequently emerge as the strongest champions of the idea. Inviting us to re-think how we define heroism, Dr Gawande reflects on this inertia:

"…We don’t like checklists. They can be painstaking. They’re not much fun. But I don’t think the issue here is mere laziness. There’s something deeper, more visceral going on when people walk away not only from saving lives but from making money. It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us – those we aspire to be – handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocol and checklists. Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating." [p.173]

Replace ‘checklist’ with ‘process’ and it’s the journey of most organizations towards process thinking, and towards a recognition of the process platform as an essential enabler for sustainable operational excellence.

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10 Nov 2011 Value Chain or Process? The Costs of Confusion

20 Sep 2011 BPM: The Foundation For Operational Excellence

Future of BPM? We're In Mesopotamia 3000BC

Adam Deane has set off a discussion on his blog on BPM Visions Of The Future.

My own view is that we are witnessing a revolution in process thinking.  It's similar to the transformation that took place around 3000BC when humankind moved from hieroglyphs to phonetic writing.  It is that breakthrough which makes possible this blog - and poetry and tax returns.

That transformation - the adoption of phonetic writing - too was driven by business needs.  The emerging societies of that time needed governance. Writing was simply the most efficient way to record and report, to establish the bureaucracy upon which control depended.

It was also a global transformation.  Writing seems to have emerged independently in Egypt, China and Central America - but the best evidence we have today comes from Mesopotomia, simply because they used baked clay tablets, which have lasted far better than paper or bamboo. This tablet from Mesopotamia, from the British Museum collection, records the allocation of rations to workers (in the form of beer, an early local currency).

Process is undergoing a parallel transformation. Until recently, process has been about technical symbols, focussed on automation, and intended to be used only by a few.

In the future, process will surely be the universal business language. But it will be holistic, not just focussed on systems. It will be integrated, not just process fragments stored in a common repository. And it will be in the language of the business, so that everyone can understand it - and get involved in continuously improving it.

In short, process will become a polite term. Folks with MBAs won't feel embarrassed to use it. We'll no longer have two terms - process and value chain  -for the same thing.  And it will be inclusive, stimulating a richer and ongoing collaborative dialog: the CIO will sit down with the business user.

And the essential enterprise enabler for all this - the 21st century equivalent of the bureacracy perhaps - will be the process management platform:

... it will integrate process with documents, KPI metrics, risk and controls, quality and compliance,  training and task support.  

... it will provide the collaborative framework and governance that enables process stakeholders, and Lean and Six Sigma teams, to drive performance improvement.

... and it will deliver all this to the desktops and smartphones of people doing real work - in the form of Storyboards and a personalized intelligent operations manual. 

Which is why I count myself thankful to work in such an exciting area.  Phonetic writing gave rise to enormous creativity. You couldn't be reading that blockbuster on your Kindle without it.  As enterprises become more virtual, more outsourced, more socially responsible, more complex and with ever more global supply chains, we will need ever more creativity in the workplace.  And business process management will be a crucial enabler. 

This post inspired by A History Of The World In 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor. Highly recommended (an ideal Christmas present, if you can bear to let it go)

PS you don't have to wait! First editions of the process management platform of the future are available here ;-)

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02 Nov 2011    Toxic Processes: Social, Cloud, Agility - And Risk

10 Oct 2011    The BPM Story Line: Tragedy or Comedy?

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Toxic Processes: Social, Cloud, Agility - and Risk

There's a looming crisis that's being driven by the headlong rush into Cloud, Social  and Big Data in pursuit of the Agility agenda. Like the financial crisis, the signs are clearly evident well ahead of the crash.  And just like every actor in that sorry tale was acting rationally within the confines of their silo, so too this time everyone's busy.

At the heart of the financial crash was the accumulation, over many years, of  toxic assets purchased in vast quantities by over-leveraged banks. The risks were not clearly visible or understood.

On the smaller scale, many global enterprises are busy working on their own sub-prime crisis. They are relying on toxic processes. As a result, their risks are not clearly visible or understood.    

Organizations are rapidly building a future that is far more virtual, where an empowered workforce manages service delivery operations that are far more complex, fast-paced, and largely outsourced.

Cloud promises the frictionless enterprise.

Social promises employee engagement and the capability to turn on a sixpence.

Sourcing and supply chain innovation promises low costs and rapid response.

