BI and BPM can learn from each other

By: Frank Buytendijk

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

Public Policy Making: The 21st Century Perspective

by Thei Geurts

Over the past decades, many reforms in government have been aimed at increasing efficiency, effectiveness and value for money. Mostly these reforms are characterized by very little focus on the actual policy process and the way it affects the ability of policy makers to meet the needs of constituents in an increasingly complex, uncertain and unpredictable world. However, if this core process were to be modernized, it would yield considerable economic and social benefits, including enhanced productivity, openness, transparency and participation, as well as actionable and interoperable policy intelligence.

It is for this reason that I wrote the booklet “Public Policy Making: The 21st Century Perspective”. The booklet offers a concise overview and analysis of the nature of the public policy making system, its challenges and its decelerators for modernization. Based upon the analysis it addresses the opportunities for improvement in the primary policy making process as well as in the political and production dimension of the process. These improvements are based upon a collaborative approach to support multi stakeholder and participants involvement in the policy making system.

Public policy making can be characterized as a complex, dynamic, constantly evolving interactive and adaptive system. The process is stakeholder-driven. Actors are engaged in a goal-driven decision-making process and have a great deal of autonomy in the way they organize their work. The process is people driven, requires flexibility to respond ad hoc to events in a way that is appropriate to the specific known context at that moment in time. Higher demands from the system in which policy makers operate require a level of support that existing facilities cannot deliver. The current support infrastructure for policy makers is characterized on the one hand by isolation, fragmentation and non-responsiveness to change, and on the other hand by a lack of crucial support elements.

Policy makers need an infrastructure that seamlessly integrates with regulation-specific sources and services. This infrastructure should be designed for people and built for change. We have concluded that policy makers need an environment that brings together heterogeneous activities and functions in a meaningful actionable ensemble, organized around the case of a policy initiative and based on the making of decisions about a policy intention. The combination of case management, dynamic rules support and knowledge support instantly adds high-level value to the support provided to policy makers. It can be used to synthesize policy making and integrate it seamlessly with policy execution, thus creating a solid basis for the innovation of public sector services. And last but not least, policy makers can reap considerable economic and social benefits, including bringing government closer to citizens.

The booklet can be obtained at www.lulu.com. A free pdf-dowmload is also available.

The book’s author has also written a white paper entitled “The Policy maker Workplace”, which describes Be Informed’s solution for innovating the policy making process. This white paper can soon be downloaded free of charge at www.beinformed.com.

Plato's cave: what is real and what is not?

By: Frank Buytendijk, chief marketing officer

To question what is real and what is not, Plato tells a story about a cave. In the middle of a cave, a number of prisoners sit against a small wall, chained since childhood. Behind them there is a huge campfire, which they cannot see. In between the campfire and the prisoners, people walk in and out. All the prisoners can see is the shadows of these people on the cave’s wall in front of them. And because of the echo, even the sounds the people make seem to come from the direction of the shadows. The prisoners would know no better than these shadows to be the real world.

Now let’s assume, Plato continues, that one prisoner is released from his chains, gets up and walks around. First he will not recognize anything in this new reality, but after time he would adapt. He would understand more about the new world, and perhaps even understand how people walking alongside a campfire cast shadows on the wall. What would happen if he would return to the other prisoners and tell them about what he has learned. They would ignore him, ridicule him, and if it weren’t for their chains, they would probably kill him.

A story from the ancient past? Certainly, but it still holds true. In fact, this is something to remember every time we sit behind the computer and look at a graph in our business intelligence tools, and study a Visio-style diagram that defines a process. They are not real, they are nothing but reflections. While we stare at the computer, reality is what is happening behind us.

Don't be like the prisoner, mistaking graphs and diagrams for reality. Reality, or the most approximate thing to it, is in conversations between you and your customers. The more you try to model them, style them, and simplify them, the more abstract they become, the more of a shadow of reality they are. Instead, business managers and business analysts should focus on following the conversation with the customers and other stakeholders, and conduct business based on this reality. A business process then becomes not a predefined set of steps, but nothing more than a set of activities that allows you to talk, share and interact. Freely. Really.

