Jakob Freund has written an interesting defense of Taylorism, and he makes a few interesting points that I don’t recall seeing in previous discussions about ACM v BPM.

Actually, when I am driving, I am a zombie worker most of the time. Sometimes, of course, there are “unpredictable” events, like a child running over the street, or an alien spaceship landing in the middle of the highway. Then I become a knowledge worker, handling that case with my horribly flexible brain.

No, I don’t mean the point about alien spacecraft, I’m referring to his point that being able to operate on auto-pilot leaves our mind free to focus when we really need to, in value-added situations.

So the bottom line is: Making the world more predictable (yes, it can be done), and then applying axiomatic systems to it, is nothing invented by Taylor and somehow an “accident” of the 20th century, but it is a central component of human evolution. It has always been there, and it will always be there, as long as people are interested in less work and more free time.

This is also an interesting argument.  A bit too much credit has gone to Taylor over the years for putting into words what might already have been in progress.

The central thesis seems to be that reducing “knowledge work” to scalable process work is one of the key imperatives of scaling a business.  It is an interesting take on things, and fits a lot of the process efforts that focus on efficiency as a goal.  And it is a refutation of much of the hype around ACM as being something shiny and new.

We’re approaching one of my favorite holidays in the United States, Thanksgiving.  Of course it is a great holiday because of the family traditions of getting together, the road trips, the airplane flights, the reacquainting with family near and far.  But I also love this holiday for the food – sometimes in Texas a turkey just isn’t good enough.  You have your fried turkey.  Your turducken.  And sometimes, if you’re lucky, you get your BBQ Thanksgiving (turkey, brisket, sausage, what’s not to like?).

But mostly I like Thanksgiving because it is a good time to remember how fortunate we all are to be in this business and to have the opportunity to work with our team and our customers.   I’m often impressed by how much people in the BPM community help each other – to find work, leads, jobs, customers, projects, business cases, studies, training.  This is a community that believes in paying it forward, and we’re glad to be part of it.

Really interesting progress on the state of the art for startup process.  It recently got some coverage at Austin Startup, with a great infographic included. But it has previously been discussed on Steve Blank’s blog.

The Genome Report is 68 pages of great reading.  Lots of details go into the general conclusions that you see in the info graphic.  It is included at the bottom of this post as well.  Interestingly, they go even farther than just producing a report. There’s an a survey you can fill out, the startup compass, which will help determine how your startup compares to other startups they did their research on for the Genome project.  I went partway through this survey myself, but at some point it becomes apparent that it is not really a good match for services businesses, it is really about product businesses.  And that’s fine – it is still far and away the most interesting pattern-matching tool I’ve seen for startups.

And the key finding seems to be exactly what Austin Startup focused on:

One of the big findings amongst the data was that almost 7 out of 10 companies failed due to premature scaling or inconsistency. Peeling back the data, the lessons seem really simple: don’t act like a big company.

Fascinating stuff… or scary stuff, if you’re running against the statistics they’ve collected… The statistics definitely back the idea of the lean startup.

(Side note for BPM practitioners… how can we apply this kind of data and thinking to our own BPM efforts as we grow them from projects to programs and beyond?)

Startup Genome Report 01

Interesting review from John Reynolds, of the Kindle Fire.  He’s underwhelmed mainly by the form factor, and the lack of access to non-Amazon content.

People often criticize Apple as having a “walled garden” – but if you read the following from John, and you use Apple products, the difference is obvious:

The Kindle Fire experience doesn’t feel like you’re connecting to the web – it feels like you’re looking through a keyhole into one little room of the web… or perhaps you’re trapped in a hallway with many doors and many keyholes.  Many of the keyholes are blocked.

That’s when it hit me… Amazon isn’t giving me access to ‘The Cloud’, they’re giving me access to ‘Their Cloud’.  Everything that I purchase from them resides in ‘Their Cloud’.  The same is true for Apple. The stuff I buy from Apple ends up in the ‘Apple Cloud’…  Flash forward in time and I see myself carrying both an iPad and a Kindle, juggling them from one hand to another in order to access ‘My Content’ in ‘Their Clouds’.

