Because an amazing thing happens when an enterprise's business processes leverage the distributed nature of the Web.
Productivity...increases.
Unfortunately, this is not what traditional business process methods, tools and techniques were created to enable. Originally, they were developed to do essentially two things – one, to analyze how an organization operates and determine areas for improvement (which might or might not have resulted in a technology implementation); and two, identify resource types and definitions so that database schemas could be designed. Thus the tools created to do this are generally expensive and complicated, with steep learning curves. And the result, or output of these tools are diagrams either too large and complex to comprehend, or so granular and precise that they fail to communicate any understanding of, or relationship to, the enterprise as a whole.
For an enterprise to see dramatic productivity gains, the tools to do so must be in the hands of, and usable by, the business user – the person actually doing the work.
So what about business process needs reinventing? Four things:
- Anyone should be able to document, or model, a business process with little or no training.
- Anyone should be able to use the result, or representation, of a documented process to navigate the tasks and activities that define their role within the organization.
- The documented process should directly connect process activities to all relevant content.
- Human interactions with a process should act as feedback into the process, either validating it or indicating areas for improvement.