Plato’s Cave in an illus­tra­tion from 1604

Why good companies create bad regulatory strategies

By: Thei Geurts

In the McKinsey Quaterly, June 2011 edition, Andre Dua, Robin Nuttall, and Jon Wilkins discuss possible reasons why good companies create bad regulatory strategies. The authors argue as follows:

“The field of behavioral economics is rapidly making its way into the tool kits of regulators. In stark contrast, we’ve rarely heard, in our work with more than 300 companies over the past three years, a senior executive consider the impact that cognitive biases might be having on his or her company’s regulatory posture. That’s understandable—people don’t like to think about the mistakes they could be making—but it’s also a missed opportunity. Our sense is that looking at regulatory strategies through the lens of behavioral economics can help clarify the missteps corporate leaders make and the corrective measures they should pursue.

We’re not suggesting that leaders are downplaying the importance of setting an effective regulatory strategy. On the contrary, in a survey of roughly 1,400 global executives we conducted in January 2011, more than half of all respondents agreed that governments and regulators will be among the stakeholders with the biggest economic impact on their companies over the next three to five years. An even larger proportion expects governmental involvement in their industries to increase over that period—all this despite recent conservative shifts in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Nonetheless, a surprising number of corporate leaders and companies continue to take positions that may seem credible internally but are totally incredible to outside observers and regulators. Simply put, there’s a disconnect between external perceptions and internal beliefs that often undermines efforts to engage productively with regulators. For evidence of this disconnect, consider some other results from our January 2011 survey. Seventy-six percent of global executives responding said they believed that regulators would rate their companies’ reputations as positive. Yet less than a quarter said that their companies frequently succeeded in influencing regulatory decisions. These executives think they’re doing right in the eyes of regulators, but their own, self-reported results say otherwise…”

“A related challenge for companies in regulatory strategy is putting themselves into the shoes of policy makers…”
“Another issue for regulatory strategists is the prevalence of “stability” biases that create a tendency toward inertia. The impact of such biases is acute in regulatory settings because the typical career track of successful executives in many industries—save highly regulated ones, such as telecommunications or electric utilities—doesn’t involve exposure to government issues. As a result, those executives often are personally ill-prepared for shifting political winds that boost the importance of regulatory issues and are prone to underinvest in the regulatory skills of their organizations or to delegate without exercising sufficient oversight. That’s one explanation for the frequency with which companies must rapidly scale up their government-relations function when they or their industries enter the crosshairs of regulators—a phenomenon we saw during 2009 and 2010 as the US health care reform debate heated up.”

Source: Why good companies create bad regulatory strategies
About the authors: Andre Dua is a director in McKinsey’s New York office, Robin Nuttall is a principal in the London office, and Jon Wilkins is a director in the Washington, DC, office.

These arguments led to the following comment by the Be Informed International Business Development Consultant Thei Geurts. The comment is after scrutiny published in the McKinsey Quaterly on the 15th of June 2011.

“Reading this article makes one wonder what the state of companies’ internal regulatory mind-set really is. How sophisticated are their systems for translating strategic goals into policies, of tracking and measuring the output of these policies, of establishing a well-functioning continuous feedback loop, and of using predictive analysis? One may expect a serious gap between strategy and execution, because internal and external strategies require similar attitudes, capabilities, methods, and tools. As in the public sector itself, it must be quite difficult to close the gap between purpose and practice in these circumstances. In other words, one is tempted to assume that creating bad external regulatory strategies could be directly linked to having bad, or at least weak, internal regulatory strategies. By experience I have seen that there are ways to tackle this problem once it is understood and once the company has the capabilities to visualize, perform, and execute the solution.”

“Do you see this connection between external and internal regulatory strategies as well?”

Be Informed to be measured in Function points

By: Willem Dicou

Function Point Analysis (FPA) is a method for measuring the functional scope of an information system, by looking at relevant user functions and (logical) data collections. The unit of measurement is the Function Point (Fp), which can be used in various ways.

A widely used application of FPA is making estimates for system development. The costs for building a system are related to its size: the larger the system, the more expensive it will be. From past experiences we know how many hours it takes on average to realize a function point: the production standard. Subsequently it is possible to calculate the value of a system and compare it to the price it was paid for.

