Sourcing Shangri-La

BPM and The Language of Process

There’s a ferment of ideas about the meaning and future – even the very existence - of Business Process Management (BPM). 

Side-stepping those impassioned debates, I want to offer what seem to me to be some simple truths. 

Every successful organization – every sustainable success – is built upon effective collaboration.  That may sound fluffy. But we can see all around us the failed projects, the waste and the missed opportunities whose root cause is ineffective collaboration.  And its consequences will escalate in a future that is faster-paced, more loosely structured and multisourced, more intricately automated - and more regulated.

Effective collaboration requires many things – vision, teamwork, leadership and so on. But it’s also true that any rich and productive dialogue – any effective collaboration – depends upon a common language. Process is that common language.

It’s the language of process that best enables effective collaboration between all the stakeholders, across functional silos, cultures and organizational boundaries. 

But which process language? 

The vision of the BPM pioneers was that BPMN could be the universal process language. “Don’t bridge the business-IT divide. Obliterate it!” was the rallying cry. In the long run, it’s the right direction. Re-reading ‘The Third Wave’ ten years on, it’s visionary but still essentially sound.

But BPMN hasn’t worked out in practice. It’s a stretch too far for most business people. For the foreseeable future, there’s no single process language that can fully reconcile the vital need of the business for a common collaborative language with the equally vital IT need for the rigour required to build applications.

BPMN looks set to progress – it’s a valuable standard from the IT perspective - but it has to be a generation at least before it could hope to realize its vision and become the universal process language.

If not BPMN, then what?  It seems to me that are three sets of questions to ask in defining the process language that best enables effective collaboration:

Is it visual and intuitive? Does it fully harness the power of visualization? In a hundredth of a second, we can scan an image and understand what it would have taken a hundred words to communicate.

Does it support real work? Languages die out if they are not useful.  It has to be rich, engaging and valuable. It must enrich understanding at every level, from the operating model down to the factory line or call centre, from Finance to IT and Logistics.

Does it enable sustainable innovation? Is it easy for users to feed back improvement ideas to process owners? Is it easy for process owners and stakeholders to collaborate on the design and implementation of change?

Note that IT is not left out in the cold here. IT may use BPMN for systems development but a universal process language that delivers in these three ways has huge benefits to IT as well.  It’s the business engagement that every CIO craves and the perfect framework for requirements capture.

Effective collaboration matters, and it requires a rich common language. Process is that language. Its force multiplier is something I’ll have to pick up next time.

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25 Feb 2013    The Hidden Costs Of 'Normal' Process Management

28 Aug 2012    The ROI On Process Visualization

© Text Michael Gammage 2013

Process Resistance

I often wonder why it should be in any way difficult to sell our software. It ought to fly off the shelves.  The business case is slam dunk rock solid. Who doesn’t want a common language and a framework for effective collaboration in designing and managing change across the enterprise?  Who wouldn’t be more agile with a clear line of sight between operating model and operational reality? Who doesn’t need to deploy processes in a way that is intuitive and engaging for people doing real work – and nurtures their feedback and ideas for continuous improvement? Who doesn't need a single source of the truth?

Most often, there’s two kinds of resistance. Sometimes it’s just a failure of imagination. People who can’t imagine that things could be significantly better. A mindset that’s the opposite of visionary.

More often though, there is understanding of the potential – but a wilful decision not to embrace it. Resistance may be justified in some circumstances. But far too often it’s just an aversion to rigor, accountability and a long-term perspective.

I was in a GBS leadership team discussion recently at a prospective client, a Fortune 500 company. The HR Head heard the pitch, and the mixed responses from around the table, then summed it up perfectly for her colleagues:

“We may not like it necessarily - but this discipline is exactly what we need.”

Moving an entire GBS organization to a new way of working requires significant and sustained effort, and continuing executive sponsorship.

But without this new way of working, this GBS organization cannot safely deliver its ambitious growth targets.  It reconciles the tension between its twin objectives: to expand at pace, delivering substantial savings and sustained service innovations over the next five years, and to ensure compliance in a highly regulated environment.

