The Eclectic Zone

I’m no crystal gazer, and this is no crystal gazing. The reality is upon us already.

Certain keywords and phrases have kept popping in my head for sometime now. I see them everywhere. There’s plenty of evidence already that the world is going through disruptions at various levels. These trends are touching everyone’s life. Well, I’m not talking about Global Warming, I’m sure we all aren’t dying in 2012. Even if we did, why take a chance and not do anything, just in case?

So, following’s a list of trends that I think are already showing up on our day-to-day life. Some are patterns, some are established business models, and some are just plain cultural trends. So, I’m using the term “trend” a bit loosely here.

I plan to cover every one of these in separate posts. And I also foresee this list expanding – this starting list is the set that I woke up this morning with!

So, here we go!

• Emergence of Multi-sided Platforms/Ecosystems (Mother of all trends. Watch out, these terms may mean more than what we know them as!)

• The Long tail everywhere

• Free, and Business models around it

• Business Technology blurs into Personal Technology

• The internet is not about Open & Free Information any more, You’re Truman & it’s not just a show

• The Big IT Shift: Cloud, Social, Mobile, Analytics

• The Changing Definition of Business Growth, what is BIG any more?

• The Right Brain careers start taking over

• The Shrinkage in life-long Operational careers

• Long Term Vision and Strategy have a New Meaning, New Method, and New Implication

I’m looking at this as a way to firm up in my mind the general understanding and vision of what will matter in few years to come. However, you’re welcome to throw a monkey wrench in this thought process… I’m sure it will only help!!!

Enjoy reading! If you’re interested in being informed when I blog these separate posts, please subscribe

Any-whichever way we look at it, technologically or as a way to make businesses better, BPM-the-social-way is much more than what Social BPM seems.

Keith Swenson, when asking ‘Who is Socializing in Social BPM?’, raised a pertinent question and stated that

If you think of BPM as a kind of application development (i.e. develop process applications for use by business people) then using social software to help with the development of applications means that the developers (i.e. process analysts, programmers) are the ones using the social media to make them more effective.  It is the developers who are socializing.

As for BPM being treated as application development, I blogged some time back to Not Treat Process Solutions as Applications. So, my point of view is very clear that BPM is not an Application Development approach. Refer my other posts on Defining BPM and BPM Ecosystem also on that.

There has been some real activity around collaborative process design environments (such as Alignspace, BlueWorks). Most have been quick to call it Social BPM. Well, that could be, but part of it.

In the whole lifecycle of BPM, Process Discovery or Process Design is only the beginning. And my experience shows that spending more effort than required in process discovery without really doing anything about executing the (right) process doesn’t get one anywhere.

So far as I can see, these collaborative techniques around Process Design may be making the templates or process resource repositories richer right now. Of course there are actual and live process discovery projects being driven on these platforms, but all that is just a tiny portion of what all could be made possible with social platforms and BPM coming together.

Social BPM is a shortened term (and could be a misnomer) for what in actual interpretation should be “BPM leveraging Social Networking technologies, disciplines and contexts”. Now, we can mix and match this with various ways in which BPM can be done and get enormous leverage. I had earlier blogged that in the context of how it related to BPM, Social is a Phenomenon that should enable BPM and supporting technologies to collaborate and synergize better toward customer centricity.

Forrester’s Clay Richardson, here, maintains that, Social BPM, apart from collaborative process discovery, delves also into more collaborative Process Development as well as better optimization techniques such as enhancement tagging. He does go on and cover the lifecycle, but lot of it still sounds a lot like an IT side of the story.

The objective of business process is to get the expected throughput as efficiently as possible to the beneficiary of the process, namely, a customer. It is here, that I will diverge slightly from what Keith mentioned that the way to conduct business should change in the sense that customers become part of the process in getting the end-product. I agree to that, but there would still be whole lot of business processes that traverse within the organization before they eventually end up with the customer. You still have lot of opportunities for dealing with the processes in a traditional way with better social leverage, even in that quantum leap context.

Take, Retail sales call centers, for instance. It is not uncommon for multiple calls from the same company to a prospect within the same day or over few days. Customer ends up repeating the same thing over and over again to every one of them. In a social leveraged environment, this simple process can be made enormously more effective with the tagging of comments from the customer, so that any other rep working on the same list can accordingly act on it. Simple, but effective.

The same applies to customer services. It’s evident that every request or complaint, when traversing through multiple routes and through various stages, keeps losing the context. A more efficient collaborative process (within the company or even involving the customer) should prevent the information loss through the process. Another great way to make this more efficient would be to use the available tools (similar to, if not the same) such as Twitter, Facebook. A lot of companies are already using Tweet hash tags as a funnel for the possible complaints (except that they choose to automate the ping – hey do you have a problem – part right now!). And there are many other ways to leverage these.

