Free the people!

By: Dick van Mersbergen

Shortly after my encounter with Confucius, I met the fourth philosopher at the Be Informed headquarters: Bertrand Russell (1872-1970). His quote: "Too little liberty brings stagnation and too much brings chaos.”

Liberty and freedom
In Dutch, we use the same word for liberty and freedom: vrijheid. Yet there is a subtle difference. Freedom (free will) is the ability to make choices without constraints. For example, a domino’s movement is completely determined by laws of physics, it does not have any freedom. Liberty is to be able to govern yourselves, to behave according to your own free will, and take responsibility for your actions. So I wondered: do we want liberty or do we want freedom?

Children vs. parents
Children want a lot of freedom, as any parent will confirm. But children not granted many liberties: children are not allowed to travel on their own, to drink or smoke, to decide what to eat, to go to bed late, etc. So many rules, their live must be hell on earth..! (And it does not get better at school, where they give out homework on top of all the rules.) Yet most children stick to their parents. I remember running away as a child, only to find myself stuck 40 meters from home: I was not allowed to cross a busy road.

So how come children are happy with little liberty? Easy: they are getting a lot of freedom! Parents go out of their ways to lift any constraint their precious crop might come across. Children like this. A lot. And they sure don’t want the responsibility that comes with every liberty. Besides, they receive benefits like love, security, free food and clothes, Xmas presents, etc. Why should they rule themselves?

People vs. government
When the Occupy movement took over a square in Amsterdam, anything went in the beginning. A colourful bunch camped in the open, living their dream and changing the world. But suddenly, after a few days, a guy was in control of the food distribution. Then an other guy was arranging security and a third guy was speaking to the press, etc. A mini-society developed and ironically, that society was very similar to the one they were protesting against.

The occupyers still had a lot of freedom, but were willing to give up liberties and hand over responsibility to others. They made rules. This applies to any organisation, being a community, a state or a nation. Whatever system a country is run by, people agree on rules for the greater good. The thing people most want is freedom.

Knowledge workers vs business processes
In business, most business processes are charactarized by little liberty: they are fully predefined. Variations either become a new process or are added to the business process, creating a more complicated version. As a result, business operations become stagnant. The opposite, instructing people to simply rule themselves and handle situations as they see fit, is also counterproductive. It would bring chaos, inconsistency and a high business risk.

Having business rules is not a problem, it is the way we arrange work. Like we saw earlier, knowledge workers are perfectly willing to agree on rules and have less self-government. What they demand is freedom. They not just want to carry out instructions, any machine can do that! They want to act with as little constraints as possible.

Free the people!
Be Informed helps to arrange that. With our declarative approach, there is no predefined process, just the possible relationships between various activities. These are the actual rules. Every transaction can have a unique path, chosen by the customer or worker, within the guidelines. Then, there is neither chaos nor stagnation.

And best of all: both customers and workers have the maximum of freedom. Which makes them very happy.

Define to gain power

By: Dick van Mersbergen

The third philosopher I came across at the Be Informed headquarters is the famous Chinese thinker and social philosopher Confucius. His quote reads:

When asked what he would do first if he were in power, Confucius responded:
"Cleansing the definitions of terms we use".

Cleansing the definition of terms we use..? Not many people seeking power would think of that. History shows us many other things considered better to do when in power: to conquer territory or neighboring countries; to eat nothing but cake; to kill all your opponents; to be loved; to indulge yourself with lush banquets; to keep tigers as pets; to possess a golden gun. The list is endless but nothing on redefining stuff. So why would Confucius want that, I thought?

Definitions are key to a proper function of society. As a child of the oldest civilization on earth, Confucius understood that the highest power is the power to define.

Objects vs Relationships
Sadly, it is very hard to create unambiguous and fully understood definitions. Everyone tends to have his own view. This is where both society and businesses process management (BPM) go wrong.

Or should I say Western societies and traditional BPM platforms? Because it is a Western approach to define objects and it is the way traditional BPM suites deal with the complex surrounding world.

A more Eastern style is to focus on the relationships between objects. This is more useful because the definition is co-owned by all the stakeholders involved. Define the relations between objects and you understand the objects better.

Meaningful relationships
In the field of BPM, Be Informed successfully took on a similar approach: creating and describing meaningful relationships between business activities. That is the core of Be Informed’s ontology. It represents nothing less than the language of the business. And he who controls language, controls everything.

With Be Informed, knowledge workers have the power to define. They no longer write endless system requirements, hand these over to the guys in IT and wait anxiously for the results. They define their processes themselves and by doing so they create the system. They are in control.

So we reversed Confucius’ wish: you don’t gain power to define, you define to gain power!