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10 Jan 2013    Nimbus V9 And The ROI On Engagement

11 Dec 2012    Process Management and Google Maps

© Text Michael Gammage 2013

Nimbus V9 And The ROI On Engagement

In case you were away from the planet yesterday and missed the trumpet fanfares: TIBCO just announced the long-awaited V9 release of Nimbus.

Personally, I’m squeamish about hype. I can LOL at the inflated claims of others. But I recoil from it myself (no moral high grounding, just a personal quirk). Anyway, I have to admit that my first instinct was to wince on reading that V9 is a “revolutionary milestone in business process improvement”.  But, actually, on reflection, my marketing colleagues are about right.

In good teams, people are engaged. Each person feels able and empowered to contribute their ideas. Each one feels involved and confident that their input can make a difference. And, just in case you think this is getting all too luvvy, there’s an ROI here as well. Engaged people are happier. And happy teams are far more productive and creative. 

So everything points to the crucial value of engagement. But nurturing it is more difficult, by an order of magnitude, in a world where so many of us are now knowledge workers, often collaborating remotely with people we’ve never met, and across complex global organizational landscapes. How do you get engagement in today’s world?

You can see the search for this modern philosopher’s stone going on all around us. It’s been a major theme in the MixFix debates on re-imagining the enterprise.

One of the keys to engagement is simplicity. People can’t or won’t engage if they don’t understand.

Neil Taylor quoted a great example recently. After six months trying to improve “operational excellence”, only one of his client's teams had actually improved. It turned out that the team leader was holding weekly meetings that she called “Doing everyday things better”. She had made it simple – she turned corporate-speak into down-to-earth language - so her team got engaged.

Against this backdrop and these challenges, Nimbus V9 is a revolutionary milestone.

Nimbus UPN was designed from the outset to create process that is easy on the eye. Content to engage and support process users, not just the geeks. Nimbus already delivered that content as a personalized ‘intelligent operations manual’ to every desktop and mobile device. Nimbus V9 now provides a completely new user interface that is significantly more intuitive.

V9 makes it even easier for people to find the right information, in the right context, at the time that they need it - and delivered in the format that works best for them. Feedback, actions and change requests are simpler too. [And all without sacrificing, in any way, the governance and other capabilities that underpin Nimbus as an enterprise platform for process management and continuous improvement.]

Engagement matters more than ever – and simplicity is its essential foundation. V9 pushes us much further up the curve. It’s going to be fascinating to see how clients leverage this. Must stop now, need to go. Marketing colleague at the door, with a baseball bat?

 

© Text Michael Gammage 2013

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13 Dec 2012    The Universal Business Language: Process

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Cloud Without Risk: Pie In The Sky

We know that systems failures are surprisingly common, hugely wasteful and can bring a company to its knees. 

Best example last year must be Knight Capital, a market-maker responsible for 10% of US equity trading volumes. In just two hours of trading on the afternoon of 1st August, a 'software glitch' lost the firm $460m. The subsequent rescue package cost the owners 70% of their equity. 

Arguably though there's no such thing as an IT failure. If all work is ultimately process, then ultimately it's always a process failure.

At one level, Knight Capital went down because of a flawed implementation of a software upgrade. But it's probably more true to say that, somewhere along the line (and maybe we'll find out once the legal battles are done), there was a flawed process, or a good enough process that was poorly executed.

Probably both. And almost certainly - because this is the continual theme - the root cause was ineffective collaboration.  Vital stakeholders were missed out from the consultation. People thought that they had a common understanding of an end-to-end process and missed the gaps. There was no governance framework to ensure that people used the latest document. No-one realised that there were two different versions of the same process...    

So McKinsey is right when it warned last week of the new risks in the migration to cloud services, making it clear that this is not simply a technical IT challenge:

"IT organizations must now adopt a business-focused risk-management approach that engages business leaders in making trade-offs between the economic gains that cloud solutions promise and the risks they entail."

