Some BPM consultants propose that processes are the most important corporate asset. I disagree because a process is an abstract entity that produces no value. Value is defined by human interaction in the real world. While abstract processes promise to make that human interaction more controllable they ignore human nature and workplace psychology, much as socialism and communism do. These are idealistic concepts that fail in the real world of individual human agents. People are at their best when they feel that their contribution is valued as an individual. Therefore the idea of empowerment – making people responsible for their work – has been around for some time.

Why you would want to empower employees?

Empowerment is often misunderstood as authority for decisionmaking for everyone. Some tries at empowerment have failed to show the hoped for results because they followed the idea that all people are the same. The most important element of empowerment is the realization that people are different. Not clever and dumb, or lazy and hardworking, but just people in the wrong place.

I go with the 80/20 Pareto rule. 20% of people are responsible for 80% of results. But one can not fire the other 80% of people as the remaining would again structure the same. It means that only 20% of people have the interest and capability to take responsibility. I see them as process owners (PO) who can be given goals to chase. 20% is actually enough as the ideal team size is ten which provides one teamleader and one assistant/stand-in per team. The other eight rather want to be part of and even feel better when they are empowered as a team. If a person is unhappy as team member he may be a PO candidate, in the wrong team or have some other issues with job/private life relationships. If a team fails on goals the PO may be the problem.

So who manages the POs? At best two percent of people are natural motivators, people leaders, creative gurus and entrepreneurs. Ten process owners with a hundred people report to the 2% motivators/entrepreneur (ME) types. Voilá, there is your LEAN organization with the executive in the third line that ten MEs report to. It indicates that businesses get much harder to manage over a 1000 people and that I find confirmed by my own experience as well as Schuhmacher’s ‘Small is beautiful’. Size is not everything.

Empowerment requires two important elements: first, people coaching and second, business and process transparency. Calling for a coach is not an admittance of failure and sending in a coach is not punishment but a support action. The 2% MEs can be coaches or use additional coaches who should ideally have grown from the business itself.

Transparency is best achieved by a collaborative process support infrastructure – certainly not your run-of-the-mill BPM/SOA software. Transparency enables monitoring of (business) goal achievement of each team to verify if goals are set sensibly and well understood. There are no flows for the process of a PO, but Role Activity Diagrams are practical to show PO relationships. POs are empowered to question goals and can decide to change the way their goals are achieved. All structureal changes are agreed upon by the pre and post linked POs with the ME in attendance.

What is needed to empower people in a process-owning business?

1. Forget flowcharts: Starting with a process flow focus puts process improvements into a meta level. This is the main reason that I am against flowcharting processes. It adds bureaucracy and reduces the agility of the responsible process owner.
2. Define the process owners: Utilize RAD role activity diagrams to model the structure of process owners for all processes that you need to improve. Map out through which real-world deliverables they serve each other.
3. Customer service goals: The goal achievement (customer satisfaction) optimization loop must be responsibility of that process owner. A normal flowchart can not redesign and optimize itself.
4. Real-time business data: The process owner needs real-time business data to measure his goal achievement and the authority to execute towards those goals. IT is essential for that to add the transparency that the PO and the executive needs.
5. Define real-world entities only: Real world entities to be delivered to a customer according to cost and quality goals are plausible. Process flow is abstract and not understood.
6. States – Events – Rules: Real world entities that have plausible states and are linked together with rules create plausible process states and can be easily improved by adding new entities, new rules and new actors without redesign.
7. Do not fragment process execution: Most BPM analyst and consultants propose that you need multiple best-of-breed BPM products to cover all process needs. That is utterly ignorant! Pi-calculus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi-calculus proves that a network model of connected entities can map any flow logic. Structured (10%), Dynamic (80%) and Ad-Hoc processes (10%) can all be handled in one system.
   
8. Service and Support processes are the same: Deliverables in all process types are achievable with the same state/event/rule model. Using an adaptible process model reduces the nedd for support meta-processes such as change management dramatically. The functional change management of the processes must be part of the process platform and executable by the process owners.

A Process Definition for Empowerment:

The executive defines a business strategy and architecture by assigning processes.

