Comments for eXeedTechnology.com

Comment on Dinosaurs or Cockroaches by Jacob Ukelson

Jacob Ukelson — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 20:12:47 +0000

Thanks for the comment, I couldn’t agree more.
I like the term “Human Centric Processes” which I think is a good descriptive name. I know that Human Interaction Management is also used - but for me that lacks the connotation of a process (business or otherwise) with some expected output ot outcome. McKinsey has used the term “tacit interactions” for the type of work done by knowledge workers.
So I guess “Tacit Interaction Management” is a possible name - or maybe “Tacit Interaction Management for Enterprises” or “TIME”

ActionBase, one of our companies, has been working in this area for a while here in Israel - and has over 100 customers - mostly in Israel, but is now starting to move into Europe and the US. Let me know if you want some of their case studies.

Comment on Dinosaurs or Cockroaches by Roeland Loggen

Roeland Loggen — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 14:33:42 +0000

Great to see your blog posts on dynamic processes. As a BPM consultant I encounter knowledge intensive, collaboration intensive more or less adhoc processes more and more, and BPM thinking + BPM technology is currently falling short.
Enabling companies to greatly improve these processes from a productivity perspective (process participants) as well as visibility/control (manager), agility and compliance is the biggest challenge for the coming years. I especially link it to the quote of Peter Drucker, who said:
“The most important, and indeed the truly unique contribution of management in the 20th century was the 50-fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker in manufacturing. The most important contribution management needs to make in the 21st century is similarly to increase the productivity of knowledge work and the knowledge worker.”

We are also looking into this area with research and case studies (although we call it “Human Centric Processes” and “Human Interaction Management” Input always welcome.

Regards,
Roeland Loggen

Comment on More on Naming HPM by Jacob Ukelson

Jacob Ukelson — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:31:10 +0000

I agree. Standard email in its current form won’t cut it, but still that is how people are choosing to actually “manage” these type of processes today. So I think a good solution is to let people remain in their email environment, but with some additional implicit and explict tools for managing these human processes. I think it will be a while until Wikis replace email (if ever).
That is why I like ActionBase’s approach and is what led us to invest in them - its ActionMail product provides a repository of process information in context, a system of record for the process and its related information, a single copy (per process) of all the process related correspondence and documentation, and of-course management and monitoring of the process - all within the user’s familiar email (MS Outlook) environment. It is a way to provide them a managed version of email’s agility that can be used to manage their human processes.

Comment on More on Naming HPM by Sandy Kemsley

Sandy Kemsley — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 11:44:59 +0000

I’m in complete agreement on the difficulty of changing processes within existing BPMS — that’s why rules play so heavily in agility, since they provide a relatively simple, bounded, parameter-driven way of allowing a business participant to fine-tune the behavior of the process. This, of course, is not the same as actually changing the process, but that’s what passes for agility in today’s BPMS.

Email is problematic for so many reasons, however: multiple copies, little control, etc. Wikis, providing a common repository of knowledge, are a better paradigm for this.

Comment on More on Naming HPM by Jacob Ukelson

Jacob Ukelson — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 07:27:31 +0000

Thanks for the clarification. I think actually enabling most BPM systems for process change by any role would be very difficult on many different levels, given the way most BPM systems work today. Being able to think about processes that get modified in flight is in itself a big leap for many process designers, and being able to actually define the change needed at a granular and detailed enough level so the BPM engine could execute the change would be beyond the capabilities of most people in the process. On top of that there is the issues of testing, storing and managing all the processes variants as they arise. That is what lead me to the conclusion that in the end most BPM systems will just add rules (a good thing), but that won’t actually make them truly agile, or capable of handling the ad-hoc, unstructured human processes. It will just make them more flexible, better architected BPM systems for structured tasks.
I think moving toward BPM folks will need to think differently about these types of agile processes, and there is a need to marry email (or in the future wiki) based HPM systems and BPM systems as the only way that could actually lead to truly agile process management.

Comment on More on Naming HPM by Sandy Kemsley

Sandy Kemsley — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:37:33 +0000

Gartner’s take on Dynamic BPM isn’t exclusively about rules, although that’s a part of it: it’s the ability to support process change by any role, at any time, with very low latency. It’s really agile BPM, but Gartner has to have their own names for everything

Comment on Dynamic Business Applications and HPM by Jacob Ukelson

Jacob Ukelson — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:27:38 +0000

People have been asking, so yes there is an ActionBase whitepaper that goes into this stuff in more detail. Anyone wanting a copy can just send me a note.

Comment on More on Human Process Management by Jacob Ukelson

Jacob Ukelson — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 09:21:24 +0000

Hi Israel,
I think that using chat software is a useful bridge if you can solve the problem synchronously - it lets you solve the problem right away (almost as if the person was in the chair next to you). A lot of processes don’t lend themselves to that type of immediate resolution - so people resort to email. The other “problem” with that type of interaction is that from the business perspective - they have no way to log or relate those two separate interactions (CRM+IM) - so no real ’system of record” is created - unless the rep is amazingly good at documentation…

I liked Luis’ video - but for me it points out the difficulties in getting the web 2.0 type tools used in the enterprise - most of his talk is about methodology and best practices - not technology. People will need to change the way they work for those technologies to replace email -and I just don’t see that happening. I think that over time Wikis and such will be another tool used, but email (with all its warts) is here to stay…

Comment on More on Human Process Management by Israel Blechman

Israel Blechman — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 16:54:31 +0000

Hi Jacob,

Long time since my last comment (even though I am a devoted reader).

Your post reminded me an IBM demo I saw about a year ago illustrating a bank teller’s portal combining a business process (of opening a bank account) with a human interaction portlet accompanying to it. This way a teller can start a chat with peers and ask for their advice when reaching a BPM deadend instead of using e-mail.

Do you consider it a decent bridge over the BPM and Humen Process gap?

I would also like to hear your opinion about Luis Suarez’ “thinking out of the inbox” experiment: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/elsua/see-the-light-thinking-outside-the-inbox-the-video-26899

Israel

Comment on Linking Documents and Process by Tom

Tom — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 05:16:38 +0000

This is an excellent point and one that, as you point out, is almost entirely missed. Vignette, and previously Intraspect, developed a collaboration technology that sits at the intersection of documents, ad-hoc or structured processes and email and is able to capture not only the artifacts but also their context.