Both Scott Francis (Leading from Below) and Adam Deane (BPM: Business Politics Management) did a good job of articulating and demonstrating how important politics are in implementing a BPM project. I couldn’t agree more – managing politics is a big part of getting anything done in a business of any size.

There is one point that I think they both missed (or at least didn’t focus on) – managing those politics is just as important as managing the process – and politics exist in every (yes every) non-routine process in business. Unless the process is fully automated (or so routine that it should be fully automated) – people and their judgment are involved. Once that is the case, politics are sure to follow. Those politics are managed in meetings, discussions, conversations, email and documents. Also, they are just as important as the process itself – since they influence the outcome of the process.

So yes, Business Politics Management is the cousin of Business Process Management – a kissing cousin. Most BPMS vendors don’t consider politics something a BPMS should address. In my opinion as long as BPMS tools ignore all the stuff that goes on around the process (i.e. politics), but has influence on the outcome of the process – they have a big hole in functionality.

I was reading a Gartner report on “Predicts 2011: PPM Goes From Managing Projects to
Managing Value and Change” (PPM is project and portfolio management – never eactly sure why it is considered separate from BPM, but that is another issue. Maybe we should try to understand why people don’t use BPM for PPM…).

It had a chart about the certainty of requirements – which led me to think about BPM projects and the certainty of requirements. In many BPM engagements, discovering the model of existing process is a large part of the project. Once the model exists, that is when the rest of a BPM suite is brought to bear. So in many ways the BPMN (or other notation) is the equivalent of requirements. That led me to the following chart (the way I believe most BPM suites view the world):

I believe that most real world processes actually look like:

Real world process requirements (especially in today’s modern economy) are lot more uncertain than BPMS vendors would like people to think.

One thing that has always bothered me about the BPM and ACM communities is that we are all techies. We claim to provide tools in direct support of the business, but in reality very few business people actually care about the nuances in the ongoing BPM vs. ACM argument – or even understand (or care about) what those tools actually are. My guess is that for most business people our ongoing ACM vs BPM vs ECM conversation is about as interesting as an argument about “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?”. We need to focus on business issues in terminology that business people can understand and appreciate.

I was reading an article in the Harvard Business Review on “Strategies for Learning from Failure” by Amy C. Edmondson and she made some very interesting points that are very relevant for a BPM vs ACM comparison from a business perspective.  She points out that mistakes (really business process issues – but she doesn’t call them that) fall into three broad categories – preventable, complexity-related, and intelligent. Many of the articles in the same issue use a similar taxonomy to talk about the context of failure. I really liked the article (and the issue in general) because even though most don’t use the process word explicitly – they are really talking about business processes – structured, semi-structured and unstructured. But since they are business oriented, rather than technically oriented - they use very different terminology than us here in ACM\BPM\ECM community.

Using her taxonomy – BPM (as it used today) is focused on optimizing and “preventing failure in predictable operations”. She doesn’t use the words BPM anywhere but it is clear for anyone with any knowledge of BPM that a BPM  system would help enormously in this context. It is interesting that she talks about checklists in this context – which supports the idea that if ACM is easy enough to implement and use – it can provide much of the benefit of a full fledged BPM system, or at least be a good first step towards a full fledged BPM. I think this is what worries BPM vendors most.

In the second category – “unavoidable failures in complex systems”, she states that “a large number of organizational failures are due to the inherent uncertainty of work. A particular combination of needs, people and problems may have never occured before.”  In my mind she is describing exactly the domain that ACM targets – with the goals of ensuring that “small failures” don’t go unnoticed and cause a catastropic failure, and gathering information about the actual execution of the process to facilitate best practice creation and learning. For me this is why knowledge work needs ACM.

The third category “intelligent failure at the frontier’ – this is where people are truly innovating, experimenting and learning new things or “when answers are not known in advance because this exact situation has not been encountered before and perhaps never will be again”.  I don’t think ACM or BPM provide much assistance here.

So more than a technical under pinning for the ACM vs BPM debate which always seems to devolve into a feature\ function discussion by vendors and analysts, I think we need a business underpinning for process – and use that to define the different tools using a business context.

One key differentiator between BPM and ACM is the level of “ad-hoc”-ness related to the processes being served by those tools. A question that almost always comes up with respect to ACM is that whether it is a stopgap measure – a way to manage for processes that haven’t yet been structured, or that aren’t cost effective to structure. It is a sensible question for someone that spends their time looking at existing processes and use a BPM methodology create some order from what seems to  (at least at first blush) unstructured chaos.

By creating a formal description of an existing process (perhaps using BPMN, perhaps not) a structure is created for the existing process, formalizing the tasks and flow related to the work done in service of that process.  Once that is done, the process can be analyzed, optimized and codified.  All of that makes a lot of sense for large processes that have been around for a while, and that are well understood. I would add also for processes that lend themselves to being structured, but that isn’t the point here – so no reason to get into that argument.

Once you have done all that, most organizations hope that they are done, and now can just use their newly minted processes for ever. Sort of like the waterfall method for creating software. Everyone in the industry knows that isn’t true – that processes are living, changing entities. More like the iterative (or agile) methods for creating software. If you look at the “agile manifesto” for software:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

the principles are just as applicable to process management as they are to software development. These principles came to be after decades of software development, and people realized that the old process of building software wasn’t keeping up with customer, needs and there needed to be a change. Agile methodologies haven’t been mainstream for that long – but I think that most everyone in the industry believes that they are the wave of the future.