In cloud migrations, as in every other business transformation program, it's effective collaboration that underpins innovation and sustainable improvement - and ensures that risks are properly managed. 

It's extraordinary therefore that so many organizations flirt with disaster, blithely assuming that they don't need an enterprise-wide process management platform equipped to enable effective collaboration.  

They may say otherwise but in practice they rely on definitions of their business based on process fragments, in multiple formats and tools, often in arcane technical languages, of unclear provenance, scattered across multiple repositories, only tenuously linked with operational realities, and 'managed' with the flimsiest of governance.

Amazingly, Gartner's dramatic prediction, announced two years ago this month, that: "Between now and year-end 2014, overlooked but easily detectable business process defects will topple 10 Global 2000 companies" still looks a safe bet.

 

© Text Michael Gammage 2013

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The Double Helix For Organizational DNA

Shooting the breeze with a molecular biologist over seasonal turkey, I was stunned to realize that the way in which our cells work together, to create healthy organisms like you and me, might provide us with a useful model of the way in which healthy organizations work.   

We have around 100 trillion cells in our bodies. Maybe 102 trillion, post festivities.

We have hundreds of types of cell but, gametes aside, every cell in our bodies contains our unique DNA. Set out along its double helix structure, and using just the four letter CAGT alphabet, our nuclear DNA is transcribed via RNA into the proteins which ultimately define and make us function.  Change any aspect of it and you change the person.    

The idea that business process represents an organization's DNA is not new.  But, by and large, it's been seen as just a vague analog, nothing more concrete.  Look more closely though and it gets interesting. In every cell, DNA is always written:

within the same format - the double helix structure. It's always there; we don't have cells with no double helix. And it's always complete; we don't have cells with fragments of partial helix structures. 

in the same language.  We don't have cells using different languages, or subsets of CAGT.  It's worth noting too that the CAGT language may be 'simple' but it's still capable of communicating to its 'audiences' exactly how to code for proteins - and whatever else they need to know.

So the analogy becomes more real. A process management platform is a double helix for the enterprise. It's complete and integrated and present in every cell of the organization.  And its language is capable of engaging and enabling every one of its audiences.

There are some fascinating twists though. 

Cells also contain mitochondria, the power plants that make possible life as we know it. Without energy from mitochondria, we would be blobs of jelly, unable to move.  Mitochondria are really, really powerful in the cellular world. Comparable in many ways to the role of IT in the enterprise. Most modern enterprises would collapse immediately without systems and automation. IT is to the enterprise what the mitochondrion is to the cell: the essential powerhouse.

It gets better. Mitochondria have their own distinct DNA (which we inherit only through our mothers, but that's another story). The point is that every cell has two sets of DNA - nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA).

The nuclear DNA is much larger and drives change but in many cases depends upon mtDNA input. Nuclear DNA, for instance, controls 99% of what it takes to make more mitochondria (and therefore extra energy) but the 1% of mtDNA input is essential.

So our cells work - and we live - because nuclear DNA (the business) and mtDNA (the IT powerhouse) always work in concert (and share a common language - CAGT).  Nature confirms what we see in the world of organizations: that sustainable improvement always depends upon effective collaboration, facilitated by a common language and within a defined framework (a governance framework, in the world of the enterprise).

One further parallel. As we have evolved, our mtDNA has shrunk significantly. Some mtDNA capabilities have migrated to become embedded within an ever-expanding nuclear DNA.  Which sounds rather like how the IT mindset has, in some ways and over the last two decades, migrated to become embedded within mainstream business thinking.  Not because IT is any less important. In fact, it's happened because IT is now so important.

PS apologies to molecular biologists. It's all far more complex in reality of course.  But, as others have noted, business process management now means so many things to so many people that it's exhausted. We need a fresh approach, and the life of the cell might just be a useful start point...    

