The imperative to reinvent business process

Why am I so keen on the idea of reinventing business process?

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:

1. Anyone should be able to document, or model, a business process with little or no training.
   
2. 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.
   
3. The documented process should directly connect process activities to all relevant content.
   
4. Human interactions with a process should act as feedback into the process, either validating it or indicating areas for improvement.

Determining the value of your content

A key challenge to connecting content is determining exactly what is useful and what is not.

The truth is this – the vast majority of information produced by the enterprise has little residual value to the enterprise.

The highest value content, or intellectual assets, are those that format, drive, guide or inspire the majority of information produced by employees. This "core asset set" may evolve and change over time, but it still sets the standards that define business value. The core set is the foundation for most content that is produced. Due to the critical nature of this set, and because it's generally small (relative to all content produced) the best way to manage these assets is manually as it must be continually refined and validated. However, once an inventory is complete, updating and evolving consumes little resources as it becomes self perpetuating if managed in the right kind of system.

The fresher the asset, the greater the value

New content produced from the core set is at its zenith in value the moment it is completed. Bottom line: the best work is always the most recent. As newer and newer content is produced, the value of the predecessor continually diminishes until it is reduced to archival status.

The real challenge at this stage is the location of the content, as the fresher it is, the closer it resides to the authoring mechanism. Thus, the very best content often lives in the least accessible places, the desktops and laptops of the creators. Making the freshest content widely and painlessly accessible is the real challenge, for both the system and the culture.

Archived content provides infrequent value

This is where search engines and content/KM management systems can be useful (though questionable in proportion to their cost), by automatically indexing and cataloging information stored throughout the infrastructure. Sure you'll have to sift through a lot of junk, but eventually you will find what you think you need. Odds are, however, if you didn't find it in the first two tiers, it's probably not all that valuable anyway – certainly not in proportion to the cost of the time wasted finding it.

Business process defined

Since business process is one of the areas covered in this blog, I felt it would be useful to provide a clear definition, since it is thrown about so much by people who frankly, don't really understand it.

A business process is simply a collection of like minded activities or tasks that generally occur in a sequence, or flow. A process breaks down, or decomposes, into increasing precise subtypes of activities, called sub-activities. And a business process has a scope and a point of view.

Processes have two kinds of relationships:

Activities in a process sequence can have relationships between other activities — for example, the result, or output, of one activity could initiate another. This is also known as a dependency.

Activities also have constantly changing relationships to resources, such as content, rules and regulations, people and tools. As a process decomposes to greater detail, activity resources refine as well, becoming more and more precise.

About process scope and point of view:

A process scoped at the enterprise level might be called "Grow Business," and would include three levels or stages; at the highest level, it is strategic, which in turn defines the operational level, which then defines the tactical level. A process scoped at the operational level could be "Support Customer." And a process scoped at the tactical level could be "Answer Phone."

Point of view refers to the process perspective, as the CEO could have a different view of the same process than the manager or line worker.

So what's a "business process model?"

A business process model captures, or documents, the flows, decomposition and relationships between activities and resources of a process as defined by scope and point of view. And they ain't pretty.

A passion for process

Business process is something I have been fascinated with for some time now. And, while it may not be obvious at first glance, my current venture, Emantix, is simply the latest evolution of my fascination with and thinking on business process. After all, business processes are really nothing more than words organized in a such a way as to achieve consensus between two people or more as to what it is they do. Nothing more than words. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, interrogatives, prepositions, interjections... antonyms, synonyms, hyponyms, troponyms, hypernyms, meronyms... make a sentence with me.

But I digress.

In the last company I started, Contextware, I reinvented the mechanisms, the tools, of business process, as well as the output, or interface. But I did not go far enough. Truly reinventing process requires much more than mere functionality, buttons to push, true reinvention demands a greater and more comprehensive understanding of information and the rules of language itself, as that is where business process knowledge lives and breathes, and hides.

And the biggest challenge of all is whatever form the answer takes, if it isn't easy as hell to do, people won't do it, use it or buy it. So while my postings on this blog may cover many things, I apologize for how often I keep coming back to the fundamental business benefits of — and imperative for — reinventing business process.