• Process owners networked in Role Activity Diagrams
• Process goals

The PO uses that to define how to execute:

• Customer
• real world deliverable entities (properties, state, relationship)
• deliverables used from other processes
• global game rules and local process rules
• process states
• role based presentation

IT and business necessities:

• role/policy authorization model
• entity data linkage to backend apps
• reporting transparency and hierarchy
• auditing and archiving

Conclusion:

So why would empowerment work better than stick and carrot, known as reward and punishment, or strict quality monitoring? Each action in an empowered organization drives productivity forward, while rigidly planned organizations (hierarchically or not) waste bureaucratic energy on analysis and designs, policing procedures and reward/punishment systems. Not only that but each controlling or monitoring action, and each reward will cause counterproductive forces in the organization. When I was a salesman in IBM, the sales commission system caused a lot of distortion of what was sold to the customer and sales always used it to their advantage.

Today most IT solutions either use pre- and hardcoded processes that are then enforced. Employees have to execute standardized processes (to reduce cost) for an abstract, statistically classified customer. IT is seen mostly as a people and cost reduction tool by automating and industrializing.

The missed opportunity is however that it could also be used for a new kind of architectured collaboration (Web2.0 for business entities) that truly enables empowerment. IT would suddenly not be an expense but turn the business into a new kind of organization with unheard of dynamics.

I have just taken a further look at the BPMN 2.0 proposal to see if we could use some of its standard graphic modeling concepts for our process visualization in our Papyrus Platform. I was very disappointed. The enhanced and additional definitions create ambiguous models. An ‘Activity’ can still represent any number of different functions and the new event types are lacking in detail on how they interact with the flow. There is still no artefact method, attribute and state modelling and no business rules. The proposed UML-like data modeling seems non-existent. Thus, it will be impossible to use BPMN 2.0 for exchange as-is (despite earlier claims) and it still has to be transcoded to an executable format (i.e. BPEL plus Java) using additional information that is not mapped into BPMN. Thus, no roundtrip and user empowerment! All inbound and outbound content and GUI artefacts will still have to be programmed. Hence, a lot of project management bureaucracy.

Obviously a lot can still change and maybe 2.0 will take a few more years to become a final spec. But I feel that all that is to no avail as it remains firmly footed in the flowcharting domain. But what are we trying to achieve with a process model? Gain an understanding to calculate how the systems will react given a certain situation? Simulate what will happen when certain actions are taken? Control the system so that it becomes more manageable? Achieve transparency of the processes en-route and completed?

A BPMN model has only the acting agents (users) as real world entities whose functions and decisions to perform these functions can’t be modeled unless substantial abstraction is performed. BPMN 2.0, as all flowchart models, is STILL functionally blind to the inner function of the major elements of a business process (content data and context) and therefore to its decision logic. Flowchart modelers see the world (a business) as a ‘complicated’ system that can be decomposed into a sequential causal chain of functions ‘to be executed’ and a limited set of states that causally control the execution. The relevant process knowledge is however hidden in a) functions performed by different agents who influence state changes on business entities and b) patterns of entity states and attributes that cause different agents to perform certain functions, and c) a variety of complex business events that can change entity states at any time. Flowcharts are unable to represent that even if one could extract and analyze all the information from the agents and the entities! As bad as that is, it is not the key problem.

A classical model of physics (i.e. a watch) is complicated, but the economy or a large business that consists of individually acting agents is complex (Anderson, Arrow, Pines – 1988). The flowchart fallacy is to see a business as complicated rather than complex. Holland et. al (1986) proposed a method of real-world modeling in which the world consists of various states S where a transition function F(S) changes a given state at time t into a new state a time t+1.  The caveat is that in a complex system the modeler using a modelling function can neither accurately describe the state space with all its entities nor can the function F – and its causality – performed by the agents be accurately known.

While the Law Of Large Numbers allows us to build a statistical representation of real-world situations across a large number of entities and thus there seems to an emergent pattern, this does however not describe a causal law. The LOLN is an observation and cannot be decomposed into why the various agents came to a particular decision. The individual agents have only a certain probability to interact in a certain way and as much as that can be modelled, it does not allow the modeller to deduce a function to act causally correct on all entities in the same manner. The simplified ‘complicated’ model will therefore be quite wrong when people are involved. That explains why the reductionist approach works well for a robotic production plant but not for people.

