Sunday, August 21, 2011

Systems versus The Real World

By: Frank Buytendijk, chief marketing officer

This morning I bought a train ticket at the machine. The procedure was aborted by the machine: “Unusable Card” it said. Unusable? I had just bought a sandwich with it, and it was quite usable yesterday too, thank you very much. The machine should have said “I am terribly sorry for failing in the single task I am actually supposed to do, but I can’t seem to read your card”.

As the mother of all ironies, when I was sharing my frustration about the machine with someone on the phone, we got disconnected. A metallic voice told me “Your call has been completed.” Excuse me? My call wasn’t completed at all, it was terminated. That is what the voice should have said.

Both examples are typical results of engineering thinking, reasoning from within the system. Everything outside of the rules of the system is seen as an anomaly, a.k.a. the real world. As much attention is being paid to user interfaces and interaction, if the designers live within the confines of their own systems, instead of in the world of the users, they will create silly responses that annoy users, and reduce users to operators of the system. The purpose of the system is the use, not the system itself.

Focusing on what is happening in the real world is one of the most important characteristics of Be Informed. The business rules that drive the system’s are completely transparent, as part of a metamodel. They are not locked into the system at all. And with Be Informed you don’t completely predefine the processes it needs to support. All you do is define the boundaries of the possible activities a user could do. Within those boundaries, users are completely free to use the system in the way they see fit. There is no predefined order of steps, and the system is simply there to help you find the shortest and best way to complete the transaction. This idea is called dynamic case management. Building a system with Be Informed is not about application development, it is not more (and less) than business engineering. Engineering as it should be, putting the user and his or her reality first.

Friday, August 12, 2011

Medieval Best Practices

By: Frank Buytendijk, chief marketing officer

Medieval Best Practices is the first article of already the third series of articles on strategy, philosophy and analytics. I am arguing that many of the discussions we are having around the right approach towards business intelligence, data warehousing and so forth are purely dogmatic of nature.

In Part II, I elaborate on what advice the philosophers in the Age of Enlightenment would have had for us. They would have urged us to think for ourselves, and not blindly adopt best practices. The enlightenment view feels remarkably fresh, as these were the days people truly believed in technological advancement, much like our generation.

Part III then continues criticizing the Age of Enlightenment, that is the basis of most of our thinking in business: decision theory. Decision theory assumes human beings to take rational decisions, and new insights in behavorial economy question that assumption.

In short, I feel that best practices are the solutions to yesterday's problems.

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Show them how it works

By: Rik Hoogenberg, chief executive officer

Change programs don’t often meet with a favourable atmosphere. Why? Because all too often, change programs haven’t worked. I am convinced that the vast majority of professionals within organizations are motivated and willing to deliver their best performance. But if IT support falls short, they get frustrated. And if even change programs to improve IT support fail, they lose interest.

That is why it is essential to demonstrate as soon as possible, that change works. Usually it is enough to show what others have done with Be Informed - it's amazing how similar problems businesses and government institutions face. Sometimes more is needed. At Be Informed, we are able to tackle the toughest and most intractable problem and within a few days up to several weeks we show how the solution works in practice. Not as a demo, but as an actual working system.

To do this, we work with dedicated specialists of the organization to understand the basics of the organization and it’s processes, in order to find the best possible solution. Shifting from a “no, it is very complex, it hardly can be done” towards a “we will solve it” state of mind. Once the core solution is up and running, the promise of change that works has been proven and other professionals can be involved for optimization. It is our experience that people don’t need to be convinced to contribute to it. Once they see the core solution at work, they will get inspired to be a part of it. Success sells itself.

Several Be Informed implementations have taught us that the key inspiration of a running application within such a short period of time was that the Be Informed business process platform restores the role of professionals within knowledge intensive administrative organizations. No longer will they be forced to adjust inadequate process results, Be Informed empowers them to add value to effective and efficient business processes. And this perspective initiates their collective dedication to the change program. This way, not only the Be Informed powered solutions add to the success of administrative organizations, but also the way in which they are implemented contributes to a mind shift within the organization.