I was reading a Forrester report “The Emerging Technology Trends that CIOs Should Care About“  and was struck by what they call “Dynamic Business Applications”  where they claim that “Most business applications are too inflexible to keep pace with the businesses they support, as they force people to figure out how to map isolated pools of information and functions to their tasks and processes, and they force IT pros to spend too much budget to keep up with evolving markets, policies, regulations, and business models.” I couldn’t agree more, especially since they break this out separately from BPM.

This is especially relevant for the fluid environment needed for the kind of work done by knowledge workers, especially for ad-hoc processes or exception handling. This type of work needs a new paradigm where the ad-hoc, human way people actually handle most process needs to be the guiding mechanism. Knowledge workers use an implicit process framework that they use for their tasks, but almost every instance is some sort of exception. I think this one reason the use of email is so pervasively used by knowledge workers for their processes. This very different from the structured processes that are handled by BPM - and we’ll need a new paradigm for it. I have started to use the term Human Process Management - but I am not sure that is the best name for those ”process frameworks (usually handled via email and meetings) for ad-hoc “unstructured” human centric processes.

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at 6:56 am and is filed under Human Process Management, VC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.