The NESMA (Dutch Software Metrics Association) developed counting guidelines that in 2003 were certified by ISO as an official ISO standard. Basis for the Standard are the NESMA FPA counting guidelines as expressed in the “Manual of counting guidelines for the definition and application of function point analysis”. The standard is known as NESMA ISO / IEC 24570 and is now used in many countries worldwide.

Based on these standard guidelines, Be Informed created a directive by which systems developed using the Be Informed Business Process Platform can be measured, in both the preliminary stages based on the Be Informed Pattern Engine, and subsequently using the models stored in the repository. This directive has been validated by Galorath, an internationally renowned company in the field of software metrics.

Measurements of actual systems show that it is possible to reach a four to five times better score per function point using Be Informed. These results are already significant, but are even more remarkable when we consider that function points within Be Informed are not only used in building and testing, but in the "full life-cycle" of implementations.

Business and IT Alignment

By: Frank Buytendijk, chief marketing officer

I recently received a promotional email for a "masterclass" on business and IT alignment. The training promised answers on the following questions: "how do you know your IT strategy is aligned with your business strategy?", "how can you put together a governance model that ensures IT follows the business?" and "Pitfalls and success factors".

I checked, the email wasn't from 1983, but seriously from 2009. How can we still have that discussion? Has nothing improved in the last 20 years? And moreover, how can business/IT alignment be so misconceived?

First of all, let's define alignment, this is usually skipped already. From a social-psychological view, a person is aligned when the self, self-perception and external perception closely match. The self-perception is how you look at yourself, and the self is who you really are. If there is a mismatch you could become delusional, frustrated, and generally uncontrolled. You don't understand yourself. If there is a big gap between the self and self-perception, and the external perception, people expect you to be someone that you are really not. This leads to role distance, and unauthentic behavior too. The same can be said of organizations. If there is a big gap between true organizational behavior and who we think we are, we are kidding ourselves. Did you check out your mission statement and values lately? And if there is a big gap between external perception and the organization's true motives, you spend more time figuring out how to spin your strategy externally than actually executing on it. Quite dysfunctional.

Same with business/IT alignment. Like any relationship, it needs to come from both sides. Business perception about value needs to match the IT perspective. But... functional relationships should be based on equality. If both parties agree that IT should follow the business, you're in a dependent, submissive relationship. Not mature.

Business needs to align to IT, as much as IT needs to align with the business. It's a two way street. The nature of technology dictates so, for starters. If you are a carpenter, and you buy one of those circular saw tables (new technology), you'd better organize your process and work around that table, instead of lifting the table to go to the wood. If IT were to follow the business, deleting text on a screen would have to be done with Tipp-ex. The whole point of technology is to not align with the business, but to bring innovation. New, different, better ways of working. If anything, business should align to technology in order to be more successful. In fact, secretly we do so already. It has become a best practice to adapt the business to the processes built into the ERP system and CRM application, and rightly so.

Then, let's discuss Business/Business alignment. How many times is IT struggling with suboptimal business cases, based on budget held by the business, by having to put in a departmental solutions, because each department is "unique"? IT is often found to be "nerdy" and having "no sense of urgency" for talking about architecture and infrastructure. True, IT driven projects are usually not very successful (the business will see to that), but the only thing worse is a business driven project. Short-term successful, but ill-architected, nothing repeatable, and lots of them combined form one big negative ROI in two years down the road. It is the role of IT to see commonality between functional requirements, and take an integrated approach. It would be a lot easier if the business departments would align with, well, the other business departments, instead of IT having that struggle all the time themselves.

And, while I am on the subject, it's a pity if organizations are still discussing business/IT alignment. The real battlefront has moved on already. The name of the game is value chain integration. Aligning all stakeholders around a successful and sustainable business model. Making sure partners, suppliers and channels all benefit from integrated logistical and administrative flows, while taking into account the requirements of investors, regulators, and society at large. This is how alignment contributes to the business strategy.