Organizing data governance and many ways to mess it up again

By: Frank Buytendijk, chief marketing officer

A world without government is a pretty horrible prospect. In such a world, everyone would be at war in a struggle to survive. To avoid such an environment, we prefer to hand over some of our natural rights to a government. We give up some of our freedom to receive protection. This is the purpose of government.

John Locke (1632-1704) has argued that creating a state is not a top-down exercise: a society is the result of a social contract between citizens. We pay taxes and therefore receive protection, infrastructure and social benefits.

In our modern days, there is a new aspect to this: we expect data governance. But is this well thought through yet? I published a series of articles on this question.

Whose Data Is It, Anyway? was the first article on data governance in the public sector and commercial enterprise. It presented a bit of a "big brother" doom and gloom scenario, I am afraid. But is it unlikely? I don't know.

In The TomTom Case – Were Police Using or Abusing Data Analytics?, I included a real-life case study, describing how a police force used collected TomTom satnav data in order to plan speed traps. Ethical or not?

The third article Who Owns Your Data? focused on the private sector. Digital data governance isn’t clearly organized. Who owns the location-based data on your smartphone? The phone company? The phone manufacturer? Or do you feel you own the text messages, voicemail, emails and pictures you stored on your phone? And who owns the status updates you put on Facebook, you or Facebook?

In the final article of the series Organizing Data Governance - And Many Ways to Mess it Up Again, I concluded with two topics. First I described how to organize data governance in a less traditional way. Then, I did the opposite and described some ways to mess it up again, to protect our interests until the public and private sectors get it right.

Harvard Business Review: “Embracing Complexity”

By: Frank Buytendijk, chief marketing officer

Be Informed helps organizations embrace complexity, this has been our mission since the beginning. We’ve even using the same term, “embrace complexity”. In essence, fighting complexity is useless, it is a natural phenomenon. Harvard Business Review (HBR), the world’s most influential management magazine, acknowledges that and chose “managing complex organizations” as its theme in its September 2011 issue.

Here we highlight some of the statements in the HBR articles, and add our experience.

HBR: “Managing a business today is fundamentally different than it was just 30 years ago. The most profound difference is the level of complexity people have to cope with”

This trend is particularly visible in business operations. Compliance regulations, a wide variation of customer requirements and shorter product and strategy life-cycles make that administrative professionals and other knowledge workers can’t rely on conventional wisdom anymore. Mass customized products and processes have become the norm. Analyst firms such as Forrester and Gartner estimate the market for more unstructured and knowledge-intensive business processes to be 2-4 bigger than traditional structured business processes.

HBR: “It’s harder to place bets, because the past behavior of a complex system may not predict its future behavior”

We believe business processes and IT should work  more “above the line”. This means that business logic is not embedded in custom code and business applications, but is stored in a so-called meta model. Once the rules of the games change, or you’d like to change the rules, this can be done without affecting the IT systems, it requires only changes in the model. This way you can still invest in a long-term IT architecture, but keep your options open, as the business keeps changing all the time.

HBR: “It’s easy to confuse the merely complicated with the genuinely complex.”

Here we have a different point of view. HBR defines complicated as a situation with many moving parts, but predictable patterns, like flying an airplane. Complexity, however, describes systems in which the interactions continuously changing. The same starting conditions may result in different outcomes. We’d rather see a more practical definition. We see complexity as a natural phenomenon, that organizations need to deal with. There are many moving parts, they can change all the time, or all of a sudden new moving parts emerge. Complicatedness, however, represents how you deal with that complexity in your organization. For instance, governance, business operations and systems may be complicated. Complicatedness can be reduced, in order to embrace complexity. For more information, go to www.beinformed.com/whitepapers and www.beinformed.com/takethetest.

HBR: “In a complex environment, even small decisions can have unintended consequences. […] It is very difficult, if not impossible, for an individual decision maker to see an entire complex system. […] Limit or even eliminate the need for accurate predictions.”

We couldn’t agree more. We believe strategy formulation (or policy-making) and execution should be a continuous closed loop. Before making any strategic decision, the consequences should be clear. Simulation is a powerful tool for doing that. And these decisions should not be made in isolation, but a collaborative processes, involving multiple people and disciplines. We also don’t believe in “sticking to the plan”, we opt for “sticking to reality”. If you have business operations that can quickly follow any changes in the environment, there is less need to accurate predictions.

HBR: “Take a real-options approach”

Our research has shown that real-options thinking is not very well-known in the business world. But it should be, and we all know examples. For instance, a service oriented architecture is a real-options strategy: you invest in keeping your future options of use open. Be Informed is based on real-options: business processes are derived on the spot, and are based on the unique characteristics of every case. And once you change the rules, the system changes with it immediately.

