Following discussions in the LinkedIn ACM Group I am presenting here the shortest possible definition of Adaptive Case Management or Adaptive Process (AP). I propose that it involves three distinct paradigm shifts:

1. Adaptive Process is a productive system that deploys not only the organization and process structure but through backend interfaces becomes the system of record for the business data entities and content involved. All processes are completely transparent as per access authorization and fully auditable.
2. Adaptive Process enables non-technical business users in virtual organizations to seamlessly create/consolidate structured and unstructured processes from basic predefined business entities, content, social interactions, and business rules.
3. Adaptive Process moves the process knowledge gathering in the life cycle from the template analysis/modeling/simulation phase into the process execution. The AP system collects actionable knowledge – without intermediate analysis phase – based on process patterns created by business users.

Adaptive Process does not simply enhance BPM with unstructured processes. Case Management enables unstructured collaboration but it does not collect actionable knowledge from the process.  Yes, AP seems to be quite effective for knowledge workers, but there is no reason why it would not provide similar benefits to any business activity by any person inside or outside the organisation. That has to do with a very limited view of business processes from a conceptual preset BPM perspective only. Structured or predictable processes are only those that apparently can’t be improved any further or seem to have no need to change. Projects pick those because BPM methodology, modelling and software are so limited and can only bring cost reductions there. It is not what the business really needs …

What are my requirements for Adaptive Process based on? From a real world perspective all processes are human perception ONLY. They are abstract simplifications that do not exist in reality, because it is impossible to analyse and model all complex relationships and dependencies. In a purely classical physical world (mechanics and electronics) modelling is more realistically possible (up to a point as otherwise chip production would always yield 100% and machines would not break). But lets return from philosophy (and quantum physics, by the way).

In reality everything that happens (any action that is taken by a person), happens because it is caused by a mental match to a knowledge/perception pattern. That we think it is a process is related to the sequential relative memory path of our brain. We do not remember in pictures but in things in sequence, relative and change. Just because things happened in sequence, it is not yet a process and one event does not have to cause another. So far so good. Another step back to BPM.

You can now take BPM as a management concept and say that it has nothing to do with process management as a technology. Correct. Most business consultants sell that aspect of their work and the weaker the management and employees are the more they can benefit from BPM guidance. A great organisation with great people will be destroyed by BPM (as a concept not yet software) because their initiative and intuitive work focus is destroyed. Their perception patterns created successful outcomes and now they can’t do that anymore.

Think about it:  Without BPM, business processes in any organization DO continuously adapt. Maybe not in a desired direction if the management isn’t any good. They will be using whatever means at their disposal to do so. Paper and pencil will work fine. But they will adapt because the individual agents make it a complex adaptive system and not a simplified complicated one. If you now bring in BPM, as a first step you kill that natural ability through the mandatory simplification. That is the destructive danger of BPM I am so outspoken against. Ideally we can bring in a system that will not take away the natural adaptive capability but enhance it and make the outcomes and individual perception patterns transparent for improvement.

I propose that we need to provide Adaptive Process technology that exposes structured (business data) and unstructured (content) information to the members of structured (business) and unstructured (social) organizations to securely execute – with knowledge interactively gathered previously – structured (process) and unstructured (case) work in a transparent and auditable manner .

Snippets of wisdom from fun movies:

‘Life is like a box of chocolates. You’ll never know what ya gonna git.’ (Forrest Gump)

‘Had a single of a long series of events taken place differently this morning, she would not have been run over by a car.’ (The Mysterious Case of Benjamin Button)

‘You can put the seed in the ground and water it but it will become what it is.’ (Kung Fu Panda)

Why am I using movie quotes rather than heavy weight scientific arguments to start off this post? I am trying to point out that everyday people know better about causality and predictability than scientists, who live in the illusion that mathematics IS the reality and not just an abstraction of it.