But perhaps we should start with something else. Remember the definition of alignment. The self, self-perception and external perception need to closely match. Perhaps the real problem is the gap between self and self-perception. IT people sometimes think too little of themselves, and desperately want to be seen as a 'business partner' and considered of strategic importance. Don't worry. You are. Because of the nature of technology. And IT people sometimes think too much of themselves, claiming they understand the business better than the marketing, operations or sales executives. Don't kid yourself. When was the last time you talked to a customer, and constructed a multi-year deal? Think of yourself as who you really are: at the core of business innovation, while at the same time making sure the business runs smoothly.

Thanks for listening. Rant over.

Change you can believe in

By: Rik Hoogenberg, chief executive officer

Be Informed’s case based approach in administrative processes, that are becoming more knowledge-intensive, allows organizations to boost efficiency, agility and customer intimacy. Organizations that do not postpone the inevitable and carefully plan an overhaul of their business processes with Be Informed profit most from these benefits. Yet many IT projects in large organizations fail. How to succeed in changing the way your organization works? It’s simpler than you might think.

First of all, working with Be Informed allows you to change the way you work. Considering that many administrative organizations have organized their work in overcomplicated systems, procedures and applications, this would seem a logical step, right? Then, make sure your transformation is done by people with a ‘can do’, solution oriented approach. This requires critical minds, looking for the simplest solutions. To give you an example; an administrative organization required an ID from citizens to perform certain actions. Many hours of discussions were spent on which type of ID would suffice: passport, drivers licence, or ID card. ID regulations as described in national law proved these discussions to be pointless; use what is needed, instead of what is currently implemented.

An important reason why many IT-projects in large organizations fail, is that traditionally all requirements, functionalities and so forth need to be exhaustively predescribed and, consequently, built. These projects take years, increasing the risk that the eventual outcome will be outdated upon implementation. Simply because too many changes will have taken place: in business, technology, society, et cetera. Also, many organizations fail to benefit from innovative technology by upholding the complicatedness of their systems and processes in new environments. With Be Informed, organizations don’t need to build systems or applications, we model our solutions based on a central business model, using a pragmatic approach that allows business users to see what they get, and reuse what is there already. Working with Be Informed means successful innovation by simplifying systems and processes.

We don’t ask the business users what they want, we interact with them on what they need to do their job. As car manufacturer Henry Ford once said: “If I had asked them what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”.

Within one or two months we present the first application showing the new way of working, discussing functional requirements with business users. This way, enthusiasm for new solutions is gained from the start of the project, which will prove helpful along the way in which an integrated approach, supported by a solution oriented project team consisting of experts from all corners of the organization will guarantee the organizations ability to embrace complexity for years to come.

What is fact-based, anyway?

By: Frank Buytendijk, chief marketing officer

After the series of articles on how Marx predicted the end of Google and Facebook (part 1, part 2, and part 3), I have just finished a new series of articles on the "analytical world". Again, this series has three parts.

In part 1, I argue that although "fact-based management" and "competing on analytics" both sound really cool, the concepts have some serious shortcomings. According to most philosophers, there is not much we can really know for sure. And analytics, as a model of the world, are removed even one step more from reality.

Part 2 discusses the practical consequences of this analysis, taking recent examples such as the outburst of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland and the credit crunch. Both cases where people relied too much on analytical models. Part 2 also contains a critique on predictive analytics.

I do realize it is easy to criticize things, so if I do I should present an alternative view. This I have done in part 3, where I will introduce the concept of "messy analytics". We should pay more attention to factors that mess up the model, as they represent this nasty thing called reality. In fact, I propose to mess up models on purpose, just to see if they can handle what is often called "black swans". Messing up model so they become more precise may sound counterintuitive, but I am almost convinced you will agree with the logic I will present.

Another analyst report on Be Informed

By: Frank Buytendijk, chief marketing officer

Two weeks ago, Forrester published an analyst report on Be Informed. I have had a few questions already if there are other analyst reports as well. I think I have found the ultimate analyst report on Be Informed. Even more, it has been out for many years.

The analyst in question is Rene Descartes (1596-1650), a French philosopher, and father of what is now called "rationalism". He validated Be Informed's way of meta-modeling the business, although I must admit I am doubtful whether he was actually aware of this particular use of his philosophy.