© Text Michael Gammage 2013

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The Universal Business Language: Process

When Noah Webster produced the first edition of his American Dictionary of the English Language in April 1828, he insisted that: “As an independent nation, our honor [sic] requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.”  And so, by the fall of that year, as the view from the railroad caboose showed leaves in a blaze of color, American English had moved center stage…

Seriously though, Webster’s use of language to create a new ‘superior’ identity for his ‘tribe’ is an interesting example of how languages diverge. As evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel points out in a fascinating essay in New Scientist this week, linguistic diversity is rooted in the desire to assert the identity of a ‘tribe’, most often against a backdrop of conflict over territory and resources:  “There really has been a war of words going on”.

One of the many extraordinary phenomena of our time is the speed with which a truly global language is emerging.  The result, says Pagel, is “a mass extinction of languages to rival the great biological extinctions in Earth’s past”. 

One in six of us on the planet may speak Mandarin but humanity is rapidly converging upon English as its auxiliary language. Vastly more people learn English as a second language than any other. Global corporations may be headquartered in Germany, France, China or Spain but English is almost invariably their adopted global language.

But in the world of work, and especially in the world of global business, English only goes so far.  Work is increasingly complex. Most often, it requires collaboration between many people, in different regions and organizational units, with different motivations and with different roles and responsibilities – and all enabled and automated by IT systems. 

To even describe work in this context is challenging.  To collaborate effectively, to exploit new opportunities in an increasingly interconnected and cumulatively more complex world, demands a language above and beyond English.

In the same way that, through no plan or expressed intent, simply for the benefits it brings, English is becoming the world’s favourite auxiliary language, so too with process, which, by a similar evolutionary path, has emerged as the global business language essential for effective collaboration. Procure to Pay, Value Chains, Operating Models, Lean Manufacturing, Hire to Retire, Order to Cash, Supply Chains – these terms have emerged as part of the everyday vocabulary of process.

This new world calls for a new conception of process.  To be fit for use, it can no longer be the preserve of a corporate elite – in IT or Quality or the Six Sigma team - it has to be universal.  It needs to connect with people doing real work: to support them and to enable them to contribute to improving the way things are done. And so it has, above all, to be engaging: visual, intuitive and personalised.

No surprise then that a process management platform is coming to be seen as the beating heart of the 21st century enterprise, the essential infrastructure that enables effective collaboration on innovation and continuous improvement.

Noah Webster was a revolutionary and idealist so I think he would probably approve of the way global languages are bringing humanity closer. Either way, he must be tickled pink that a Brit is writing this in American English.

  

This post was first published on Successful Workplace

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Process Management and Google Maps

Would you rely on Google Maps if you knew it was incomplete, in different formats, languages and UIs - and that much of it was out-of-date? I don't think so.

But ask the same question in an enterprise context and the answer would oftentimes be 'Yes'.  An extraordinary number of businesses rely upon enterprise process maps that are incomplete, in different formats, languages and UIs - and seriously out-of-date.

Google of course saw the potential in location-based services in a mobile world and continues to invest heavily. But as Google's Mr Maps, Brian McClendon, noted in an interview at the weekend, everything depends upon having a solid map base:

"You need to have the basic structure of the world so you can place the relevant information on top of it. If you don't have an accurate map, everything else is inaccurate".  

So Google provides MapMaker and other tools so that its users can get engaged: in providing feedback, even in real-time editing and extension of its coverage. That user engagement helps to drive high levels of accuracy in Google maps.

Imagine an enterprise process map by Google Maps: a visualization of how the peaks of the operating model link to the valleys of everyday operational reality. With this basic structure of the business accurately mapped, it becomes possible to do much more: 

• to orchestrate business transformation
• to underpin Lean Sigma and continuous improvement
• to connect risk and compliance management with business reality
• to ensure IT alignment and enable business-led systems implementations
• to support front-line people doing real work.

But to do this, an enterprise process map too has to be accurate. It is the base map of the enterprise - the foundation upon which everything else is built. So it has to be properly developed and managed. It has to be comprehensive and integrated, and within a robust governance framework. Critically, it has to be in the language of the business because engagement is the key to its sustainability.

