By: Frank Buytendijk, chief marketing officer
I recently traveled with my family to Germany. We decided to fly. Due to the status I have on one of the airlines, I am allowed to make use of the business class line at security, also when flying economy. Although no one else was in line, the guy checking my ticket sent me back to the long line for economy class. My wife and children did not have that status. This while 4 security people, let me repeat this: four people, in the business class security line were just standing there, doing nothing, watching the overly crowded economy line. "the rules, sir". The rules, where would we be without the rules.
It reminded me about what I heard about Southwest Airlines. One of the most important success factors is "turnaround time", who fast planes can leave again after landing. Southwest realizes this and put NO strict rules, procedures and processes in place for the ground staff in place, other than the guidance how important turnaround time is. The company lets the ground staff deal with the situation at hand, as the staff sees fit. You can guess the result: excellent turnaround times at the gate.
Back to the airport where I was at. What would be the result if the security people would open up the business class line if there is availability:
- less queues, higher flow, higher customer satisfaction
- lower cost of security, because of better resource load balancing at the line
- more time for shopping at the airport, improving sales and profitability
- no negative impact on security, the procedure stays the same
- better job satisfaction for security people, because they are empowered to make a difference.
Where would we all be without these senseless rule? In a better place. Less rules, better performance. Performance is about people making the right decisions.
Be good,
frank
Monday, January 31, 2011
Sunday, January 23, 2011
The New World of Work!
by: John Sijbesma, Managing director Professional Services Be Informed
The New World of Work (NWW) must be something more than working from home, some smart-office applications in a cloud or a overhyped marketing campaign. Ten years ago Telecommuting was the new paradigm and 5 years later flexible working was the trend. Now there is NWW. Why should this now become a structural part of our organizational culture?
There must be an underlying trend that feeds these needs and initiatives. I feel this is due to the increased complexity of processes and applications as well as rapidly increasing changes that are necessary to survive globally.
In our approach an organization will need to fully review her objectives, and provide answers to the following questions: why are we here and what decisions should we really take? The New World of Work is an ambitious concept. It pretty much questions everything we do as an organization. We therefore need to evaluate where we really stand as an organization and what decisions we tend to make. For an insurance company it is necessary to cover risks, a government body for example needs to issue licenses and a social security administration agencies remits funds in accordance with the law. As it were, we examine ‘Greenfield’ what are the objectives of an organization and we reversely determine what information or activities are necessary to take a particular decision. This mechanism is also knows as "goal-driven” or “decision-centric".
In order to capture large quantities of knowledge rules, traditional system development environments (eg. Java) no longer suffice; semantic technologies offer possibilities. These include the capture of knowledge rules in ontologies and taxonomies. It's also the knowledge rules that make an organization unique when compared with its competitors. Therefore, why not manage them very explicitly?
Administrative business processes in general are becoming more knowledge intensive and therefore require a different approach. It will be substantially more event-driven, “social" and interactive. There will be less mundane manual work. Experience has shown that it provides a much more interesting workload for specialists. These knowledge specialists should in turn be supported in their NWW by the appropriate collaboration tooling, one of the unique priorities of NWW.
I claim home working is only a relatively small aspect of NWW; the reason being that knowledge-intensive work requires direct collaboration. Complex cases need to be handled and answered in close consultation with peers or colleagues with necessary knowledge specialisms. Therefore, I see a new approach arising in which small specialist teams share the responsibility to treat complex cases. It is essential to utilize the appropriate tooling to remotely communicate and collaborate with each other.
The combination of semantic technologies, straight through processing and decision centric organization makes NWW now possible.
Alan Greenspan writes in his book "The Age of Turbulence, a life in service of the economy" that he is a true believer in creative destruction. By this he meant that every industry is constantly renewed from within. Creative operational ideas will oust - like a blooming flower - the 'old' customs and industries. This is how I see the above described concepts, as an approach to organise business processes in the New world of Work.
John
The New World of Work (NWW) must be something more than working from home, some smart-office applications in a cloud or a overhyped marketing campaign. Ten years ago Telecommuting was the new paradigm and 5 years later flexible working was the trend. Now there is NWW. Why should this now become a structural part of our organizational culture?
There must be an underlying trend that feeds these needs and initiatives. I feel this is due to the increased complexity of processes and applications as well as rapidly increasing changes that are necessary to survive globally.