Actually, the same isn’t true for Apple, though I can see why he said that. Apple’s iTunes content seems to be locked to iTunes… but it isn’t.  As much of Apple’s content that they can make DRM-free has been made so – only the studio labels stand in the way of DRM-free content.  From my iPhone and iPad I can access gmail, google docs, netflix, amazon’s store, Kindle content, etc. (In fact, I don’t own a Kindle, but read Kindle books on my iPhone and iPad all the time).  The addition of “iCloud” added features and functionality to my use of Apple’s devices, but didn’t remove any.  My iPhone config can now be backed up to the cloud.  Contacts, email, calendar invites now synchronize better between devices. But I also still synch those items with Google Apps. Having said that, I like John’s vision for “MyCloud” even better than what Apple, Google, Amazon, or anyone else is yet producing:

If the Universe was fair, which it isn’t, whenever I created any content it would be stored in ‘My Cloud’.  Whenever I purchased anything it would be stored in ‘My Cloud’.  Facebook, Google+, Apple, and Amazon would have to pull that content from ‘My Cloud’ to use it in their apps, and I would set the policies regarding access to ‘My Content’.

From what John is observing, it sounds to me like Amazon has produced an “Amazon tablet” not a general purpose tablet.  There’s nothing wrong with that, per se… but I don’t think that that’s what people were expecting when they pre-ordered.

It isn’t hard to think about the analogies applicable to cloud BPM offerings…

Alberto Manuel’s End to End BPM blog lists BPM Blogs worth reading in 2011 – linked here in case you don’t follow his blog directly or haven’t seen his posts on twitter.  He lists some of our favorite blogs, including Sandy Kemsley’s and Anatoly Belychook’s blogs.

There are a couple on the list I haven’t been following which I’ll now be checking out.  Thanks to Alberto for putting this list together!

ebizQ has an interesting two-page article on BPM and Healthcare titled “BPM: The healthcare industry’s prescription for serving patients better“, which uses the label BPM broadly (not specifically meaning “BPMS”):

For example, Nunn says, one facility used BPM to reduce the number of patient falls—a common problem among elderly people and those recovering from surgery. After analyzing data, the facility changed the layout of its beds so nurses could better keep an eye on patients when they got up at night to use the bathroom, which was when most falls were recorded.

In another case, Nunn worked with a hospital trying to pinpoint why many of its heart-surgery patients were getting infections. By examining the entire process of surgery from admittance to discharge, Nunn’s team was able to determine that an autoclave, a machine for sterilizing instruments, was not working properly, even though its gauges indicated that it was reaching the proper temperatures. After the hospital replaced the machine, infection rates plummeted.

As I’ve said at other times, there’s a place for more “case” oriented approaches in hospitals and healthcare, but the case approach would *never* address changing the layout of beds, nor determining that the autoclave isn’t sterilizing sufficiently.

To those that think that examining aggregate outcomes is irrelevant in patient care, I’m telling you, you are missing the boat.  Note that the above two examples I picked out don’t necessarily require BPM (six sigma analysis likely would turn this up), BPM can be the instrument for collecting and analyzing the data that allows the six sigma (or other experts) to determine root cause – or failing root cause, at least to identify correlation.

This isn’t the first time we’ve pointed to good work by others, documenting the benefits of BPM to the healthcare business, and I’m sure it won’t be the last.

David Brakoniecki wrote a great post on “those pesky rules” last month and I just had to comment on it.  The startling finding was that at one insurance company, 30% of the rules were flat wrong.  As David says:

Given that the insurance business is really little more than sets of rules – underwriting rules, claims management rules, customer cross-sell rules – and that it is a heavily regulated business, incorrect rules are more than bad business but potential regulatory nightmare.

Bingo.  The problem with rules is that many of them are simple, but the interactions between them are not.  The resulting outcomes are not.  There are better ways to represent these kinds of solutions (constraints, heuristic search, etc.) but they require pretty advanced education to model, and most companies are looking to de-value expertise rather than invest in expertise. So simple rules are used – simple in each instance, but complicated when taken as a whole. Unpredictable as well.  The right abstractions are not available for modeling, so granular abstractions are used, and they’re just not good enough.  It becomes unmanageable or inaccurate over time.