The reductionist modeling hypothesis suggests the more a decomposition in smaller elements takes place the more accurate the model would be. Anderson proposed in 1972 that reductionist models are misleading for complex systems because they cannot map and predict emerging properties. Thus they cannot be used to construct the system from the decomposed bits and pieces. The model representation in such situations can only happen through destroying and redrawing the blueprint using the new functions or entities. The reductionist ‘complicated’ model cannot adapt to external influences or to changes in its agent functions.  Flowcharting is acccordingly abstraction based, top-down modeling of complicated functions that connects purely hypothetical snapshots in time with statistically inferred rules that are not causal in reality for a complex adaptive system, just as global warming theory.

Hereto I propose (as I have done for the last ten years) that BPMN 2.0 and flowchart models are still a failure for designing business processes, because a large business clearly is a complex adaptive system that consists of individual acting agents with its employees and customers. Trying to simplify a business into a ‘complicated’ system, forces the agents into non-individual actor-robots and makes the system unable to adapt to the customer agents or to other environmental changes, except if one goes back to the blueprint. That is exactly the situation why we have IT Governance and Centers of Execellence bureaucracy who have to redesign the blueprints. As this typically requires long and difficult projects to implement, BPM reduces the agility of a business rather than improve it.  If agents (such as customers would) refuse to be controlled, the model breaks not only down but produces wrong results.

I propose that a bottom-up approach of real-world objects that can map state-changes and identify causal patterns from unimpeded user activity creates a much more realistic and adaptible model of business activity. Rather than to enforce the agents to perform in a certain way, the system simply enforces basic rules of the game and creates substantial transparency and therefore flexibility and adaptability. Process management has to offer complex real world models of people acting as a social group on business entities. Flowcharts are at most usable at a very high level, for example to show the dependencies between process owners and their goals.

As for BPMN 2.0 or any other flowcharting BPM approach, why would you want to reduce your business agility?

The main goal of a Business Architecture is to enable the business to improve customer service quality through a better transparency, flexibility and adaptability of business operations. The market environment changes more rapidly and the use of technology by customers dramatically influences how a business can operate. Financial services calculation processes, marketing programs, business rules and content change already weekly rather than monthly.

However, if a business architecture has to be modelled, encoded and assembled by using a large number of tools and software components it cannot provide the benefits. Today’s heavily fragmented and hardcoding-integrated IT systems (including SOA) are too rigid to enable rapidly changing business environments. Most IT departments do not focus on adaptability and innovation because they have been requested to focus on lowering cost and system stability. Therefore, six month rollout cycles are the norm with three month being the exception. Business users expectations of stability and executive demands for lower cost are incompatible with the ability to achieve a flexble and adaptive, competitive IT infrastructure. Efficiency is still the main IT goal, with effectiveness a far-off second and agility being no more than an overused buzzword.

Combine this with the misconception that running a business can be pre-planned and therefore encoded into processes and rules, with decisions being taken by predictive analysis based on historical (or better outdated?) business data. I propose that good business decisions are always taken by experienced people who use intuition to combine relevant data in business context. After billions of IT investments neither process management nor business intelligence have delivered the promised wonderland of the automated enterprise that the board can run remotely from the beach. Why?

Neither BPM nor BI consider the human side of running a business and therefore fail to produce a nimble, agile organization. Based on unproven management theories and over-optimistic information technology benefit claims a huge IT bureaucracy is now necessary to manage a complex technology stack. Control and use of the technology stack is only feasable through outsourcing partners and the necessary complex contracts reduce corporate agility even more. Billions are spent by the IT monopolists for marketing to sell an illusion of the IT-controlled business that does not exist and is not achievable by the proposed complex means.

The above situation was the reason for ISIS Papyrus to develop a new IT platform that does not require a huge technology stack and does not need complex programming but a simple modeling and rule definition methodology to build a flexible and adaptible Business Architecture that is mostly under the control of the business and not the IT department.

Agility AND innovation happen on the people level. BPM and SixSigma trash out the people empowerment slogan but fail to deliver because in neither approach people are given the freedom to do things as they see fit as long as the goals are achieved. Enterprise 2.0 is a countermovement to the bureaucratic IT-Governance approach, but if it is simply putting Web 2.0 behind the firewall without giving the user access to plausible business data entities there is not such thing as empowerment.