Adopt the language of IT - swimlanes, BPMN symbols - and it's a fatal obstacle to engagement with process stakeholders and users. Engagement requires the language of the business - which is why the adoption of Universal Process Notation (UPN) by virtually every Nimbus client may seem arcane but actually it's very significant.

There's another significant parallel here: the importance of personalization. Users don't want Google Maps as a replacement atlas to browse on their smartphones. They want Google Maps to present them with content that is about their preferences, their location and their time of day.  

It's exactly the same with enterprise process maps.  Users want to be presented with content that is about their role, their KPIs and in their language - that helps them to do their job.  But how many organizations simply create an enterprise atlas and file it on the corporate intranet?

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10 Dec 2012    Sustainable Improvement

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Sustainable Improvement

I love this picture.  I saw this hearfelt and passionate plea in a kitchen area on the headquarters campus of a Fortune 100 company, a leader in its industry.

The COMPLETE AND TOTAL frustration, nay depair, of the author is evident. [And the scrawled response"or you will be sent to bed" just makes it more hilarious.]  

What's interesting, though, is that this is one of the most organised and diligent organisations I've ever worked with. And everyone I've ever met there is bright, switched on and seemingly hard-wired for collaboration. This is the last place you'd expect to see freeloaders and a societal breakdown.

I took another picture on that same campus that day.  I was knocked out by  an official corporate comms poster on a restroom wall.  [Don't worry - if I ever come to your workplace, I do know how to behave...] 

It was an outstanding poster on the theme of collaboration, and, in particular, on the value of simplicity in allowing everyone to get engaged and work more efficiently. I can't show the whole poster without revealing the organization (and probably infringing copyright) but here's part of it.

Even organizations such this - an organization that installs in its restrooms high quality artwork promoting process as an enabler for more effective collaboration - even such an organization can still fall apart when it comes to packing the dishwasher.

There's a lesson here. If process is to fulfil its potential as the language of the enterprise, then it absolutely has to be simple - capable of being understood by everyone. And if process management is to be the platform that enables effective collaboration across the enterprise, then it absolutely has to be robust but also intuitive and engaging. Otherwise it's about as sustainable as a kitchen rota. 

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19 Nov 2012    No Other Corporate Asset Is Wasted So Spectacularly

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No Corporate Asset Is Wasted So Spectacularly

Another week, another client struggling with process amnesia.

I'm looking at an RFP from a household name with "no process documentation available" with respect to its core financial system and the business processes it enables. Last week, I was involved with a global organisation that had thrown out a well-known SI after wasting (their word, not mine) a considerable sum trying to capture their core processes. Next week, I'm working with a client in the energy sector with a complex and ageing system in urgent need of upgrading, but with almost no understanding of how the system works or how it connects with their business processes (which seem to be largely anecdotal anyway). 

Many organizations - and we're talking big and global, oftentimes - are repeat offenders. They are ATMs for the Big 4. They spend millions on a 'process mapping binge' but the processes are never adopted, and the organizations have only the most feeble mechanisms to maintain them, and so, two years later, a new mapping project kicks off.   

It's true that we too generate waste of a kind. Clients adopting Nimbus generally migrate out of any other process format or tool.  They want a common language, and they want to use UPN to ensure engagement. So that's waste of a sort - one global client ditched man-years of process capture of its European finance operations by one of the Big 4 - but it pays off in adoption and sustainability.

Put to one side the missed opportunities from not taking process excellence more seriously - like avoiding IT project failures, or success in multisourcing, or integrated compliance, or sustainable improvement, for instance.

Just at the very simplest level of avoiding unnecessary costs: Is there any other corporate asset where waste on the scale that is considered normal in 'process management' would be tolerated?  

Things are changing but, really, how did 'process' get such a bad rap? It's the DNA of the organization, for goodness sake. How did we get to a situation where it's considered unremarkable that an organization cannot describe its business processes, or how they are supported by its systems?