As Dave goes on to say, it just isn’t realistic for the business to maintain rules without assistance from IT.  We have to get past the idea of IT or Business owning the assets of the business.  Both parties need to take responsibility for the health of the business and the health of the assets that allow that business to perform smoothly, or at all.

I love the Graphing Calculator Story.  It is an oldie but a goodie.

When I hear people (you know who you are!) lament a lack of corporate sponsorship as dooming a project to failure, I want to send them this blog post.  Ron Avitzur didn’t even have a *job* and he got his project done and shipped.  He lists out a litany of roadblocks in front of them – and yet he managed to cajole others into helping him.  To get others excited about his vision for the graphing calculator.

It is a classic example of leadership from below, or leadership from outside.  No one reports to him, so he can’t command a change.  He has no official status.  And yet he is able to mobilize resources by creating a buzz, by being honest, by having passion about his work.

I’ve often been a proponent of leading from below.  If you’re successful, the executive sponsorship will come.  Typically it doesn’t happen the other way around.  So quit making excuses and be the change you want to see in your organization.  Read Ron’s story for inspiration.  No excuses now – we’re getting paid after all! (Unlike Ron!)

Nice to see more companies bringing talent and jobs to Austin. BlackLocus joins the list this week with news coverage from AustinStartup and the Austin-American Statesman:

BlackLocus, a technology company founded in 2009 by three Carnegie Mellon University students, is making Austin its headquarters to take advantage of the area’s cloud computing talent pool.

The company, which sells Web software that helps e-commerce companies price their products, raised $2.5 million from Silverton Partners of Austin and DFJ Mercury of Houston in July.

Since then, BlackLocus has built out its senior management team and is working to double its 15-person workforce over the next two quarters.

AustinStartup has a more personal touch to their coverage:

“We are excited to join the high tech community in Austin,” said Rodrigo Carvalho, co-founder and CEO of Black Locus.  “We have been graciously welcomed. The technology companies here and the people behind them want to see others succeed. Everyone has been so helpful. It comes down to the networking, the resources and the top tier talent. Austin was our top pick. “

They also covered a couple of the recent team additions, which happen to include my friend Rob Taylor, previously of TrueCar, and Trebor Carpentor, previously of Lombardi, of all places.  It is a small world.

Bruce Silver reports that IBM is following through on its promises with respect to BPMN 2.0 in its next release, IBM BPM 7.5.1, which ships this week.

Not that IBM is covering EVERY corner of BPMN 2.0, but it is a significant advance – in that they are surprisingly supporting import and export of BPMN 2.0 XML from the Process Designer:

In a recent post, I talked about what “BPMN 2.0 support” really means, in both non-executable and executable model contexts.  It’s not primarily about the notation, although a few shapes and symbols – notably non-interrupting events and event subprocesses – are new in BPMN 2.0. BPMN 2.0 support is really about the XML serialization, the ability to export the process model according to the XSD and rules of the spec, and ideally import from the XML as well.  IBM BPM 7.5.1 can do both.

[...]

The important thing, though, is not just the palette of shapes but the fact that Process Designer supports export and import of the BPMN 2.0 standard XML format.  (Oracle BPM 11g has had the BPMN 2.0 shapes for a year and a half and still cannot do that.)  I haven’t seen the XML yet but I believe that the export includes data objects, data inputs and outputs, data association mappings (assignment), and other details of executable BPMN 2.0. At least I hope it does.

A few new palette items have been added as well, though as Bruce notes, we’re still missing explicit representation of message flows.  I happen to agree with Bruce that this could improve the readability of IBM BPM models. And knowing how things are implemented underneath, I believe I’m qualified to say there aren’t really any technical barriers to having this “transparently” implement message flows, except to update some of the assumptions that go into the process canvas.

Great news, and great recap from Bruce.

In a flurry of posts recently there’s another attempt to sever ACM and BPM.  It’s a strange urgency among some ACM advocates to separate it from the idea of managing business processes.