In our approach an organization will need to fully review her objectives, and provide answers to the following questions: why are we here and what decisions should we really take? The New World of Work is an ambitious concept. It pretty much questions everything we do as an organization. We therefore need to evaluate where we really stand as an organization and what decisions we tend to make. For an insurance company it is necessary to cover risks, a government body for example needs to issue licenses and a social security administration agencies remits funds in accordance with the law. As it were, we examine ‘Greenfield’ what are the objectives of an organization and we reversely determine what information or activities are necessary to take a particular decision. This mechanism is also knows as "goal-driven” or “decision-centric".
In order to capture large quantities of knowledge rules, traditional system development environments (eg. Java) no longer suffice; semantic technologies offer possibilities. These include the capture of knowledge rules in ontologies and taxonomies. It's also the knowledge rules that make an organization unique when compared with its competitors. Therefore, why not manage them very explicitly?
Administrative business processes in general are becoming more knowledge intensive and therefore require a different approach. It will be substantially more event-driven, “social" and interactive. There will be less mundane manual work. Experience has shown that it provides a much more interesting workload for specialists. These knowledge specialists should in turn be supported in their NWW by the appropriate collaboration tooling, one of the unique priorities of NWW.
I claim home working is only a relatively small aspect of NWW; the reason being that knowledge-intensive work requires direct collaboration. Complex cases need to be handled and answered in close consultation with peers or colleagues with necessary knowledge specialisms. Therefore, I see a new approach arising in which small specialist teams share the responsibility to treat complex cases. It is essential to utilize the appropriate tooling to remotely communicate and collaborate with each other.
The combination of semantic technologies, straight through processing and decision centric organization makes NWW now possible.
Alan Greenspan writes in his book "The Age of Turbulence, a life in service of the economy" that he is a true believer in creative destruction. By this he meant that every industry is constantly renewed from within. Creative operational ideas will oust - like a blooming flower - the 'old' customs and industries. This is how I see the above described concepts, as an approach to organise business processes in the New world of Work.
John
Friday, January 14, 2011
No guts, no glory
By: Rik Hoogenberg, chief executive officer
It’s winter time and it’s cold. Not my favorite time of year. I am more of a spring time type of guy. Simply because I enjoy watching young life shape. And the sunshine ofcourse.
2011 marks Be Informed’s 5th birthday. Still a very young company, but fiercely ambitious and growing fast. Not that it has been easy; the first years proved to be a major challenge in convincing our first customers of our revolutionary approach towards business processes. Government institutions like the ministry of VROM, IND and CAK showed the guts to choose for innovation, for the inspired vision of new solutions which promised results beyond imagination.
Whoever still thinks government is hesitant to innovate, is living in the past.
Today, I am proud to see that Be Informed has met it’s promises with some major implementations over the past few years. A growing number of administrative organizations recognize our value and proven track record. I am happy to see so much willingness and ambition both with clients and partners to make things happen. As I said before, I enjoy watching young life shape.
That is why it is such a pity that the market in which we operate today is just as cold as the current season. Both clients and partners seem ready to embrace our solutions, but economic considerations appeal to patience. Nevertheless, spring time is coming. Can you feel it too?
Rik
It’s winter time and it’s cold. Not my favorite time of year. I am more of a spring time type of guy. Simply because I enjoy watching young life shape. And the sunshine ofcourse.
2011 marks Be Informed’s 5th birthday. Still a very young company, but fiercely ambitious and growing fast. Not that it has been easy; the first years proved to be a major challenge in convincing our first customers of our revolutionary approach towards business processes. Government institutions like the ministry of VROM, IND and CAK showed the guts to choose for innovation, for the inspired vision of new solutions which promised results beyond imagination.
Whoever still thinks government is hesitant to innovate, is living in the past.
Today, I am proud to see that Be Informed has met it’s promises with some major implementations over the past few years. A growing number of administrative organizations recognize our value and proven track record. I am happy to see so much willingness and ambition both with clients and partners to make things happen. As I said before, I enjoy watching young life shape.
That is why it is such a pity that the market in which we operate today is just as cold as the current season. Both clients and partners seem ready to embrace our solutions, but economic considerations appeal to patience. Nevertheless, spring time is coming. Can you feel it too?