HBR also publishes an interview with Legg Mason’s chief investment strategist, Michael Maubossin. He argues that in complex adaptive environments, we don’t really know how things are going to unfold, so it’s difficult to make forecasts or budgets going many years into the future. He refers to another HBR article, called “Strategy as Simple Rules” (2001), that recommends creating a set of decision rules that are clear to everyone, and that describe what the organization stands for. “Then you pretty much let people decide on the fly in the field what they think makes sense given what they see, without violating the rules.”

We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. The Be Informed business process platform is designed to do just that. And our customers tell us it works. They typically save more than 30% in their cost of operations, more than 60% on their system’s TCO and up to 90% in their cost of change. How? By letting go the idea of fully predefined and prebuilt processes, but allowing administrative professionals to organize their work based on how they see fit, based on the customer conversation they have, or the specifics of the case at hand. Without breaking any rules. Would you like to know more? Contact us.

Read more:

• Learning to Live with Complexity
• Smart Rules: Six Ways to Get People to Solve Problems Without You
• Embracing Complexity

You will only see if you get it

By: Dick van Mersbergen

All meeting rooms at the Be Informed headquarters are named after famous philosophers. Large posters explain how they relate to our product and company. The second philosopher I came across is Ludwig Wittgenstein. His quote:“Logic takes case of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.”

The poster reads: “At Be Informed, our approach is more logical. We look at the goal of the process and then simply and logically work our way back to what is needed to successfully complete transactions towards that goal.”

Like every sports-minded Dutchman, the combination of the wordslogic andgoal made me think of the most famous Dutch footballer: Johan Cruijff. He is not just dazzled defenders with his football skills; his pseudo philosophical comments and weird twists of old saying had the same effect on people. Completely unaware of this, Cruijff ends every cryptic sentence with: “…it’s logical.”

In 1983, Cruijff joined long-term rival Feyenoord. During the first training session they played a 4-2 rondo on a small square pitch (see figure 1). Black has possession of the ball and the two in the middle (orange) have to conquer it. An easy game, played in during training sessions everywhere.

The Master immediately said: “Stop! You do it all wrong.” The other players replied: “But we play this game for years and it works fine. What’s the problem?” Cruijff explained that when the 4 players are in the corners, they limit their space. There are just two good passes possible (the orange arrows), as the pass through the middle is likely to be intercepted. There is hardly room for improvement, for example when X1 and X3 move will not change a thing.

So the others asked: “Well, this might be, but how to play it right?” Cruijff said: you need to stand halfway along the sides (see figure 2). Then, when moving, X1, X2 and X3 will create space and give the player with the ball more options. Even the pass through the middle will be OK because the defenders will be forced to leave this space more open.

At first, the others of the Feyenoord squad were sceptical. But they tried it and it worked really well. They understood and adapted the new playing style. So by simply turning the players’ square 45 degrees and introducing a new vision, a whole new game was created. Cruijff did not change the rules, he gave the players a new perspective. To use an other famous Cruyff quote “You will only see if you get it” (Je gaat het pas zien als je het doorhebt). This is actually the title of a management book on Cruijff and leadership.

And there is a link with our company as well. At Be Informed, we looked at the way business processes were automated and we said: “Wait, is this really the best way to do things?”. Instead of playing the same game over and over again, we introduced a new goal-oriented approach and created a completely new -and winning- game in the world of Business Process Management.

By the way, in the 1983-1984 season Feyenoord went on to win the Dutch leaguefor the first time in 10 years. It’s logical.

Sun Tzu: Check and mate.

By: Dick van Mersbergen

In one of the meeting rooms at Be Informed I came across a famous quote by Sun Tzu:

Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.

As a vivid (but not very strong) chess player, I study strategy and tactics. So I grinned and nodded - every chess player knows that Sun Tzu was right.

Besides, working at Be Informed, I am interested in computers and artificial intelligence. So Sun Tzu’s quote also made me think of the link between Be Informed and chess computers. The two proved to be very similar.

A short history of chess computers
The first chess machine was constructed by Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1770 to impress Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresa. It was called The Turk, after the mechanical Turk that executed the moves on the chess table. The machine travelled Europe and beat strong players and even Napoleon in 1809. Soon after that, the machine was unveiled as a hoax. In the small chamber underneath a master player was hidden, he made moves via a ingenious array of mechanics.