Keith misinterpreted my recent post on ACM/BPM – confusing product efforts by software vendors with implementation and execution efforts by business users.  Bruce Silver and I are speculating about whether “ACM” will really exist as a distinct market from BPM – and we both doubt it.  Keith is questioning whether doctors and lawyers should use BPMN.  A bit unrelated.

In another post, Keith attempts to put the wheels back on the track.  But Adaptive Process advocate Max J. Pucher notes that he sees a benefit to customers in a holistic solution – and goes on to advocate his own company’s approach:

Therefore I do not see a clear distinction between ACM and BPM, except that a BPMS cannot perform the kind of ACM user-driven processes that you describe so well. My recommendation of a homogenous system that does both really well is not only driven by my product orientation. Remember? I don’t have to sell what I have – I develop what empowers people!

I see it the opposite way: The only reason people have to keep ACM and BPM as independent functions are sales perspectives or BPM design or consulting skills that might become obsolete. From a business benefit perspective, a homogenous solution that also encompasses architecture, content and rules is the only thing that makes sense. Agree? Whether this is easy to sell or argument from an existing BPM mindset is a completely different story.

If it is a single solution, it really doesn’t matter if ACM and BPM are separate or the same.  It just matters whether you can solve the problem for the customer – or not.  Or if the customer can solve the problem for themselves – or not.  I believe Max’s firm is in competition (in a sense) with BPM vendors – because they’re both competing for a market around improving business processes.  Max’s competitive differentiators are related to the adaptive way his firm approaches this subject.  A company like IBM will pitch different differentiators for their product offering.  They may coexist in the market or within customers, or they may compete.  But so far this looks like one market to me. I might have more faith in BPMS based on my personal experience, than Max does – but in the wide angle view I see more agreement than disagreement in terms of what BPM is (versus what a particular product can deliver).

Jacob Ukelson proposes to call this area “knowledge process” instead of ACM.  I expressed a bit of my frustration with this distinction, though I generally sympathize with his frustration as well! -

As I mentioned on twitter, I don’t think the problem is that they got in the weeds on features. The problem is that ACM folks got too caught up in trying to prove that BPMS can’t do ACM – which is silly. Or worse, that ACM was superior/above/better-than BPM – which again, is just a silly argument to get into. Like arguing that BPM is better than SOA – they’re either complementary or competitive and if they’re not competitive than better doesn’t really have meaning.

Knowledge work is business work, last I checked. business people describe knowledge work as being part of their business processes. Fighting a definition battle that isn’t worth fighting. Go ahead and convince customers that they don’t have a sales process. That it is, instead, a sales knowledge process or a sales case management. Or that they shouldn’t apply process improvement techniques to aggregate outcomes.[...]

I keep hearing from people about what isn’t the answer… but not hearing much about what is  unless it is a plug for “read the book” or very high level – as you say – principles – which of course could just mean “use email”.

I think the ACM discussion has been useful in that it reminds people that BPM shouldn’t be just about automation and eliminating human work. But to me, separating ACM from BPM is a bit like saying that what’s good for the goose isn’t good for the gander- that some work (usually whatever work we envision ourselves doing) isn’t subject to the same general rules as the work others are doing. My work is creative, but their work is not. My work is knowledge work but their work is routine.

I promise you, all work that involves people involves creativity, passion, skill, energy, pride – or the lack thereof. Our goal should be to reduce the mundane and routine, and allow the people to focus on the creative and expressive and decisive. We could argue over ACM vs. BPM or just agree that BPM and ACM are two slices of bread in the same loaf.

Just because I don’t use a BPMS to tie my shoes doesn’t make it knowledge work.  Nor does it mean it isn’t a process.

Usually when someone says “the end of” some technology, we can all snicker, knowing that this meme comes up every so often and is usually way off base.  In this case, with Adobe’s recent announcement of the end of Flash on mobile devices, we can reasonably say it is the beginning of the end of Flash as we know it – because, increasingly, sites will be designed without it.  Flash won’t go away in a day or a week, but it is in decline.

It seems like a reasonable strategic move for Adobe.  Their engineering team has had more than enough time to figure out how to make it perform for mobile devices – and it hasn’t.  Moreover, iOS was unlikely to support Flash even if it started to perform well.