Another area that appeals to me is on managing, optimizing and automating business rules. Most business rules go from completely manual decision making to completely automated one over time by the system (or someone in the system) recording the most commonly adopted practice by the experts that become policies and then fixed and then automated rules over time. A simple “FB – Like this” kind of a feature can be internalized within the system every time an expert makes decision in the context. It’s pretty much an artificial rule automation intelligence built around simple tagging mechanism.

I also see the mash-ups as a great mechanism to pull together all the information that the process participant would need while completing the task. Even better, the widgets could be driven by the user choice than dictated by the process. In fact, some of these things don’t need to be captured in the process at all, only the scope of what the participant may or may not be able to include in the task/activity.

There are plenty of ways in which the process paradigm should drastically change as we embrace social networking as the way of life for process participants. However, the BPM vendors would need to also decide which capability of the product they need to “not bother about” rather than building all the technological components within the product. They need to leverage certain basic and simple technologies available elsewhere better, and that’s why I earlier said that social is a context setting in which we should expect the BPM technologies to synergize better for customer centricity. I think that’s what Sandy is also hinting when referring to 2.0 Reality Rehab!

Time to don our Green and Blue Hats! BPM-the-Social-Way is much more than what Social BPM seems right now…

Some time back I blogged about the various patterns of BPM Center of Excellence (COE) and emphasized that good governance leads to better performance. I didn’t delve into why COEs are important and what the COEs do in that post, believing enough was written already on those.

Today, Theo brought up a stirring point again, (as always ) and claimed that social wave while removing silos will also bring the extinction of the COEs.

Well, I disagree. I left a comment there but thought I didn’t do full justice to the argument, hence this post.

Let’s first understand what all a COE can typically do (any subset of the following could be done by a COE based on the need of the enterprise and pattern(s) chosen):

• Help in Demand Management, Projects Prioritization, and Implementation planning

• Conduct Periodic reviews of architecture

• Formulation of consistent approach, practices and processes across teams and geographies

• Knowledge Management and better collaboration on reuse

• Standardization of the architectural patterns, process modeling guidelines, notations, and design elements for cross-usage and leverage of investments

• Facilitate faster and better delivery turnaround for Process implementation to business owners

• Formulation of Reusable Process fragments, vertical process model, horizontal technical frameworks, centralized business rules

• Oversight of the Process repositories and facilitate storage and maintenance including version management

• Facilitate Technological / Infrastructural migration plans as needed

• Cost Rationalization through the efficient governance mechanisms and various servicing models based on business needs

• Streamlined vendor management, platform support and issue resolution

• Plan and manage the resource needs of various skill set based on the demand-supply management in conjunction with Programs planning

and so on…

Now, the basic premise of a CoE is not to own infrastructure or resources directly (although it could be one of the possible models in a conducive environment), it is based on facilitation, collaboration, oversight and streamlining. So, a COE model formulated well can actually leverage immensely from social networking and collaboration tools. This wave, in fact should be a booster for the COE intent.

Going back to the premise of the COE extinction hypothesis, I agree that the business world could more than do well with a little more freedom, Innovation, creativity, and collaboration. However, a system, governance, and little bit of structure is still needed. In the same spirit, I’d also like to refer another post the same day from Theo that makes an excellent point -

Right now, if you look at how businesses are run, every department is silo’d, we’re not really running one ship but lots of smaller craft all heading off in different directions with the notion that they are doing the same thing. And the guy in the centre seat is so far removed from the action he really has no clue how the ship operates.

And he also adds in terms of how Social paradigm is going to help us there -

Collaboration breeds involvement, and that creates a sense of purpose. Silo’s breed disconnectivity which in turn feeds discourse

Now, that’s a good thought , full of good intent. However, it is actually a wish that can actually not be fulfilled without a facilitating mechanism beyond the tools and technology. If one wants all those silo-ed ship to go in one direction, how would that happen without some bit of governance and structure? The reason is the human angle to the silo mode of working. I had blogged a little earlier about the systemic mechanism of aligning incentives for bridging those silos and Max made a terrific point that went like this –

Create a clear and well strcutured process organization, assign the best qualified process owner, empower him and his people and that will be it. They will be proud of their achievement without a single bonus dollar paid. If you need to link your objectives and KPIs, your process organization is wrong. You have created conflicting processes, because your functional organization does not reflect them. That can be fine, if the process owner and his team are empowered.

And this is where COEs (in whatever form) provide tremendous value. It’s not just managerial governance, but more collaboration, facilitation and alignment effort.

Still, let’s consider the scenarios where one may NOT need the COE.

If the answers to the following questions is strong affirmative in the social networking paradigm without a facilitating body or some human governance, then COEs may cease to exist in any form…

• Every individual comes up and learns by oneself, no best practices are needed, they all collaborate and learn on the fly and do the right thing (regardless of their experience,  personal competency and personal egos and preferred relationships

• Architecture will evolve the right way without the need for an agreed upon enterprise architecture blue-print

• All the technological components needed will become mashable, and plug-&-play. Individuals can decide by themselves what they want to use with collaborative decision making

• Central planning will not be required for any size of programs. Project Managers of individual streams would be able to meet over a collaboration platform and devise the plan without one entity primarily accountable for the program

• BPM will indeed become purely process and no technological development required. Plug-&-Play.