Within each program silo - Cloud, Social, Sourcing - it makes perfect sense. It's the agility that CEOs are looking for. But this new level of agility comes with new levels of risk. Two examples:

The complexity of existing supply chains  makes them vulnerable. Car production was halted in several factories around the world when the Japanese tsunami struck the remote Tohoku region: it turns out that the Renesas plant there produces 40% of the world's microcontrollers. Building resilient global supply chains will require even more complexity. The increasing adoption of outsourced services from multiple suppliers - the growing virtualization of the enterprise - will exacerbate this complexity, and therefore the vulnerability.  

In customer relationship management, IBM's Global CMO Study, out this week, shows CMOs living in a world of high complexity and unpredictable interdependencies. It calls out customer intimacy as a strategic goal for CMOs. But it's to be delivered as rapid response in a world of real-time social media by empowered employees - many of them working for outsourcing partners - dealing with empowered customers, and by complex, rapidly-changing, business rules applied to Big Data.  So much higher levels of complexity and therefore vulnerability.

It's easy to get carried away with the potential benefits in Cloud and Social (and Big Data). But the execution risks are correspondingly high - and largely overlooked. In complex, fast-paced and global organizations, increasing agility correlates with increasing risk. 

Business process management is unglamorous next to Cloud, Social, Big Data and Agility.  But a BPM platform is the essential foundation for success.  The first step in mitigating risk is transparency. (It's also the key to unlocking potential innovation as well, of course).   

Pause please while I step up to my soapbox again. The BPM platform that can leverage Cloud, Social, Big Data fully, while properly managing risk, must have three fundamentals:

Holistic perspective. This means visibility of the enterprise that is complete, integrated, rigorous and realtime.  Transparency here is like the capability to run a three-dimensional CT Scan for the enterprise at any time.

Effective collaboration. That means a common language, across the internal functional silos and the extended enterprise. The only plausible language is end-to-end process - but, and this is critical, in the language of the business, not IT-speak, to ensure shared understanding.  It also requires a governance framework that is robust but practical, otherwise collaborative innovation will stall, or undermine risk management.

Ubiquity. It must connect strategy directly with operational reality across the enterprise. There's a compliance gap if the enterprise process model is simply an abstract managed by IT or the Quality function. It has to support real people in getting real work done.  So it needs to be personalized, and deployed to desktops and mobile devices as easy-to-consume process content.  This ensures the real-world integrity of the process model. It also engages the workforce and so channels Social to where it's most productive: fostering continuous improvement within the process context.      

Some organizations recognize these risks - we are seeing new levels of interest in a BPM platform that can deliver this capability - but most don't yet. Some put their faith in complete and 'perfect' IT process models - but they focus only on what's automated, and are understood only by a handful of people. Most organizations rely on incomplete, duplicated and overlapping process fragments in a variety of tools and formats, and with no governance beyond email.  Either way, IT models or myriad fragments, these are toxic processes.

If we continue our current trajectory, Gartner's prediction earlier this year that ten global companies will be toppled within three years by basic process defects looks safe.

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31 Oct 2011    The Socially Optimized Business - And Process

30 Sep 2011    Optimize 15,000 Business Controls? No Problem

 

The Socially Optimized Business - And Process

I love the positive energy and openness of the Dachis Group and the Social Business Council - their one page graphic summarising Attributes of a Socially Optimized Business can be downloaded here - so I don't want to be picky.  But there's a flaw in their manifesto - at least, as I understand it - that may seem nerdy but is, I think, actually quite crucial.

I've huge sympathy for the call for a Renaissance in business:

"After decades of mechanistic, dehumanizing, process-oriented management dogma, progressive organizations are waking up to the disturbing truth that they’ve squeezed all the creativity out of their business. When companies embrace organic, passionate, socially-savvy initiatives, they blossom. Who benefits? Everyone."

What worries me is the way we seem to be trashing 'process-orientation'. 

Agreed, process has for too long been articulated in the form of technical gobbledegook. And it's rarely exciting. 

But - if we express process simply and holistically, so that people across the socially optimized enterprise can understand it, then we have a universal language that can get everyone talking. 

And if we support it with an enabling process management platform, then we have:

connected the creativity with how work gets done.  So we ensure that social business is not an ivory tower, it's about engaging with everyone's ideas

the ideal framework for Lean, Six Sigma and other process improvement programs - and for sustainable continuous improvement

the governance framework that ensures collaboration will be effective, across all the functional silos and the increasingly virtual extended enterprise  (it also allows the Chief Risk Officer to sleep at night). 