Still, it was a moment full of rich claim chowder.  No surprise, Daring Fireball has the best collection of such links:

• Everybody Wins – as John points out, it isn’t some competing Apple tech that won, it was HTML5, which is an open specification.
• And clearly, Steve was Right.
• Opponents: in this piece, John reminds us that Apple didn’t win this argument from a position of market dominance, they were starting from a position of zero marketshare in 2007.  And one could argue that keeping Flash off the phone improved the experience – and therefore the sales – of the devices.
• Why Apple is Completely Wrong – one of the more amusing “claim chowder” posts.  JR Raphael’s response is even more amusing, in that he completely ducks the argument he picked in the first place. And of course the first tip-off that he’s lost the argument is that he opens his blog by belittling Daring Fireball and John Gruber, rather than just responding to the points made.
• Did you know Flash 10.1 was going to kill HTML5?

What’s surprising (to me) is how many people really thought Flash support was a problem, or a marketing gimmick that real people would care about.

At least there is one commentator who had the courage to poke fun at his own writing: Dan Frommer, now writing for his own spot, SplatF:

But it was so impractical! Not just the idea of Palm and Adobe banding together — they actually did try to work together on Flash for WebOS devices, and it still failed. But the idea of Flash working well on a mobile/touch device was so far-fetched in 2007, and is still pretty looney today. And that’s a big reason why Adobe is now winding down mobile Flash development. (Though it will continue to try to be a part of the mobile app ecosystem, which is sort of what I was getting at.)

Anyway, I think that was the first time John Gruber linked to me from Daring Fireball. I guess I deserved his sarcasm that day:

Sure, and maybe they can wave the same magic wand and make chips run faster and cooler and have batteries that last for weeks without recharging.

At least Dan owns it.  I’d love to see something similar from Fred Wilson’s blog – a re-examining of the basic truths as he saw them in 2007-8.

One anecdote from Isaacston’s Steve Jobs that really resonated for me was this amusing exchange between he and Ellison:

At this point Jobs got real close to Ellison and said, “Larry, this is why it’s really important that I’m your friend. You don’t need any more money.”

Ellison agreed with that general sentiment, but thought it was stupid that some “fund manager at Fidelity” would make more money on Apple’s success than he or Jobs.

Jobs responded by saying, “I think if I went back to Apple and didn’t own any of Apple, and you didn’t own any of Apple, I’d have the moral high ground.”

Ellison’s response: “Steve, that’s really expensive real estate, this moral high ground.”

Ellison is so right. That moral high ground is really expensive real estate.  And it is much more expensive real estate for people like Larry and Steve than it has ever been for someone like me.

So the question: is that expensive real estate really worth it?

We know the answer is supposed to be yes, but so often we see people make decisions that yield that moral high ground.  We might face that temptation ourselves. Just remember that holding the moral high ground isn’t something you start doing after you’ve made your millions (because, for most people who do this, there are always more millions to chase… and then billions).  The moral high ground is something you start doing today, if you weren’t doing it yesterday.  It is something you build up piece by piece, day by day, until it has real value. That value is in reputation, trust, personal relationships, business relationships.

In my experience, in the long run, the moral high ground is worth it.  If you stick to it, you’ll find that while some of your friends and colleagues end up with more money in the short term, or even in the long term, you’ll end up with the friends.  The lifelong friends.  And if you’re in Steve’s rarefied air you end up with not only friends and loyal executives, but admirers far and wide.

That moral high ground gives you the moral authority to lead more effectively.  In an information economy, that’s important.  Your talent can walk out the door any time.  And while the economy may not be good, the job market for high tech workers is quite good.

I’ve never regretted holding that expensive real estate.  No question, the really expensive real estate is still worth it. I hope Larry went ahead and bought a few Apple shares while he was at it, though.

I got a kick out of reading Ben Farrell’s post on Appian’s blog today,  “What a Difference a BPM Software Acquisition Makes: A Look into the Wayback Machine“.  I think Ben thinks he’s really caught out Phil Gilbert, formerly President and CTO of Lombardi, now VP of BPM at IBM:

“Today one of our customers said they were told by IBM: “why spend your money with Lombardi, we’ll give you our BPMS for free.” I finally agree 100% with IBM on something: their BPMS is worth nothing. Getting a cheap BPMS is like buying a dancing elephant for a dollar: cool, but who can afford to feed it?”

