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.

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.