There's a doctoral thesis for someone in all this. Not sure whether it's a tragedy or a comedy.

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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]. 

 

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IT Project Failure: How Did We End Up Here?

McKinsey’s report last week, drawn from an analysis of 5,400 IT projects, deserves reflection. It makes sober reading:

“Our research, conducted in collaboration with the University of Oxford, suggests that half of all large IT projects massively blow their budgets. On average, large IT projects run 45 percent over budget and 7 percent over time, while delivering 56 percent less value than predicted. Software projects run the highest risk of cost and schedule overruns.”

Conspiracy theorists and crime fiction fans will likely read it and claim skullduggery amongst the SI consulting firms invariably associated with large IT projects.  Resisting the inner detective, let's just stay analytical and ask: how did we end up here?

At the heart of McKinsey’s prescription for delivering IT success is "helping IT and the business to join forces" - the need for effective collaboration.

Successful IT project teams, says McKinsey, continually engage with stakeholders – at all levels, internally and externally – within a rigorous governance framework for managing change.

IT program teams use email, Sharepoint, shared desktops, conference calls and social media.  They typically have budgets to allow substantial groups to convene for months of workshops in airport hotels. And the people involved, by and large, want to do a good job and to be associated with a successful project.

So, with all these resources: If effective collaboration is the key to success, and the costs of failure are so enormous, why do large IT projects so often fail?

In my experience, the two biggest barriers to effective collaboration between IT and the business are that:

#1 They don’t speak the same language. Theoretically, their lingua franca is ‘business process’.  But, most often, the IT program team adopts a technical language and systems mindset. So the business is forced to adopt swimlanes and other IT constructs. Without the business properly engaged in discussions of the current operational reality and the target operating model, the project is immediately vulnerable to what McKinsey identifies as a common pitfall: 'teams focus disproportionately on technology issues and targets'.  

#2 Holistic perspectives are lost or ignored. Most often, the IT systems mindset comes to dominate: if it's not automated, it's secondary. And so the business stakeholders come to focus only on the process fragments linked to system transactions, which limits creative thinking about transformation possibilities and hampers change management.  Far too few of those involved, if any, can see the whole. What starts out as a business transformation project enabled by IT slowly degrades to become an IT project with business consequences.

Which is how, most often, business stakeholders find themselves forced to approve enormous documents (400 pages is the biggest I've seen, others claim to have seen 600+ page documents), with each process fragment annotated with technical flowchart diagrams and multi-column tables of requirements extending over many pages. It might as well be in Egyptian hieroglyphs. Even worse, that document becomes simply a project milestone, the end of a requirements capture stage. It totally undermines the idea of the rich ongoing collaboration between IT and the business that defines successful projects.

That document is the smoking gun at the heart of IT project failure.

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Avoiding IT Failure (And Bankruptcy)

News from a colleague yesterday of another SAP project using Nimbus Control: unforeseen delays, a shredded budget and a bewildered client. Another huge success in fact.

This European manufacturer was told by a leading analyst firm to expect to take at least 8-12 months for its Finance transformation and SAP consolidation project across 8 countries and 7 lines of business.

Opting to use Nimbus, the program team worked with stakeholders from across the European business units to agree common business processes – in blueprints that included KPI's, policies, local variants and all the detailed requirements necessary to implement a single SAP instance.

Their results were completed, presented and approved by all the country CFOs and other CxO stakeholders in just 4 months.

Which leaves the program team with an unforeseen delay while the rest of the business scrambles to catch up (it was widely assumed that the program team would take at least 12 months to complete the blueprinting phase).

And the client’s budget is shredded.  The program timescale has been dramatically shortened, significantly reducing the consulting days required (as well as the equally expensive number of days required from internal resources).

This client's savings are not at the expense of quality. The reverse in fact. As it happened, the client’s chosen SI implementation partner had no Nimbus expertise. So the client decided that they would not be required for the blueprinting phase. It was a gamble that paid off handsomely.  When the SI was recently re-introduced back into the project, at the completion of the blueprinting, its verdict was that this is “the best SAP blueprint we have ever seen”.