I recently reread Nassim Taleb’s ‘Fooled by Randomness’ and it reminded me that CEOs and CIOs who believe in Predictive Analysis are not that much more clever than stockbrokers. Much of the current hype is caused by IBM’s multi-billion dollar ‘Smart Planet’ advertizing campaign. Are you aware that there are no ‘Smart’ products that IBM sells? IBM sells a vision and no more. In Europe nobody talks about smart power grids because the power networks are so much more modern than in the rest of the world and they are run by SMART PEOPLE, not requiring smart software – whatever that is supposed to be. Am I saying that the mathematics of predictive analysis are wrong? Absolutely not. Given that the world would conform to the model they use it would be perfect. But … it doesn’t!

The chain: REALITY -> MODEL -> COLLECTION -> FILTERING -> PROCESSING -> PREDICTION -> CAUSAL ACTION is purely an illusion. Even if you find wonderful correlating patterns in the data, which most probably means that you have spent a lot of time tuning the above chain until it does look good, it has nothing do to with achieving causal knowledge. Yes, one might achieve some statistical knowledge on common human behavior but actually, there is no need to do high volume data processing for that. Simple observations on a few people will do the same. The data will be wrong and the action you take will have different results than planned (… the seed will become what it is!)

Don’t forget: MORE DATA produces MORE NOISE! Higher sampling rates do not produce higher accuracy but just more opportunities to misinterpret a trend. PA experts claim that filtering solves that problem.  To filter out the extremes in data will reduce the one important aspect of the information and that is the ‘Tipping Point’, which tells you when the data will push something over the edge. The grain of sand that tumbles the avalanche. Averaged data are mostly irrelevant and have no influence on individual results! It is however compounded by our propensity to misinterpret numbers, so read ‘Calculated Risk’ by Gerd Gigerenzer to understand why.

It is not the same as in digital music with a sine wave and its harmonics, where higher sampling rates allow you to interpolate more of the harmonics. Even here the MP3 format of the Fraunhofer institute managed to lose high-frequency samples by figuring out how little of that information is actually relevant to human perception. The Predictive Analysis fallacy comes from assuming that the world is based on classical physics such as the sine wave. The world is however a complex adaptive system of many layers of emerging functions and interrelationships than cannot be decomposed and thus not modelled. It is utterly random.

Nassim Taleb uses a similar example as the following as to why great stocks on the stockmarket are purely random. The anecdotal evidence of the successes of Predictive Analysis are purely RANDOM too. Given a 50% chance of success that PA improves what a business does, you will have definite positive result at 12.5% of businesses after the third year by pure chance. That does not take into account the so-called hindsight bias. Some results seem utterly obvious once they have happened. PA sales people will tell you that it is those 12.5% that used PA ‘properly’ and were able to ACT upon the results, while the others failed. They ask: ‘Do you want to belong to the TOP TEN percent of businesses?’ However, comparing two companies where one uses PA and the other not is utterly invalid because both business results are random. There is no causal connection between the two, except if one would employ a large scale, double blind test where all businesses believe they are using PA, but half don’t.

So in my book, all those people who proclaim the ‘Smart Planet’ by means of Predictive Analysis aren’t really that smart. They actually are blinded by noise. Software will never be smart – OUR GUTS ARE!

The Thought Leader Summit of the WFMC at the Tibco offices in Maidenhead was quite interesting. There were 20 attendants. I was very positively surprised to hear that most see the need for a new kind of process or case management.

The day was spent with the following discussions:

• Is there a need for new concept that enables adaptive processes?
• Which different set of benefits does it deliver to the business?
• How can it be distinguished from BPM and Case Management (CM)?
• Is that difference so substantial that it is not just an extension of either?
• Is BPM for clerks and case management for ‘knowledge workers’?
• What would one call such a concept (and with it the solutions)?
• How would such a concept be received in the marketplace?

The presentations of Cordys and Global360 made it clear that the business perspective is certainly different to BPM. Global360 also made it clear that it is different from Case Management. In my presentation I tried to make understood that I see BPM as a very limited solution when compared to real-world business needs and while Case Management is a step in the right direction, it is mostly hardcoded in features towards the area of use in either healthcare or legal and thus too limited for widespread business use. All other Case Management solutions are typically custom-built by vendors or service providers from 3 to 7 individual products with lots of custom coding. Yes, there are a number of BPM products that have ad-hoc functionality, case folders, dynamic sub-process selection and process wikis, but they still require substantial upfront analysis effort.