That’s Phil Gilbert talking. Or rather, Phil Gilbert back when he was president and CTO of Lombardi. Today’s Phil Gilbert is head of BPM at IBM. Say it again, Phil: “Their BPMS is worth nothing.”

And then later on he takes on the new IBM-Lombardi combination, IBM BPM:

The fact is that nearly two years after its acquisition of Lombardi, IBM has still failed to outline a clear path for its BPM customers. Yes, it made a marketing-oriented announcement about a roll-up of its disparate BPM portfolio into IBM BPM 7.5, but that is a unified offering in marketing-speak only.

I wonder after reading this if the only wayback machine is Appian’s blog publishing.  Maybe this is something they wrote in 2009 when the acquisition was announced?  or in 2010 when many analysts were unhappy with IBM’s lack of communication about the plan for Lombardi and WPS integration?  Or in 2011 springtime when Clay Richardson dissented from all other analysts and customers present at Impact by referring to the integration as “a new coat of paint”? At any of these times, Ben could have piled on with his post in a (somewhat) timely fashion.  But no, two years later he’s finally hit “publish”.  Maybe he missed all the Lombardi and IBM news the last two years and is just trying to catch up?  Maybe he’s just burned about losing a deal to IBM?  (this post also reads like a “mad because we lost a deal” post) Or maybe he doesn’t like Phil.

Appian has some good things going for it, and they made a bet on mobile/cloud that was “early” in the BPM space, relative to competitors.  But this whole David vs. Goliath thing is a bit of an art.  Phil was pretty good at it, Ben still needs some work – more edge, less sour grapes.

Regardless, he clearly doesn’t understand what happened vis-a-vis IBM and Lombardi.  Lombardi was, at times, in heated competition with IBM.  Given that IBM bought Lombardi, one could infer that IBM learned a bit about BPM from Lombardi and Phil, and realized that there was another take on BPM in the market – Lombardi’s – that would be better received than IBM’s current portfolio, and would create more value with IBM’s resources behind it for both IBM and Lombardi shareholders and customers.

If you look at IBM’s BPM vision (also commented on here, and here, and here) – which Ben derides without knowing it – IBM has adopted Lombardi’s vision of BPM and added some pieces to the puzzle that create additional value (ILOG, Integration Designer, the message bus, Business Monitor, etc).  And the key thing that IBM and Phil had to do when bringing Lombardi and WPS and ILOG together was not a technical problem, it was a business problem.  They had to define the go-to-market strategy – edit the value propositions to a manageable number that IBM’s huge sales force can really leverage.  Of course lots of development effort went into creating IBM BPM – but to get the integration “right” without understanding how to take the products to market would be an utter failure to the market, customers, and shareholders.  Now, it could have gone the other way.  Lombardi might have been swallowed up by IBM, discontinued, and chalked up as a “technology buy”.  But it wasn’t.  It became the centerpiece of a new strategy and BPM go-to-market for IBM.  Phil did get the change he wanted – from the inside.  And that change is ongoing, with a few more surprises yet to come.

Customers aren’t “forced to figure out their own path” – the upgrade path is clearly defined and actually well-supported by IBM.   Unsurprisingly, Ben’s role doesn’t include knowing the real story behind IBM’s products and strategy.  That’s not corporate communications’ job.  But you’d think he’d be a little more timely with his shots across the bow, if not more accurate in his firing solution.  I tell you one thing, I know what corporate communications folks are really good at: cherry picking.

Bruce has left no stone un-turned in his review of IBM BPM 7.5.  In his words:

IBM is the big dog in the BPMS landscape.  BPM 7.5 combines the old WebSphere Lombardi Edition and WebSphere Dynamic Process Edition (aka Process Server) in a single offering.  More than two separate products in a single box, there is real integration under the covers, in the form of a shared Process Center repository.  Find out all about it in my latest Industry Trend Report, available here.  You’ll need to be registered on BPMS Watch to access it.