It’s another example of the power of Nimbus Control as a platform for effective collaboration across complex and dynamic environments (yawn...). But it’s extraordinarily relevant in a week when McKinsey has published results from a survey of 5,400 IT projects (with a combined cost over-run of $66bn).

As McKinsey notes, the keys to IT project success are not rocket science: good stakeholder management, effective teamwork and avoiding ‘the common pitfall of focussing disproportionately on technology issues’.

So a platform that provides visualization of end-to-end processes – intuitive, in their complete business context, and in the language of the business – and wrapped within a robust governance framework won’t just cut costs.  It’s the best possible insurance against a ‘black swan’ - the 17 percent of IT projects which McKinsey reckon go so bad that they can threaten the very existence of the company.

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Mapping The Stakeholders In GBS Success

I sat down with a recently-launched and highly ambitious Global Business Services (GBS) team to map all the stakeholders who will need to be engaged to ensure their success.  We rapidly filled the whiteboard (below - disguised!).

It’s an extraordinary number of people,  across multiple functions and regions.  And this is not just about preparing for the launch for this particular GBS. This is about ongoing collaboration – and its scope is only going to expand as this GBS scales up on its five year program.

This organization intends to adopt Nimbus to enable the collaboration across these diverse stakeholders that will be required to deliver outstanding service for its clients. Frankly, it’s difficult to see how else you could do it.

End-to-end process - in the language of the business - is becoming the universal business language.  Wrapped within a robust governance framework, and delivered to users in way that supports them in doing real work, it’s the platform that can ensure effective collaboration across the complex and dynamic service delivery environments faced by most GBS organizations.  

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Outsourcing: Death Throes and Birth Pangs

The existential crisis underway in the outsourcing industry makes for amusing reading. The industry has voted by a two-thirds majority to drop 'the O word', reports advisory group HfS, in an attempt to shed its apparently negative connotations. But there's no industry consensus on a new name - and 'outsourcing' features in many of the most popular suggested alternatives.

Phil Fersht, HfS founder and industry thought leader, doesn't mince his words:

"There is far too much “believe our own bullshit” going on and this industry needs to change how it is perceived before it can effectively “rebrand”." 

Phil maps out the four challenges he sees facing a stalled industry. But really they are all one - and summed up in his final challenge:

Challenge #4: How can buyers and providers really partner to foster innovations into business process outcomes?

I'm optimistic. Outsourcing service providers I know are investing heavily to up their game. They see the industry's current convulsions as death throes for a simpler world of labor arbitrage and automation.  And the birth pangs of a world where outsourcing will continue to prosper but in new ways.

If you ask me, two developments will define this new world:

All Work Is Process. The opening sentence to the first-ever APQC report on Business Process Management, published back when Adam was a lad - but it remains broadly true, and it is set to become much more widely accepted. So we'll drop, for example, the empty distinction between 'business process outsourcing' (which really means Finance and HR services) and the rest (such as IT, planning and analytics). All work will be seen as process. The process will always be owned by the enterprise but it may be delivered using in-house resources or be outsourced or, most often, through a hybrid of the two. 

Platforms for Process Excellence. If all work is process then every organization needs an enterprise process workbench. Outsourcing providers will adopt them to enable more collaborative engagements with their clients across the service delivery lifecycle.  Outsourcing buyers will adopt them to orchestrate the delivery of end-to-end processes, delivered through a constantly-adapting blend of in-house and bought-in resources - and to engage all the process stakeholders in continuous improvement.

Arguably, the most interesting challenges are now on the buy side: Developing Global Business Services organizations with the capability to continually re-optimize multiple, complex and dynamic sourcing equations [which include, crucially, keeping IT aligned] to deliver value and innovation for the enterprise. No surprise that GBS is the career choice for some of the brightest people I know.

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21 Aug 2012    How To Simplify Global Shared Services

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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...

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