William of Ockham wrote in Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate: “The explanation of any phenomenon should make as few assumptions as possible and not invent further entities to explain a theory.” He was a friar and felt that the one entity of God would explain everything. Bertrand Russel translated it to: “The simplest explanation is usually the best.” Translated further to IT means that coded software systems or process solutions that require substantial resources to be model a business and even more to then adapt it to changing needs make things more complex than necessary. Flexibility AND adaptability by the user – while ensuring transparency and maintainability – are the key capabilities of modern systems. SixSigma adds a lot of bureaucratic complexity that is certainly not in line with Occam’s Razor. Let’s simplify …

A detailed description of Business Architecture features of the Papyrus Platform you will on my Papyrus Architecture blog.

I just read an invitation to ‘the most comprehensive, current and pragmatic BPM seminar in the world’. The host is claimed to be the most experienced and highly-rated seminar facilitator and author in the enterprise BPM field, who supposedly ‘developed more agile process-based business architectures and process models that will scale and adapt’ than anyone else. I won’t use a name but you can basically enter any BPM expert you want. They are all the same.

This wonders of BPM seminar should be attended by:

• Strategic Planners
• Business Process Executives, Stewards, Owners and Managers
• Business and Systems Architects, Analysts and Designers
• Business Executives and Managers
• Lean and Six Sigma leaders
• IT Leaders
• Program and Project Managers
• BPM Internal and External Consultants
• Change Agents who must influence cultural and behavioral transformation
• HR Professionals introducing new competencies and organization designs

Well, except for the executives and managers these people are not performing ANY work that produces ANY business revenue. They are all bureaucrats! There are now ten different people who will tell the ONE poor grunt sitting in the customer frontline how to do his job and once they come out of this seminar they will be brainwashed to believe that it will actually improve the way a business works.

The brainwashing starts with a certain amount of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt). The invitation points to economic pressures and change and an increasing burden of compliance that are the norm for any business. So what? Well, it says, ‘managers who solve problems on the spot employ short term thinking and create imperfect patchwork solutions.’ It claims that ‘only those with lean and reliable end-to-end processes will be able to do more with the scarce resources they already have’. Says who? Proves what? The worst short-term thinking perform c-level execs who look at quarterly results only to drive the shareprice up!

Then it says that ‘process management obviously needs to be aligned across the whole organization’. Does that not remind you of centrally planned communism? In any case they are telling you that you can’t manage your business and you can’t trust your managers and your people are idiots. They tell you that you do not need managers with initiative, experience, people management skills and who act decisive and intuitive. Nope, all wrong! You need bureaucrats who will put the business on track. Right. Exactly!

The invitation further proposes that the business does not need to know how to make a customer happy but ‘business managers, architects and analysts must be able to strategize, architect, define, understand, analyze, improve, and communicate knowledge about business processes for multiple purposes’. What are those purposes? The seminar will supposedly teach you how to manage the politics so that there won’t be any resistance. Basically it says right here two things: The people will hate it, so you need to enforce it and you do that by policing each and every step of the newly defined work processes by exploiting technology to the max! The Brave New World of 1984 is finally here.

It further says clearly that not people are the asset of the business but the processes are! Then there is a lot of mumbo-jumbo about scalable methods, models, best practices (a.k.a. copycat ideas) that can supposedly ‘be applied to whole enterprises’. Clearly that BPM expert has never tried that! Then the rest of the invitation is sprinkled with buzzwords about SOA-enabled, process-centric and model-driven, breakthrough BPMS technologies! Who believes this crap?

And what will you be able to do with all that new knowledge? Supposedly you will ‘anticipate and respond to changing needs more quickly and deliver better performance faster’. It strikes me as strange that all this new bureaucracy will speed up change. Who will anticipate something? One of the ten BPM-Lean-SixSigma-ChangeAgent bureaucrats who are disconnected from daily operations? They think that the business clerks who are now paternally spoon-fed with process steps like idiots and who hate their BPM guts for taking away their initiative and customer orientation will tell them? That is the true DELUSION. This style of BPM motivation blatantly ignores the most basic, but most important concepts of human resource management.

Finally the course invitation puts the cards on the table by saying: ‘Get all people to change with less hassle’. Aha, the BPM pundits think that they can run the business by remote control. That is what they are selling. No manager in his right mind will believe that this is possible. Corporation-wide BPM is as bad as Outsourcing. It is proof of incompetence. It shows a focus on cost when there should be a focus on people – employees and customers!