Registration is simple but you might miss the link in the lower right-hand corner of the site (or just search for “Registration” on the page).  It is a comprehensive report and if you’re considering IBM BPM, this is worth a read.

Fred Wilson has one of the best blogs on the subject of startups and investing.  Which is really no surprise given his cat-bird seat on the whole industry.  As a services startup, I occasionally find passages in his writing that really resonate, like this one:

Roelof Botha, a leading VC with Sequoia, once gave me a great piece of advice in helping founders start to focus on company building. He said founders should think of their company as a product and build it and shape it with the same passion and care. I’ve taken that to heart and passed it on a few times.

No matter how or when you do it, building a company is a required step to sustainability. Positive cash flow is not enough to keep the company independent and solvent. You need a culture, systems, and processes to keep everyone happy and functioning well.

This is so true.  We’re still a work-in-progress at BP3.  We’ve been building our culture, and our team of amazing individuals. But we’re still learning the right processes for the new situations we’re finding ourselves in as we get bigger and are tackling more projects simultaneously.

How you handle these situations has a big effect on how the company performs for its customers.  When we have a “process failure”, if all we do is firefight in a one-off fashion, that will help the customer and solve the short-term problem.  But we are trying to build a lasting company.  We need to not only put out the fire but adjust our operating guidelines so that we identify these issues and situations early – and have an organization and response in place to resolve the issue without firefighting.

Every time we put out a fire we’re also taking a step back and trying to think about whether this is something we need to address systemically or organizationally, or whether this is a one-off event.  And even for the one-off events- what’s the best escalation path for dealing with those without derailing core business functions?

Great comment down below the main article by Charlie Crystal:

That’s one of the most enjoyable parts of building a company–defining what kind of people you want to be, the impact you want to have on the world, your employees, your community; and then cheerfully getting it done and evangelizing what you do, why you do it, and how you do it.

This is company building, and it is good stuff.

Bruce Silver, never one to shy from a debate, weighs in with a post I largely agree with:

The question is BPM part of case management, or is case management part of BPM? is a metaphysical one.  I think, however, it is a proxy for the real question, can a BPMS do a good job with case management, or do you need a special dedicated tool?  It’s obvious that if a single offering could provide both, users would prefer it over separate dedicated offerings.  And it’s equally obvious that it can be done, although it’s fair to say that the offerings may not be good enough yet.  Back in 2005, people said you needed separate BPM platforms for human workflow and integration processes.  It was just a matter of time, and not that long a time.

In one paragraph, I think Bruce has succinctly cut down 90% of the noise:

1. This is a metaphysical question. In a practical sense, who cares.
2. To the extent that people care, it is because they’re substituting this metaphysical / philosophical question for a practical one: “Can a BPMS do a good job with Case Management?” (or ACM)
3. Everyone understands customers would like to have one tool that does both. And makes breakfast.  Thus the fear and uncertainty and doubt about this issue among software vendors.
4. Anyone who can code worth a lick can see that it can be done. But as Bruce says, there’s a lot of room for improvement on most of the tooling out there.
5. History suggests the ultimate answer.

He then moves on to discuss how a case might be different from a process.  Overall a great read.

Jacob Ukelson posted about preventing failure vs. fixing failure.  He make a few good points and along the way once again compares ACM / BPM by implication.  In a sense, many will argue, ACM is about learning from failure, and BPM about preventing failure:

One of the key reasons companies deploy a BPM suite is to prevent failure. This is a major selling point for many BPM solutions. A key goal of a BPM suite is to enable the deployment of process driven solutions that prevent a deployed process from failing.

But of course, as he points out later, it isn’t always cheaper to prevent failure rather than fix it. ( Not to mention, in some businesses, fixing it is an opportunity to delight the customer. ) This  is the crux of it:  the arguments about failure are talking past each other.  Process Improvement (BPM) should aim to reduce preventable failures of a fairly routine nature.  Data entry errors, for example.  Logical inconsistencies. This isn’t the primary or only goal, but it certainly is one important form of process improvement for many processes out there. But the idea that we should learn from failure isn’t exactly a new one either… Max Pucher’s blog is an excellent example of this concept in the 70′s and 80′s.  The Lean Startup is an excellent example from the startup world.