Rik
Monday, January 3, 2011
Business Process Madness, Part I
by: Frank Buytendijk, chief marketing officer
The supermarket. First day after New Year's Eve and the holidays. People lining up with all (all!) their empty bottles to get their deposit back. Machine broken.
Of all the days where the machine could be broken, there really can't be a worse day. Quite fast a lady, frantically talking on the phone, appears to inspect the situation. She explains the customers they need to wait until the machine is fixed again, and that there is nothing she can do. She leaves again.
Abdel, the supermarket guy standing there quickly realizes this is not going to work. The line of people with lots of bottles is getting longer. He decides to do the right thing and starts to write receipts. As it should be (and always has been, by the way, before the machine arrived): number of bottles, total amount of deposit returned, and his signature. Happy with Abdel taking responsibility, I go to the cash register with my groceries and hand-written receipt.
Here it appears that Abdel did the right thing, but in the end only shifted the problem. The lady at the cash register explains she can only handle things with a barcode, and the little receipt doesn't have a barcode. To pay me out, she needs the "code" from the shift leader. The shift leader is there quickly, and provides the code. I mention that there will be many people coming with a hand-written receipt in a minute. The team leader says that this is not manageable, and will ask Abdel to stop writing receipts immediately.
Phew. Limited damage. No rules broken. But is the problem solved?
Is it manageable for customers to take all their empty bottles in their shopping bags home again? Not really, they need the shopping bags for their groceries again. Not to mention having to come again next time with all their empty bottles...
Moreover, there is no learning effect. The process is simply stopped, instead of adapted to deal with the situation. It is true that the shift leader hopping from cash register to cash register with her "code" is not manageable, but surely telling everyone to report to the service desk with their hand-written receipt is manageable. And if paying out money based on hand-written receipts is a breach in compliance, then escalating that breach leads to realizing perhaps a backup procedure is needed.
Exclusively relying on an automated process, without having a backup plan other than sending customers away, is not taking responsibility. The customers didn't mess up, the supermarket did.
In our era of compliance and operational excellence, it seems many business processes are skewed towards the benefit of the vendor, at the detriment of customer value. This is not good. Employees should always have the autonomy, and training, to figure out what the right thing to do is, and be able to share their best practices. That would be a better start of 2011.
frank
The supermarket. First day after New Year's Eve and the holidays. People lining up with all (all!) their empty bottles to get their deposit back. Machine broken.
Of all the days where the machine could be broken, there really can't be a worse day. Quite fast a lady, frantically talking on the phone, appears to inspect the situation. She explains the customers they need to wait until the machine is fixed again, and that there is nothing she can do. She leaves again.
Abdel, the supermarket guy standing there quickly realizes this is not going to work. The line of people with lots of bottles is getting longer. He decides to do the right thing and starts to write receipts. As it should be (and always has been, by the way, before the machine arrived): number of bottles, total amount of deposit returned, and his signature. Happy with Abdel taking responsibility, I go to the cash register with my groceries and hand-written receipt.
Here it appears that Abdel did the right thing, but in the end only shifted the problem. The lady at the cash register explains she can only handle things with a barcode, and the little receipt doesn't have a barcode. To pay me out, she needs the "code" from the shift leader. The shift leader is there quickly, and provides the code. I mention that there will be many people coming with a hand-written receipt in a minute. The team leader says that this is not manageable, and will ask Abdel to stop writing receipts immediately.
Phew. Limited damage. No rules broken. But is the problem solved?
Is it manageable for customers to take all their empty bottles in their shopping bags home again? Not really, they need the shopping bags for their groceries again. Not to mention having to come again next time with all their empty bottles...
Moreover, there is no learning effect. The process is simply stopped, instead of adapted to deal with the situation. It is true that the shift leader hopping from cash register to cash register with her "code" is not manageable, but surely telling everyone to report to the service desk with their hand-written receipt is manageable. And if paying out money based on hand-written receipts is a breach in compliance, then escalating that breach leads to realizing perhaps a backup procedure is needed.
Exclusively relying on an automated process, without having a backup plan other than sending customers away, is not taking responsibility. The customers didn't mess up, the supermarket did.
In our era of compliance and operational excellence, it seems many business processes are skewed towards the benefit of the vendor, at the detriment of customer value. This is not good. Employees should always have the autonomy, and training, to figure out what the right thing to do is, and be able to share their best practices. That would be a better start of 2011.
frank
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