What are the unique business benefits of such a solution?

• User work only with real-world items, such as content and people.
• There is no upfront analysis and design of business processes.
• Business entities are accessible and usable in real-time in the case.
• Processes are focused on achieving individual goals.
• Organization can be virtual with participants being added at any time.
• Business process DECISION knowledge is discovered during execution.
• Management acquires full transparency of processes and execution.
• Business users, management AND CUSTOMERS can participate.

In the end we could not agree what to name such a solution. The closest match was ‘Adaptive Case Management’ but then attendants either thought that Case Management was close enough or too different. I could go with Adaptive Case Management (ACM) and will call it that here for the time being. Typically TLAs are created by some analysts group based on a large enough market fragment. No revenue – no TLA (Three-Letter-Acronym)! If you have any suggestion for a TLA, then please let me know. I said before that I intensely dislike market fragments but it seems thats what people want.

Here is a revised, shortened list of ACM features and differentiators:

1. I proposed that the key ACM differentiator is in the template life-cycle.
2. ACM therefore requires a version-controlled, central repository of model templates that enables definition changes to be deployed using a change management life-cycle.
3. In difference to BPM, the process template is not fully analyzed and designed up front and then instantiated and executed as-is.
4. In difference to CM and collaboration, a case is not just a folder that bundles all information with some state definitions.
5. In difference to both, a case can be assembled BY THE USER from a set of predefined template elements, including content and business entities that are real-time linked to business applications.
6. In difference to both, ACM employs some means to enhance case handling knowledge from user actions on previously executed cases.
7. ACM can BOTH guide or enforce user actions.
8. ACM allows both parallel and strict sequential execution of role activities.
9. ACM controls user access to EVERYTHING based on role/policy not dependent on organisational roles or GUI/forms definitions.
10. ACM can include rule/pattern/state controlled decision-making.
11. Business entities and content are not encapsulated by a case but just referenced and therefore changes to business entities can change many cases.
12. Events can influence any process or case entity at any time or trigger rules.
13. Boundary rules can be defined by users as business-wide or case relevant.
14. .. this is not a complete list either.

So far, so good. There is a Linked-In group I created on ACM and there is a discussion about doing a symposium. I am worried that too many interests will once again conflict here. There is also a Case Management RFP at OMG in the wings. We’ll see.

While I am excited that this first step has happened, I realize that there are so many special interests of vendors, analysts and consultants that there is a long way to go until a new process management paradigm will be widely accepted. Either the technology and user acceptance will be so convincing that the market will jump at it, or some large vendor will spend billions in advertizing to make people accept an inferior solution as ‘the standard’. No, I am not jaded. I happens all the time.

On Nov. 3rd, I will be attending a Thought Leader Summit of the Workflow Management Coalition. The focus of discussion will be Case Management or Dynamic BPM. Keith Swenson, who felt I could add to the discussion, was so friendly to invite me. Given my critical stance towards BPM, I feel like walking into the Colosseum with lots of hungry lions waiting. Should this be my last post, you know what happened … just a little joke! Keith asked participants to offer a position statement upfront to enable others to prepare themselves.

Here is my Position Statement for WfMC Thought Leader Summit:

Businesses have to succeed in an economy that is a ‘complex adaptive system’ rather than a complicated system that can be decomposed into building blocks. Adam Smith’s invisible hand at work. A system of independently acting agents is not complicated but complex and is considered a complex adaptive environment that resists decomposition, see Anderson, Arrow, Pines (1988). From a planning perspective it seems ideal if businesses would not consist of independent acting agents, but would act coherently, hence BPM to the rescue. I propose that such perfect businesses would be so foreign in a dynamic free market economy that they would fail. Thus also large companies are complex adaptive systems,  in which (like in most natural systems) successful structures emerge, adapt and evolve rather than being artificially created (think about in-house politics for a moment!). In such systems, functions cannot be created by a methodology of analysis and design, mostly because for the lack of realistic abstraction. That does not mean that there is no process perspective but it is much less detailed than a step-by-step flowchart model. Models are only necessary to define the real-world entities for process handoff between process owners.