If you’re familiar with six sigma technique (a fairly mature method that predates my professional career), then you’re likely familiar with the Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA).  In it, you rate possible or anticipated failures by:

• Severity – how bad will it be if it happens?
• Frequency – how likely or how often is it to happen?
• Detectability – how easy and reliable is the detection of the failure (or pre-detection).

Different remedies apply to the failures depending on their characteristics.  Often this is applied at a pretty tactical level.  But conceptually you can apply it at a macro or management level.  Such aphorisms as “worry about what you can control, not what you can’t” and “prepare for the worst hope for the best” are perhaps simplified examples of this kind of thinking.  Much business advice could be reduced to focusing on what matters and letting go of what doesn’t.  Some failures don’t warrant preventative treatment, and some do.  This isn’t exactly a new idea.

The kind of “preventing failure” behaviors that ACM folks are pushing against are mostly organizational or cultural in nature rather than procedural. It isn’t like BPM proponents are advocating that businesses circle the wagons and just focus on preventing failures.

So in summary -  where you want to play it safe deploy a process solution focused on managing structured processes, if you need agility (and are willing to accept its associated risk) then you should focus on “first fault problem resolution” for your unstructured processes – rather than try to structure them to prevent failure.

This isn’t as easy as it sounds for some businesses.  Let’s talk the First Horizon oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.  Did they need agility or preventing failure out there on the platform?  And which situation did their decision-making process most resemble?  (Given that individual operators could and would override long-established safety protocol, I think we can infer that they were on the side of more agility vs. more preventative).  Other businesses, and other situations, would have a different profile and tolerance for various kinds of failure.

If you’re going to have agility and learn from failure, don’t forget one other thing.  You need really good leadership.  If you don’t have that, the results of failure might surprise you.

So John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame picks up on Seth Weintraub’s report that two-thirds of Google’s mobile search revenue comes from iOS devices.  John’s analysis echoes our own thoughts on the subject:

I’ve speculated for years that by making Apple into an enemy, Google could wind up losing money with Android, long-term, compared to a hypothetical world where they’d kept Android as a BlackBerry-ish OS rather than an iPhone-ish one. iPhone users are the cream of the crop, demographically.

It isn’t at all clear that Android is a net-positive for Google’s bottom line given the relative marketshare of Android devices vs. iOS devices, and the relative search share (which is where Google’s revenue comes from), and the costs of supporting and defending Android (not to mention, buying a manufacturer).

It just feels like Google hasn’t been editing itself enough.  And prematurely it is taking on more fights than any company would rightly be interested in taking on.

To put it in perspective, right now Google is likely making twice the revenue from search on iOS than it is for search on Android.  I would have guessed at (and have always assumed) rough parity between Android and iOS devices, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.  With competitors like these, who needs friends?

http://www.bp-3.com/blogs/2011/08/its-also-about-what-you-dont-do/

John Reynolds writes about the curious case of the disappearing BPM Programmer:

So where does this distinction between Case and Process leave the BPM Programmer?  Are BPM skills irrelevant in the new world of Dynamic Case Management and Social Process?  Are the BPM Programmer’s skills doomed for irrelevance every few years just as the skills of System Programmers (C begat C++ begat Java begat Ruby etc.)?

Will BPM Programmers disappear into the mists of interesting but irrelevant oddities of the past?

The question arises simply because a small but vocal chorus has been calling BPM a subset of Case Management, or predicting the end is near for BPM. Does that mean BPM skills and jobs are thus in decline?

Not to worry.  BPM was always the tool not the goal.  The goal is managing business better.  As the Navy Seals would say, equip the man, don’t man the equipment. BPM is a means to an end.

Processes aren’t going away anytime soon.  Besides, as John says: “Your job has always been about writing software the Manage Business. Process is at the core of Business Management, but you always had to deal with Objects, Rules, and Events.”

Well said.  BPM is here to stay.  It didn’t burn brightly and fade away, it is a slower, steadier progression.  As you would expect it to be, if you understand what it is.  And the momentum is still building, rather than fading.  The name may change, the tools may evolve, but the goal of running businesses better isn’t going away.