Max J. Pucher – Quotes

“Business documents in line-mode format are too limited. They must be created as fully formatted, electronic originals so that the business has the freedom of choice to have them printed, electronically distributed or archived.”  1989 (Presentation at IBM Forum, Vienna)

“There is no process without content, and content without process you don’t need.” Max J. Pucher, 1999 (Speech at AIIM conference)

“Cause and effect are illusions of human rationality.” 2003 (In his novel “Deity”)

“Human decision-making is never done according to Boolean Logic,  but is rather emotional and thus heuristic.  Process management is therefore unable to represent human decision-making faced with uncertainty. There is no evidence that Boolean rules improve decision-making in uncertain situations. All-out BPM is therefore damaging businesses in the long-term because they destroy the complex, adaptive social system.” 2004 (Speech at ISIS OpenHouse)

“Despite BPM being around for 15 years there are still no vendor independent, studies that prove the long-term benefit of all-out process management in larger corporations.” 2005 (Keynote at the ISIS OpenHouse)

“Agility is not an intrinsic property of software or methodology and cannot be supplied through these. Only agile-thinking management and employees will make a business more agile.” 2007 (Why SOA does not deliver. Article in Output Magazine)

“Humans observe, gather experience and share that as knowledge. One has to distinguish between motor skills, taught, abstract knowledge, and your own emotionally weighted experience, which is the most powerful and usable. Software can at best emulate abstract reasoning on abstract data producing an abstract, irrelevant decision. Software will never replace or improve on human intuition and initiative!” March 2007 (Lecture at the WKO Vienna Business School)

“The economy will never be digital. People relationships are the economy and they might use digital means to communicate.” Feb. 2008 (Welcome to the Real World Post)

“Information technology in business is stuck in mud, soggy with programmer’s and user’s tears. Disruptive innovation has to be the name of the game.” Max J. Pucher, 2008 (Real World Blog)

“CRM software reduces the quality of customer relationships because it turns customers into statistics and enforces rigid service levels rather than customer orientation. The customer relationship can only be improved by more people to people communication.” July 2008 (Article in Dallas Forth Worth Press)

“A dynamic, well working business with engaged and motivated employees will be destroyed by orthodox process automation!” 2009 (Adaptive Process, Real World Blog)

“Based on Business Architecture, Adaptive Process technology must expose structured (business data) and unstructured (content) information to the members of structured (business) and unstructured (social) organizations to securely execute – with knowledge INTERACTIVELY gathered in previous processes – structured (process) and unstructured (case) work in a transparent and auditable manner.” 2009 (Real World Blog)

“The concept of the AppStore will change the software world. Nix Cloud Computing. Everyone will have his own mobile applications and they will communicate directly.” Feb. 2010 (Real World Blog)

“Despite BPM being around for 20 years there are still no vendor independent studies that prove the long-term benefit of all-out process management in larger corporations.” March 2010 (Lecture at University of Vienna PhD program)

“Hierarchies enable organizational efficiency through work-sharing. The more independent the work-units are the more efficient the organization is as long as the unit-to-unit handovers are well defined. The process owner and his team must be empowered to define their own work. Neither authority nor bonuses drive people but the intrinsic motivation of being a valuable, contributing member of a team.” March 2010, (XING BPM Forum)

“Because the BPMS skills are expensive and rare they are mostly provided by outside consultants. In effect that means that once the processes are implemented the people who know and understand them move on, leaving the business with unskilled workers and killing the ability to improve or innovate. This is the worst possible business proposition I can think of.” Oct. 2010 (Real World Blog)

“Empowerment is not decisionmaking about everything for everyone or allowing employees to freely use Enterprise 2.0 tools, YouTube and Twitter but about assigning authority, goals and means to individuals.” October 2010 (Speech at Forrester Research BPA-Forum in Washington D.C.)