Great ideas -please sign me up for the Renaissance. But let's see process as part of the solution and so make it practical.

Related Posts 

30 Sep 2011    Optimize 15,000 Business Controls? No Problem

20 Sep 2011    BPM - The Foundation For Operational Excellence

 

Are You Siri-ous?

Check out Siri, the revolutionary new voice recognition feature on the iPhone 4S.  As Apple says: 'Siri understands what you say, knows what you mean, and even talks back'.

It's amazing. Omniscient and with attitiude. It even has a Transcript button - here's an extract, so you can see how it works: 

...

Me: Well, that's great news. I'd completely given up on my pension fund. I thought it would never recover.  So when can I retire?

Siri:  You'll need to continue working until 16 June 2043.

Me:  Sheeesh! So I need to stay employable for another 30 years... What am I going to do? 

Siri: Stick with process. Right now, we've discovered the theory of business DNA. We cracked the double helix, we know how the base pairs work on the chromosomes. And we've pretty much done with mapping of the complete business genome.

Me: So it's all over. I should re-train as a therapist?

Siri: No, idiot, this is just the start. Process will become the universal business language. Every CEO's iPad will have a business process architecture - integrated, complete and in the language of the business, not geek-speak. It will be the startpoint for M&A and business restructuring. 

Me: Not just executive bling? Not just a fad that will leave me jobless in my early seventies?

Siri: No, Bozo.  CIOs will see it as the startpoint for every systems project.  CFOs will demand the transparency that comes when risk and controls are embedded in end-to-end processes.  COOs will leverage it to orchestrate increasingly complex and multisourced operations. 

Me: OK, I get it. Business genetics.  The enterprise grid.

Siri: Much more because it's not just for execs and stakeholders focussed on performance management. It will connect with people doing real work.  It will simplify and help people be more productive.  And make it easy to get involved in continuous improvement.

Me: So where do I want to work? Who's going to win here? The BPM vendor that offers an integrated platform, a collaborative framework and deployment as an intelligent operations manual to every desktop and mobile device?

Siri: Doh! No - whoever integrates Siri first.

.... 

 

Continuous Improvement - Made Easy

Naturally, I would say that Emitra Nelson from Cameron stole the show on Day 1 of the Summit for Finance Leaders in Dallas today (you can hear her story on a SharedServicesLink webinar on 18 October - more details here).

But if I couldn't vote for Emitra, on the grounds that hers is a Nimbus success story, my choice for the most thought-provoking presentation would be Andrew Simpson, Head of Business Services in America for BP, whose case I summarised in a doodle in my notes as this:

 
(my maths is shaky, so I'm hoping this means what I was thinking!)

Andrew defined Continuous Improvement (let's call it CI) as 'operational excellence through process improvements' , or, more informally, as 'stopping business insanity'. He listed the 20 most common excuses he's heard about why CI can't be done, the funniest being the manager who claimed that it would be 'against corporate policy'.

He then proceeded to show exactly how he has implemented CI, and went on to make a totally convincing case that, in the long run, 'background' CI can be even more valuable than high-profile transformation programs.  And a CI culture, he argued, will also make any major transformation program more likely to succeed: people are engaged and energised by change, not simply resistant.  In shared services terms,  CI is 'the critical success factor for any SSO that wants to stay relevant'.  

What's really interesting is how few of the organizations represented in the audience have a serious CI program.  There's lip service but little commitment. How can that possibly be? At the end of the day, CI is pretty straightforward. 

Maybe the clue lies in a video Andrew used in his presentation to illustrate resistance to change (can't find it on YouTube, but it was like this).  The hamster keeps getting on the wheel, spinning faster and faster until it's out of control and finally gets flung out into the cage - then does it again, and again and again... 

Maybe the hamster enjoys the adrenalin rush - just like the business enjoys the thrill of firefighting.   And when, after a while, the hamster is punchdrunk with concussion and unable to think clearly, well that's like the business getting so used to living in firefighting mode that it too can no longer see clearly - and so resists the CI initiative that is ultimately its way forward.

Finally, a great endorsement for CI: people from BP's Business Services unit are sought out by the rest of the business.  It's career-enhancing because it has a carefully thought-through and well-executed CI program that encourages people to bring their brains to work. It breaks out, he noted, of the analysis paralysis of left brain thinking, the belief that life is a machine and we just need to understand how the cogs fit together to get it to work perfectly.  It recognizes the special and unique value that diverse perspectives, working intelligently together, can create.