Descartes tried to establish a fundamental set of principles of what is true. What cannot be doubted. Like any good philosopher, interested in what is true, he looked at phenomena and the world around him and asked if there were different explanations possible. Testingbe whether the existing explanations were correct. The safest way of asking these questions is to have no preconceptions at all, to doubt absolutely everything. The only way to establish truth is to reach a certain sound foundation, or in Be Informed terms an ontology, of which the rest can be derived.

Descartes eventually reached the conclusion that everything can be doubted, except doubt itself. You cannot doubt your doubt, because that would mean all would be certain, and that is what you are doubting. The thought of doubt itself already proves that doubt cannot be doubted. And because you cannot separate a person from his thoughts, therefore, cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I exist. In fact, you have to exist. If you think you are dead, the fact you are thinking you are dead, proves that you are alive, as thought implies life. Trying to doubt your doubt is a metathought (thinking about thinking).

Still with me? Let's apply this thinking to Be Informed. Basically Descartes said that the only thing that cannot be doubted is the metalevel. The rational and pure thought. Everything real in the world can be doubted. Every process. Every system. Every way of working. What cannot be doubted is your description of your business model, or as Peter Drucker called it, your theory of the business. In fact, it is the only thing you can rely on. Your understanding of the world around you is changing all the time, because of new insights, but it is the only thing you in the end are in control of. The rest is questionable.

This exactly is Be Informed's approach. By building a business process ontology, you shape your world. Any specific process, any specific transaction, any instance of reality is simply derived from it. It is not needed to predefine every single process or exception, the only thing you do is describe the rules that every process instance (or in Be Informed's terminology: case) needs to obey.

Any more questions on the validity of Be Informed's ontological approach, in comparison with the common “best practice” approach of defining concrete processes? I doubt it...

Banging on your door

By: Rik Hoogenberg, chief executive officer

Currently, the need for efficient operations, transparency and building trust are to be considered universal for any administrative organization. Our experiences in the US, the UK and the Netherlands show that both public and private organizations are faced with the same tough challenges: improve performance and earn customer loyalty using resources as efficient as possible.

After years of business process optimization, drastic improvements can only be reached by adopting new principles for these processes. Modern organizations are increasingly abandoning traditional process oriented dogma’s in favour of a case based approach. The essence of this revolutionary idea is based on two key elements: business rules and customer context. These two elements are all you need to reach a decision, and that is precisely what the business process should deliver. The case based approached brings together business rules and customer context in any given situation, rendering yesterdays complicated process schemes obsolete. The catch here, is that anything can be considered and treated as a business rule; even exceptions. This notion is crucial for achieving breakthrough results in modernizing administrative organizations.

Dynamic case management, as analyst firm Forrester coined it, facilitates a tailor made process for any customer case through a generic, standardized path of dynamically assembled activities. And so far, the best of the story is that dynamic case management has a proven track record. The integration of business rules and customer context has proven to save organizations up to 50% in costs of operations and reductions in total cost of ownership which amount to 70%. And recently, Forrester even published a vendor snapshot report on Be Informed which, of course, makes me very proud. Don’t miss out on this one, once the word gets out to any stakeholder, they will be banging on your door.

IT is dead, long live IT!

By: Rik Hoogenberg, chief executive officer

Government organizations worldwide are struggling with ICT. They say it’s complex, so costs soar and the software is not doing what it should do. The point is precisely that many government IT organizations are not necessarily complex, but complicated. That's because they piled all these systems and applications on top of each other over the years. Legacy systems and licenses have become a hydra-headed monster that keeps itself alive.

At a time when government organizations worldwide have to cut costs, it is no longer justifiable to invest in legacy systems. In recent years, IT has developed impressively. Model Driven Architecture principles and 'Goal Oriented Business Process Management' offer opportunities to administrative organizations to be more responsive and agile for a fraction of the costs they are accustomed to.

Would it be risky to adopt a new approach to business processes? On the contrary! Dynamic case management, as analyst firm Forrester calls the new approach, allows organizations to improve customer intimacy and cut costs at the same time. Only semantic solutions like Be Informed can do that trick.

