The Fallacy of Business Process Management
I have been using factory automation as a comparison to business processes for many years. Modern factories don’t use conveyor belts anymore. They use workcells of people with certain skills. The piece to be manufactured is routed on a pod to the next free cell that has the right skill. Some cells have more than one skill to make them more productive. The skill of the cell lies in the experience of its WORKERS! The process is measured by the quality of the final product and not how fast each cell works. How does that relate to BPM software?
Business process management is concerned with analysing and defining process flows with logical decision points and claims that this improves the quality and the productivity of an organization. BPM monitoring is however not concerned with quality but just monitores the workflow parameters but not whether the workflow is good for the business. While TQM and Six Sigma introduce the quality monitoring aspect they can not provide practical feedback into improving processes that are bad. They just show that a problem exists.
Even the most flexible process management solution suffers from the analysis-to-implementation time lag and functional gap. Simplistic process flowcharts with or without event handlers and business rules do not permit to deal with complex interdependencies. The apparent simplicity of flowcharts is paid for by ignoring the true complexity of business operations. BPM software cannot be agile because the idea of process flows is not agile thinking. The only thing that makes a business agile is its people who share their work experiences in a group (workcell)!
It seems strange to propose a reduction of people agility to improve the agility of a business by means of rigid processes regardless of how easy they are to implement and change. Maybe that is the reason why there are NO scientific studies that prove the benefits of BPM for a business. Unfortunately the current management theory is that the people are the problem and have to be forced into a process straightjacket to optimize their work. Deeper analysis of processes however shows that the problem is not the actual work time but the wait time in transfer between steps which is 90% in most cases. It is an information gap and not a productivity gap. Yes, process monitoring will show those wait times but that is not a justification for creating rigid processes. The solution is to implement a workload (Todo, Case, or similar) management solution that will provide management insight for process improvement. The solution then is to hire more people to improve service quality and not try to justify BPM with manpower reductions. Hard-coded applications such as ERP, vertical solutions, CRM and rigid BPM processes are an overkill of people control that is damaging corporate agility.
Large scale CRM, BPM and ECM deployments have failed by higher than the industry average of large projects being already way over 50%. This is not caused as often suggested by a lack of proper project management but by the exploding complexity of modern information technology. Complex IT concepts call for further and ongoing change and improvement to the optimized business processes, but the system – man as well as machine – resists. People and complex software systems are adverse to change. While one can and has to expect at least some willingness of people to adapt, complex software becomes harder to change as it is enhanced. The world and therefore also a large business is a complex adaptive system that defies fragmentation and procedures. A simple probability calculation shows that a system of 500 components has only a 2 percent chance of working without error on the first try. Extensive component and integration testing is therefore required but never properly accounted for in project planning. As the scope creep delays the project, the delivery deadline remains the same by cutting proper testing. We have reached the point where software complexity is responsible that IT applications lag five years behind business needs.
It is irrelevant in which ways current technology – Java, XML, BPM, ECM, CEP, BI and obviously SOA – are mixed up, because with each additional layer the complexity rises and agility freezes. Each software module, layer, architecture or management concept is another brick in the wall. Yes, the time has come to truly innovate. Innovation has to be complete and employ creative destruction. How moral is it to propose the creative destruction of the business workforce to be then replaced by ineffective and rigid software? We propose the creative destruction of the information technology straightjacket by dumping hard-coded applications, as well as ECM, CRM and BPM products for a flexible platform that reinstitutes the power of the business user. When software turns into a commodity so do its users.
“Once the hole is soo deep that you can’t look out - STOP DIGGING!”
The above was the main reason to develop the User-Trained Agent of the ISIS Papyrus Platform. The core concept is about ‘Sharing Experience.’ Collaboration, Process and Case management are just implemented software fragments of business need. The UTA can look into a collaborative workspace and learn how to progress the case, including state changes and routing between work cells. User-entered business rules can turn the case into a well managed business process. Bingo! No process analysis needed, just the modeling of the metadata items required. Real-time knowledge gathering and just-in-time experience sharing. Support the agility of your experienced workforce and justify the investment into ISIS Papyrus with an improvement in service quality.
Max Pucher