The David Levy bet
As soon as computers appeared, programmers tried to make it play chess. In the 1970s and 1980s many thought no chess program would ever be able to defeat a top human player. In 1968, International Master David Levy bet that no chess computer would be beat him within ten years. He won this by beating Chess 4.7 (the strongest computer at the time) in 1978, but admitted that it would not be long before he would be surpassed. He was right: in 1989, Levy was defeated by Deep Thought.

Deep blue
Turning point was the 1996 match between IBM's Deep Blue and Gary Kasparov (one of the strongest chess players of all time), where the latter lost his first game to a computer. But Kasparov regrouped to win three and draw two of the remaining five games of the match, for a convincing victory. In May 1997, an updated version of Deep Blue defeated Kasparov 3½-2½ in the rematch. Note that athough the Cold War was long over, this was still a match of Russia vs the USA. A new era began: chess programs had overtaken human players.

How did computers become unbeatable at chess?
The first study on the subject was published in 1950 by Claude Shannon, long before anyone had programmed a computer to play chess. He predicted two possible search methods that would be used and labeled them Type A and Type B. Type A programs would use a brutal force: exame every possible position for a fixed number of moves. Shannon thought this would not suffice, because:

• the computer would be to slow. With about thirty moves possible in a typical position, looking just 3 moves ahead for both sides would take about 16 minutes(!), even in the very optimistic case that the chess computer evaluated a million positions per second.
• it ignored the problem of quiescence. When only calculating a number of moves deep, you never know if there is a move later on that refutes the combination.

So it was clear Type A needed improvements. Shannon already suggested that Type B programs would be improved by:

• only looking at good moves for each position
• using quiescence searches.

What is a good move?
Programmers worked on these improvements for years, but the problem is that it is very hard for a program being to decide which moves are good enough to be worthy of consideration. Chess players rely on their ability to recognize patterns and on their intuition. Because computers don’t have an intuition and don’t have a strategy, this proved to be counterproductive.

Quiscence: look for stability as a goal
Instead of imitating human thought processes and knowledge it turned out that computers need to do what they are best at: calculate. But they needed to understand what to calculate. Not having to check all possibilities, modern chess programs look for steady positions and the ways to get there; just these are evaluated. This was the key to world domination.

The Be Informed approach
Similar to chess computers, traditional business applications are very good at Processing, but very weak at Management. This is where Business Process Management goes wrong. The BPM suppliers at first used brutal force to deal with the zillion possibilities, then tried to improve that by making the software to think like humans.

As with chess programs it is better to define goals instead of define and manage all possible paths. This is exactly what Be Informed did: the knowledge models within Be Informed let the application work towards goals and look for the paths itself. Be Informed gave BMP its quiescence search.

So where chess programmers found that it was useless imitating a chess player, we at Be Informed don’t want our business process platform to imitate the knowledge worker. We want it to free the knowledge worker. Let’s make them both do what they do best: calculate and and decide what is good respectively.

Being a chess player I can truely sum up Sun Tzu’s view with the pleasing words: Check and mate.

The mantra is dead, long live the mantra!

By: Dick van Mersbergen

In a recent blog entry, Peter Evans-Greenwood gives his view on the current shift in business process management. His analysis matches the basis of the Be Informed philosophy.

Since Frederick Taylor’s time we’ve considered business vast machines to be improved. His mantra: Define tasks and then fit men to the task. By reducing inefficiencies you will be able to optimize you business and eventually you will have the perfect organization. Driven by this mentality we automated processes. At first small repetitive tasks, later on the interactions between these tasks, resulting in full-blown Business Process Management (BPM) applications. We dreamt of a single technology platform which will allow us to program our entire business: business operating platforms. This seemed to good to be true. And it proved to be.

The first problem is that programming is the automation of the known. Business processes, however, are the management and anticipation of the unknown. A business is not a computer. Secondly, the world of business is becoming unstable. In the past instability occurred as a transition between two stable states, but this time business seems not to settle into a new groove. The instability we’re seeing is here to stay: the only remaining constant is instability itself. The environment we operate keeps changing, pushing us to become externally focused, rather than internally focused.

It is clear we’ve reached Taylorism’s use-by date: his mantra no longer works. So what do we replace the Taylor’s mantra with?

There has been some steps in the right direction, with the emergence of Adaptive Case Management (ACM) -or Dynamic Case Management (DCM) as we call it- being the most obvious one. When the process is triggered (for example by an online application, a phone call, whatever), a knowledge worker creates a case and starts building a context by pulling data in and triggering small workflows or business processes to seek out data and resolve problems. At some stage the context will be complete, the exception resolved, and the final action is triggered. Using DCM, your business is goal oriented, flexible and keeps adapting to its complex and ever changing environment.

The mantra is dead, long live the mantra: Identify the goal and assemble the team to achieve the goal.