The Machiavellian CIO: Strategy, Analytics, Philosophy and More

By: Frank Buytendijk, chief marketing officer

It is encouraging to see how many people have found my channel "The Machiavellian CIO: Strategy, Analytics, Philosophy and More" and my first article about the iThink already. The first series of three articles is now published, keeping the philosophy theme light, before we'll get serious!

In this series of three I'll discuss how Marx actually predicted the end of Google and Facebook. I can't recall how I saw the connection, but the similarities are striking. Where in the industrial world companies were hungry for capital, in the internet world we see a different hunger: the hunger for information. The dynamic is the same. In the industrial world the value is delivered by the workers, but the shareholders benefit from the value. The workers are exploited. In the internet world, the value is delivered by us, the users. But we are not the customers, the advertisers are. The users are exploited.

In Part 1, I am taking some time to describe this dynamic, summarizing Marx' view. Although I wouldn't call myself Marxist in any way, one cannot escape the feeling Marx had a few things right, looking at the economic crisis of today.

In Part 2, I describe how Google and Facebook are heading for disaster in their current way of working, and I will explain what Marx might have thought of them. Rather provocative! We all know that Marx in the end was wrong. The post-industrial world didn't turn to communism, although some communistic elements are hugely popular on the web. I'd call Wikipedia one of the most communistic organisations I can think of today.

Part 3, lastly, describes where the world has morphed into: democracy. Also not perfect as a system, but not bad so far. Again, I will draw some parallels to the world of IT. Some have actually used the term information democracy. Intuitively it sounds attractive, but the term hasn't been properly defined yet. I will share with you how I would define an information democracy.

Can't wait to hear your reactions,

frank

Separate the know from the flow

By: Thei Geurts, presales consultant

Just received a confirmation from the McKinsey Quaterly that they have accepted and published my comment on the article of Thomas H. Davenport on "Rethinking knowledge work: A strategic approach".

In this February 2011 article Thomas Davenport argues that: "We live in a world where knowledge-based work is expanding rapidly. So is the application of technology to almost every business process and job. But to date, high-end knowledge workers have largely remained free to use only the technology they personally find useful. It's time to think about how to make them more productive by imposing a bit more structure. This combination of technology and structure, along with a bit of managerial discretion in applying them to knowledge work, may well produce a revolution in the jobs that cost and matter the most to contemporary organizations." Mr. Davenport gives some limited examples for this, in his own words, radically different approach to the productivity of knowledge workers.

In my comment I focus on the approach and results of Be Informed clients in realizing this line of thought. The comment was published on the 7th of February under the name: Thei Geurts, Be Informed, Netherlands. This is the link: McKinsey Quarterly - Rethinking_knowledge_work_A_strategic_approach.

For the readers that don't want to register to the McKinsey Quarterly, here is the text of my comment:

Indeed, what is required is a change of perspective. A change from a control point of view or a granting maximum freedom point of view, towards a view that looks for a synthesis between control and freedom. It is the era of the 'AND.'

In various recent projects, I have seen how it is possible to realize substantial productivity improvements by an approach that separates 'the know' from 'the flow.'

The know stands for the business logic, rules, concepts and relations, and references to their authentic sources. The flow stands for the dynamic process of a case in which the know is infused. Knowledge workers are engaged in a goal-driven decision making process in which they have a high level of autonomy in how to organize their work. The decision prevails over the path towards the decision. Contextual information is provided based upon the case and phase at hand and actionable information has been made executable by instruments like decision trees, checklists, interactive forms, and calculators.

The process offers at the same time support to conform to operating standards and to leverage knowledge and methodologies for managing the life cycle of a case effectively. This includes facilities for coordination, planning, assigning tasks and time, and for embedded logging and history trails to serve audit and compliance purposes.

Examples of achieved productivity gains are: implementing a change in government regulations within 2-3 days instead of in 9 months, operational cost reduction for environmental licensing of 96 million Euro in year 1, reduction of TCO-costs with 50%.