My BPM bickering is often misinterpreted as being against process management. Well, the opposite is the case! But process management is about aligning people towards a common goal. That does not happen by nailing down every work step. A service business is not a manufacturing plant. Each customer is an individual and so is each employee. The quality is improved by better communication and monitoring, which is different to policing and enforcement! Employees are responsible for their own work and the quality they produce. Process management must help them to shape the processes how they need them. Managers and process management are ENABLERS. The huge change management overhead introduced by BPMS with all its tools, staff, centers of excellence and global process models will drag your agility down. Only when the bureaucracy is cut out and the change loop is short – which means WITHIN the process team – then a business can become agile.

I was told that there are not enough great employees so BPM it is necessary to improve quality. I absolutely do not agree, there are no bad people. They just can be in the wrong place and/or poorly managed. Well, guys – if your management gets BPM to help you, you know what they think of you. Finally, I was told that enterprisewide BPM and a great, motivated staff and street-wise firstline management are not mutually exclusive. Well, that is a dramatic delusion as well. You can only have one or the other. Great people go where they are needed and appreciated. So make your choice!

Would you call every person you know and tell them that you have arrived at a certain location? Would you send an email to your complete email directory that you are currently reading a certain book? Would you print a funny photo 200 times and send it to all the people you know? The answers are most likely all NO.

But why is that exactly what millions of people are doing on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn? What is the difference? It seems quite obvious that the key difference is the mode of communication. People post information (state change events) onto their Facebook pages and their ‘friends’ can read (receive event) that information at their leisure. Well, the same could be done with email, but here the recipient list is rigidly predefined and new ‘friends’ do not get to see past information.

Why are these social networks so popular? The most important element is that they are permissive, giving both sender and receiver the freedom of choice. The receivers choose to read and the senders cannot force them, but obviously it needs both parties. If no ones sends or no one receives the exercise becomes pointless.

Strangely enough, that is the same concept that I see as relevant in quantum physics. It makes no sense to send out photons when there is no receiver for them. I think it is actually impossible to suspend a photon (wave packet) in space while it waits to be received. The reality is in the information exchange and not in the information as such, making the harmonic resonance between sender and receiver the force that shapes the laws of this universe. But enough of that here. My quantum physics musings are on my ‘On Quantum Resonance’ blog.

Does Social Computing have some relevance for business applications? I am quite certain. So should we install a corporate version of Twitter to manage our processes? I don’t think so, but the concepts can be used to a business advantage. The permissive approach maps perfectly to the state/event model of my process management concept (as implemented in Papyrus). A huge number of flowchart encoded programs of action steps that enforce communication eventually create a spiderweb of unmanagable flows and rules. The state/event model in difference empowers the permissive approach and enables the necessary dynamics of change. Why is that necessary? Should a business not enforce processes for a better quality, as demanded by TQM and SixSigma pundits? My answer is NO and the proof lies in the success of social computing. Businesses need a social resonance for better quality as well described in the ‘Toyota Way’.

All BPM initiatives that have tried to enforce processes on a large scale have failed and will continue to fail. That has to do with the dynamics of free markets and the complex adaptive systems they represent and – quite ignored by BPM proponents – the reality of human nature. The problem is compounded by the need to strike a balance. Total freedom is not possible in social systems. Also all Facebook users accept a common form and mode of information exchange as their minimum social standard.

This is why you hear me on the one hand talking and writing about empowerment of the business user and on the other hand about the requirement to create a business architecture, the necessity for security and the need of corporate identity and enforced context for content. These are the elements of such a social balance. The freedom of choice (equals empowerment) for the business user must be within the bounds of the business architecture, busines rules and security requirements. But there must be a degree of freedom for the social business process network of a business to flourish. And it still needs monitoring and auditing so absic collaboration or email is not enough. Enter state/event driven models!

In contrast to popular theory on MBA programs, changing (and therefore improving) a business is NOT a top down management activity. Change happens slowly, as a social resonance of employees to motivating activities of the management! You can not improve a business by enforcing processes. Yes, you can cut costs this way by firing the very people you need to change the business. Exchanging the people is the most expensive way to change a business, but unfortunately, sometimes that is necessary too.

As much as BPM software sells an illusion (not the process focus as such) that completey ignores the human element of managing a business, that is unfortunately the general state of affairs in IT. Also business intellligence and data warehousing gather huge amounts of irrelevant data before the necessary questions have been asked, producing meaningless statistical results the float in empty space with no receiver who could even remotely understand them.