Before jumping into the technology aspect of complex adaptive process I need to discuss the business element of my approach. I agree that there are businesses with different management styles regarding customers service and HR. I propose that even businesses with a more ‘employee control’ approach would possibly benefit more from less process analysis and more frequent process adaptation through process owners, because of the huge amount of control structure.

I arrived at my above perspective not from an expansion of BPM to dynamic process management or from the needs of case file collaboration, but from – non manufacturing – business and human resource management for service processes. I am opposed to the idea that a business can be improved by analyzing and designing rigid processes, except for an irrelevant small percentage (as an addition to ERP). I fail to find the proof that flowchart-designed processes and the related change management bureaucracy do make a business more agile. People are (if at all) agile but never analyzed and designed processes. Frequent process changes will simply destroy whatever initiative employees might have left. I have yet to see a business that does actually automate more than 20% of its processes and currently assume that this is the maximum that can be achieved. Rather than the 80% often proposed. The more processes are controlled, the more bypass and add-on activities exist. I fail to see the sense in creating rigid processes and then define everything that does not map into it as an exception. The process spectrum is rather from straight through processing to social networking with case management in between.

Process management in manufacturing was always mostly focused on quality to reduce cost, while it seems that for business services it is reducing manpower, needed skills and thus cost. I suggest that process management must always focus on customer service quality first. But not process makes people happy, but people make people happy. Therefore we need to empower people! I disagree that it is only the knowledge workers who need more dynamics and back office clerks who need rigid BPM. Also a simple activity within a case can be strictly guided by a complex adaptive process, so why bother to waste time with expensive and inaccurate process analysis?

The most likely approach to succeed is to empower the process owner to create processes on the fly as needed and empower the users to adapt those on the job. Here the similarity to Human Focused Process, Case Management and Dynamic BPM approaches becomes apparent. A complex adaptive process is however much closer to the dynamics of social networking rather than to case file collaboration.

Another important element is ‘goal definition’. Goals are a set of RULE correlated parameters that can be verified at certain intervals or be triggered by thresholds. In difference to KPI or key performance indicators, goals can be verified during real-time processing. KPI’s tend to be accumulated, consolidated data warehouse numbers. A goal mismatch event should trigger some corrective process. Goals can be anything from simple SLAs to revenue targets.

I do not want to belabor the current technology issues with roundtrip from BPM model to execution. While it may be true that most BPM systems can offer some case management aspects, the analysis, model, implement, simulate, deploy, monitor and improve cycle remains as a huge obstacle to the promised agility.

Key functions of complex adaptive (CA) process systems:

1. Distributed (similar to grid computing) communication enablement of process systems
2. The exchange of process definitions is less relevant than meta-data and methods
3. Consolidated central repository (not archive) for change management
4. Create a business architecture model of data entities in repository.
5. Utilize an object model with state/event modeling (implementing i.e. pi-calculus)
6. Enable a 100% change roundtrip for ALL elements of a process
7. Empower users to write boundary rules in natural language accessing the object data
8. Strong distributed security with embedded access control on method and attribute level
9. Enable authenticated users to create virtual organizations of collaborators
10. Empower business users to access and use defined data entities from repository
11. Simple mapping of backend business systems to data entities. (SOA or not)
12. Simple linkage to external event creating systems
13. Empower business users to create their own data entities.
14. Enable business users to create all the necessary content linked to business objects
15. Seamless integration with all inbound and outbound content (backend archives)
16. Enable business users to define role-specific user interfaces as needed.
17. Use timeline graphs to show past activities for documentation
18. Use organization charts to show authorized roles and departments or virtual organizations
19. User authorization (role/policy) and workgroup/queue assignment are independent
20. Real-time business data are mapped into the process to measure business results.
21. Customer focused processes are setup to survey customer satisfaction.
22. Consolidating process, business and satisfaction data for the process owner
23. Business results are accumulated and dashboards and reports create transparency
24. Enable offline and mobile participation for all CA processes
25. … I certainly missed a few things!