• Competency Development and talent management would either become less important in collaborative world or become easy as a snap. Wikis will be the omni-potent platform for self-learning with no specific planning required on how many skills of what type would be needed for the BPM initiatives

• Business will be the de-facto owner of the process initiatives. No conflicts of interest, no bonus issues, no issues on budget allocation. No facilitating body will be required to align the needs with the variety of preferences and plans. Collaboration would work like a magic wand and all the gaps will disappear with the social networking making a huge impact

If Social wave makes the above possible, we probably wouldn’t need COEs. Do you see this happening, my answer is a big NO.

So, IMHO, COEs may become more decentralized and could be a combination of various flavors/patterns that I have earlier covered, and actually may leverage collaboration tools and social networking technologies to get more effective and efficient. I don’t see them getting washed away with the social wave.

Token: ZQEARKWAVWQK

What is common among Avatar, iPad, and Justin Bieber… and sets them apart from the other crowd too? They all come in good packages! Well, yes. But so did many others as for as content is concerned. What sets them apart is everyone you know “seems” to like them, and the fact that you know it.

There was a time when a suburban population would not know what people in the metro thought about a particular movie during its first weekend. The word of mouth did travel but slowly. Plethora has been written on promotions, buzz marketing, product quality over time on how companies succeeded (or not) in that era.

Times have since changed drastically. The opening weekend is “the” decider of a film’s success. Reception to a product like iPad from Apple is decidedly positive even before the release announcement reaches the last paragraph. Justin just doesn’t seem to be taking any break from trending list on Twitter.

The “hype” has become a big game-changer. And the one sole factor behind all this is the groupthink phenomenon, and in the highly interconnected world today it has become a very powerful marketing tool.

Humans have an inherent tendency, in general, to conform and to fit-in. This is well-engrained in our mind-sets from the time we set out foot in school, & in society. The most neutral reaction (that originated from isolated processing within one’s brain) to a product is only possible in the consumption of the product in absolute confinement. Most of us consume the information in context of what our friends are thinking, & what majority of population is saying. In the highly inter-connected world, it is impossible to remain oblivious to the first reactions or pre-occupied responses of the world before one consumes the product oneself. And good marketers are leveraging this to a huge advantage!

How is one not going to like iPad?! The whole world loves it, and it’s from Apple!!! How much of that is first-hand reaction? Well, when an avalanche with tonnes of snow heads your way, you wouldn’t want to think of the gunshot that triggered it! This is Avalanche Marketing!!! Better get used to it and use it too.

PS: The other day, I saw some of my friends on Twitter tweeting about #chai (Tea). Almost everyone seemed to be pitching in with tweets on #chai, it didn’t matter if that made any sense. I tweeted a #chai song or two, and felt really good – I managed to fit in, didn’t I?!

Yesterday in Forrester #crmjam on Twitter, Social (networking, not cause!) aspects got a lot of attention. Theo correctly points out the possibilities of convergence between BPM and CRM. One of the converging points, as per him, is around social BPM and social CRM – again correctly.

During the same jam session, I tweeted about the fact that “social” seems to be an underlying theme around lot of disciplines/practices/technologies. And, in this rare event when we had folk from BPM, BI, and Collaboration towns of the world trying to collaborate with the CRM cause, we still were using terms that ended up pointing back to our living areas or “silos”. So, I wondered why we continue to look at the themes as Social BPM, Social CRM or Social XYZ (where XYZ could be any technology or discipline). My note there ended with a statement – “Social is a Phenomenon, and not a discipline”. (And I ended up committing to Connie and Clay that a post on the same is coming up, so I had no option but to post this )

So, this point actually aligns well with what Theo pointed out that social could be one underlying theme that could make some of these traditional silos to work together.

However, when we start looking at social aspects as the phenomenon, and not tie with a separate discipline, it has ramifications for better, such as:

• Social BPM or Social CRM will not look like a destination, but a context-setting for the passing set of events of current times

• It will prevent us from creating further sub-silos within our current silos (Social BPM under BPM, Social CRM under CRM), and hence help converge than alienate

• Social as underlying theme or phenomenon will help us focus on the actual objective behind the concept – that is, collaborate in the best interest of the customer

• Hopefully, prevent duplication of effort across disciplines (Do you really need a separate collaboration technology for usage in BPM vis-à-vis CRM or anything else?)

• And, save us from wasted energies in new terms, clarification of those, and more saving in terms of getting rid of those when this context-setting phase has passed.

What should remain – when we are done with this phenomenon –  is the set of disciplines that are better placed to collaborate and synergize toward customer centricity.