Walk the walk if you talk the talk

By: Rik Hoogenberg, chief executive officer

Recently, the Innovation Union Scoreboard 2010 was published by the European Commission. The Netherlands is characterized as an ‘innovation follower’, ranking 8th among EU member states. Analysts fear that the Netherlands will fall back even further in the coming years.
The Dutch Government, however, maintains its ambition the be among the top 5 of knowledge driven economies worldwide. Why is it so hard to reach this goal?

The answer is found in Michael Porters ‘The Competitive Advantage of Nations’, in which he rightly argues that success factors of enterprises are created by a country or region. Porter comes increasingly to the conclusion that ultimately the environment of the organization is the source of sustainable competitive advantage.

Entrepreneurship in the Netherlands has developed considerably on the officially formulated Dutch ambition, only to find government hesitant to apply this approach in practice. Had a government wide vision on smart solutions, innovation and education been implemented, then private initiatives would have met with a more favorable climate.

Now, smart solutions for agile and efficient public services depend on the personal conviction of visionary leaders, often having to fight fierce battles in order to pursue their innovative goals. This leads to unnecessary delay in adopting innovative solutions and creating a fertile climate for a knowledge based economy.

Good news and bad news

By: Frank Buytendijk, chief marketing officer

I joined Be Informed a little bit over three months ago now. The first thing I noticed, and what drew me to the world of business processes was the enormous growth potential, it is one of the few best-of-breed enterprise software markets left. There is ample room for innovation.

That's the good news.

The bad news is that I have the feeling that the business process discipline is terribly lacking behind other software markets. I think I can make the comparison, most of my own background comes from the business intelligence market. Let me explain.

In the management information systems world (MIS), close to twenty years ago it became clear that sending a programmer around, asking all users which reports they needed, and then program them all, is not the smartest approach. It leads to extremely expensive reports, no reusability and a heavy TCO burden. In the early 1990s the business intelligence query and reporting tools came up offering a different solution. Users and developers shouldn't put the report in the middle, but the data domain. If, using a metadata layer in between the reporting tool and the database, you can abstract from both the data model and the reporting layout, users can create all the necessary reports themselves. And you know all of those reports are right, because the metadata model describes the guardrails of what you can do very well.

How different the world of process still is. It is still pretty normal to send developers with little Visio schemas to all the users, and let them document, describe and build every single process. It is still accepted that business process specialists claim that "of course the process is always the starting point." Why, I wonder? It is the domain in which processes run that should be the starting point.

Be Informed has understood that fundamental principle, and basically built what is already the accepted paradigm in business intelligence. The only thing Be Informed does is describing the nature of all activities, and their mutual relationships. This is a metadata model, or in slightly more formal terms, an ontology. After doing that, users can go through processes every which way they want. And they know that whatever they do is perfectly right, because the ontology provides the guardrails.

Same thing!

If you look deep into the hearts of the people who develop Be Informed, they want nothing more than making sure that this process paradigm becomes the norm. The accepted best practice.
That would benefit Be Informed enormously. Most of our competitors have old-paradigm technologies, and it will take years to migrate to the new way of thinking. This is where I believe where Be Informed has the true lead in the market. Not the ontological approach per se, but how the idea of the ontology is consequently extrapolated and with extreme discipline is implemented throughout every aspect of the Be Informed Business Process Platform.

Hard to copy.

Interested? Would you like to know more? Let me know.

Be good,
frank

Ich bin ein Innovator

By: Rik Hoogenberg, chief executive officer

Dutch government officials frequently emphasize the importance of innovation. They urge companies to step up their R&D budgets and call for entrepreneurship that will yield fast growing start-ups.

I think innovation is a question of co-makership. I am convinced that innovation will flourish when government and companies operate as partners, instead of maintaining the principal/client dogma. It is important for government to create the right conditions for innovation, to share responsibility with companies.

At Be Informed, we are involved in various tenders for government projects. The costs of these tenders are huge, where the outcome is always uncertain. Investments done by many parties are lost in these proceedings, where synergy would have been relatively easy to achieve. Too often, government aims for the lowest price in these proceedings, instead of value creation.

So when it comes to innovation, I shamelessly quote John F. Kennedy to encourage our government towards a joint effort in a shared concern: 'Ask not what your private sector can do for you, ask what you can do for your private sector.'

Business Process Madness, Part II

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

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