Wish list:

• Business trained document classification and routing
• Business trained content capture and data extraction
• Machine learning agents discover user activity patterns in state space

Let me note that it is not simple to ‘utilize neural networks’ on top of an existing BPM engine, because it cannot expose the state space for time-stamped user activities. It is also difficult to empower business users to define GUIs and write rules without a deeply embedded security layer as otherwise they can define themselves unauthorized data or content access.

I look forward to the summit to meet so many interesting people and will report on it right here.

I swiped the title of this post from a Financial Times article by Robert Galliers of Bentley University, with whom I agree that it is utterly important that executives gain an understanding what technology can and cannot do. That understanding has to influence their strategic planning. Technology not just a means of cost reduction or automated execution and the internet is not just an additional marketing and sales channel. The article is related to a forum discussion I  was involved in on Linked-IN. The forum is run by a business process interest group that also organizes itself on bpgroup.com by Steve Towers. The subject of the discussion was whether the concept of ‘Outside-In’ process analysis is different or provides additional benefits over other process methodologies.

I dared to question whether inventing a new name (Outside-In) for a process management methodology that ‘makes customers happy’ would do anything beyond increasing consultancy revenue. BPGroup being a consultancy organization, I obviously disturbed a hornets nest. Soon they were all swirling around me and trying to sting me with their practitioners ‘It must be right because we have done it here and there’ arguments. I simply smiled and smacked them hard. Yellow goo smeared the windows … not true, I actually simply stepped aside as I won’t waste my time.

Once again, I don’t believe in process management methodologies. I believe that processes have to be about people and for people. Not tell people HOW to do something but simply WHAT process results they are responsible for. Then give them the ability to perform a process as they see fit, while transparency up and down the management line is the key ability for achieving consolidated results. Well, you might want to even call that a methodology.

It will have to be technology to deliver that dynamic process ability. Technology that embeds a certain methodology and worse certain processes are the reason why Nicolas Carr wrote ‘Does IT matter?’ in 2003. While Carr is right about the current state of affairs, he is wrong about technology in principle. Technology is changing the world not management methodology. Technology will be the key competitive advantage. Technology that helps people to identify strategic opportunities, as well as execute and verify … all in one place without intermediate process implementations.

What kind of technology could that be? It is a kind of killer app such as Facebook? No, because even Facebook is too rigid about processes. Let me use an example from the military. Strategy would be about which battle to fight and which to avoid lacking the better weapons. Doing business is a guerilla war because it is in reality a one-on-one of business and customer. Mass marketing with or without predictive analytics and rigid-process-faceless call centers are like using a nuke on the battlefield because that way you certainly will kill the bad guys along with some collateral damage – too bad. In a guerilla war the better weapons and better trained soldiers decide. You train soliders how to use the weapons and how to communicate as a team. You don’t tell them which step to take and when to shoot. A great platoon leader essentialy points in a direction and the rest is defined by real-time communication about the enemy situation through hand-signals. Imagine that one would try to manage foot soldiers in Irak using statistical predictive analysis. Yes, I had to laugh too at that image.

Fortunately we don’t command soldiers but manage employees who interact with customers. But the team communications need is the same except that we  are sitting at our desk working on a computer. Therefore this new technology weapon has to be a mobile collaborative IT environment that allows social network interaction on business activities and entities. It has to enable process owners to collaborate about the real world deliverables as their inputs and outputs and empower the process teams to execute as they see fit. Executives (generals) have at all times complete transparency and can offer process coaching and  guidance to process owners (platoon leaders). Customers can enjoy full transparency into the processes within the organization and fully participate. Here the military simile ends.

While being more than right in my book, Galliers fails to see beyond business information and intelligence, IT governance, and agile processes. But yes, business schools need to make students aware that without understanding of information technology their ability to manage will be dramatically impaired.

That leaves one question: Who will tell the current league of CEOs that they need to go back to school?