There was a ton of other good stuff too of course.  More on that later in the week, I hope.

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20 Sep 2011    BPM: The Foundation For Operational Excellence

 

Accenture: What's Holding Back Shared Services

Hats off to Accenture for bringing some reality and insights to the debate about what's holding back Shared Services. 

Everybody's doing shared services, everybody thinks it's strategic, yadda yadda yadda. The reality though is often disappointment and missed business cases.  Sustainable success in shared services is still the exception.

The Deloitte Shared Services survey, published in April, highlighted some lessons learned: the importance of governance, a collaborative framework, transparency and change management.   

Governance was also a theme running through the PwC/HfS report on Global Business Services, published in July: it has to be 'ongoing', 'well-integrated, consistent and rigorous' and not just another tool for vendor management.  

Those were useful contributions.  But Accenture's report this week Trends in Shared Services: Unlocking The Full Potential brings a new focus.  It spells out what the leaders are doing, and how they are succeeding. And process excellence is front and center.

Noting how one leader in shared services uses automation and metrics and process improvement specialists, it continues:  

"...while other elements are certainly in place - C-level support, comprehensive change management and a relentless focus on value - it is the organization's continued focus on process excellence that stands out ."

I share the report's enthusiasm that shared services will mature to become ubiquitous. And that we are witnessing the emergence of "a long-envisioned" model of integrated business services.  I agree too that 'managing multisourcing consistently' is a huge challenge for most organizations. And I'm delighted that Accenture highlights the vital need for a service management framework.   

But I have one quibble. Because even Accenture hasn't quite joined up the dots.

What is it, ultimately, that enables process excellence, that provides the collaborative framework for change management, that ensures transparency and IT alignment, that supports Lean and other continuous improvement programs, that provides the governance framework for the effective management of outsourcers, and that allows cloud and social media to be most effectively leveraged?  It's a business process management platform. 

It's not a panacea. It can seem a bit boring. It's an unspectacular answer when your SSC is 'in a complete mess'. But everything points to the business process management platform as the foundation for success in shared services.  It underpins process excellence. It's what enables the service management framework.  And it's the only way to optimize the management of process variants, which, the report notes, is the real problem in process standardization. 

What is the business process management platform that can do all this? I've defined it elsewhere as a platform that uses the universal language of end-to-end business process to enable four capabilities.  The only way I'd improve on that definition now, especially in the light of the Shared Services workshop in London last week, would be to re-iterate the importance of adoption.  If our brilliant process management models don't engage process stakeholders, and help real people to get real work done and to contribute to improving things , then we're missing the biggest trick of all.    

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BPM - The Foundation For Operational Excellence

Looking in on rehearsal presentations for Inspiring Performance 2011 next week, it's interesting to see how operational excellence is coming to the fore - and how BPM is central to it. 

Agreed, operational excellence sounds worthy but boring (though execs at UBS might be wishing that they'd paid it more attention).

Agreed too that, while it's a widely used term, there's only a loose consensus on what operational excellence actually means (even the Wikipedia entry includes an appeal for help).

But, however it's defined, or branded within the organization, it's an unqualified good.  Every COO wants it. What's less obvious to many organizations though is how operational excellence is directly linked with Business Process Management.

BPM in its IT incarnation - let's call it 'micro-BPM' - is focussed on automation.  But BPM in its wider sense - 'macro-BPM' - is about operational excellence.  And, in global organizations across every sector, a macro-BPM platform is emerging the essential foundation for operational excellence. 

Talking with clients and colleagues since our first attempt, back in January, to define how you do operational excellence in practice, we've converged on four closely-related capabilities: 

To achieve operational excellence, the enterprise needs the capability...

to understand the whole.  To maintain a complete, holistic and integrated model of the business - including what's automated and what's not, what's outsourced and what's in-house.

to flawlessly execute strategy as end-to-end operational processes. To maintain two-way line of sight between strategy and operating reality.

to continually re-optimize performance by integrating metrics and analytics with end-to-end operational processes and providing the framework for the entire enterprise to collaborate on continuous improvement.

to manage risks, controls, quality and compliance together, within one enterprise-wide and real-time governance framework.

Cue the enterprise-wide BPM platform: the essential enabler for all of these capabilities, and therefore for operational excellence. More on this, after the conference...

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