So how does BPM stand up relative to those principles? Social BPM is a way address the issue of customer collaboration (though in many cases the collaboration is around the model – in other words the contract). The growing area of process analytics is the industries answer to “responding to change”.

 I think that traditional BPM does less well on the first two principles – it is pretty clear that comprehensive documentation (the process model) is still a basic requirement. Probably because of the mindset – process and tools take precedence over individuals and interaction. So not so good on those fronts.

 Though many position ACM as a way to respond to change, for me it is a process oriented way to focus on individuals, interactions and working software (which make it more amenable to change).

It is interesting that the “Agile Manefesto” was created as a response to the existing “best practice” – for software development, just as ACM emerged from the process community. The “Agile Manifesto” was created by developers, not customers or analysts. I think it is time for the process community to create a “Process Manifesto”.

A conversation on Adam Deane’s blog on “Adaptive Case Management, or ACM for short” got me thinking about banking processes and whether or not they are structured (not just processes done by banks – for example we have good success at board decision tracking for banks – clearly an unstructured process).

A while back we had some checks stolen, along with the rest of the contents of my wife’s purse. We immediately went to the police where we were met with a certain amount of disinterest – they told us to  go take care of our important documents at the relevant official offices (e.g. driver’s license)  , notify the bank about credit card and checks. No need to file report, since it almost certainly won’t lead to anything – and the police officer in charge of reports was out that day.

So immediately we went and cancelled all the checks for the account.  It was a simple procedure of filling out a form and paying a fee. Or so I thought. A few weeks ago a check was drawn from our account and not rejected. I didn’t see it until about a week later. Calling the bank – I reminded them that we had cancelled all the checks. “OK” they said “just get us a copy of the police report, give us power of attorney to prosecute, come in sign some more documents and you’ll get a refund.”  I had thought that it must be a misunderstanding since we had already cancelled all our checks, but no they wouldn’t agree to anything less. It turns out they had a process to follow for cancelling issued checks that was tuned for cases where the client didn’t notify the bank of the stolen checks – and there was no way around the system. Even though that clearly wasn’t the case here, the clerk had little or no leeway in decision making. So wanting my money back I filed a report at the local police station, trouped up the bank to sign the papers. A very polite clerk took a copy of the report, and gave me papers to sign. To top it off he read me a paragraph that the “process” required him to say – “As a benefit to you we will cancel your check, and return your money. Please understand we are doing this in order to provide good service to a valued customer, but are under no obligation to do so.”  

“but you didn’t follow the instructions I specifically gave (and paid for) so how can this be a benefit? You shouldn’t have cashed the check at all” I said.

“Sorry” said the clerk “just process related boilerplate. Doesn’t really apply in your case, just sign these papers and I’ll credit your account”

Of course the papers had the same wording. I protested, but if I didn’t sign he couldn’t continue the process and credit my acoount. I had the feeling of working with the Mob – they take something of yours inappropriately, and then ransom it back. I really started to get mad, so we got a bank attorney and they agreed for the clerk to erase that line from the document. I signed and asked to see the manager.

Waited for a while and went in to see the manager. She opens our meeting (after having glanced at the screen) – “I am happy that as a benefit to you we returned your money. Please understand we are doing this in order to provide good service to a valued customer….”  Well you can imagine what happened next…

Reading the responses to Peter Schoof’s  eBizq question “What type of event leads to BPM vs. what type leads to ACM?” and Sandy Kelmsley blog about “Knowledge Management, Social Media, Social BPM and Control” got me thinking about the link between work activities and work products.  One key difference between ACM and BPM(S) is that BPM(S) presupposes a pretty rigid set of tasks and activities that need to occur to generate a work result (in other words management is in control of the work process, not just expecting results). That implies a tight implicit (or maybe even explicit) link between the activities and the work product. Anything that isn’t directly related to the activities proscribed isn’t seen as bringing value – since it doesn’t enhance the result in any way. So if you aren’t doing the proscribed activities you are goofing off. 

I’ll wager that all of us in the ACM\BPM\ECM community (and everyone reading this blog) don’t work that way – and that a shrinking set of people in developed countries do work that way. It is true that for certain kinds of work a Tayloristic view still holds – my guess would be that is exactly the kind of work that is a prime candidate for outsourcing. For me, the prime goal of ACM is to provide process oriented tools for knowledge workers (augmenting the collaboration tools they already use) – not primarily a way to extend BPMS. Something that I can use to help me in my daily tasks.  I’ll wager that none of us use a BPMS for our daily work.

For most of us knowledge workers – the ability to connect activities to results can only be measured after the fact, not proscribed before the work get done.  If you look at some of the standard mechanisms that companies use to manage knowledge workers – e.g. management by objectives (MBO) – there is no direct attempt to proscribe activities. There is an attempt to proscribe goals – but in my experience the very high level goals stick, the more tactical goals tend to change quite often. Anyone who has ever been part of an MBO process knows that goals change between the time they are agreed upon until they are reviewed. Woe to the employee that comes to their MBO review meeting trying to explain that things failed (because the environment changed) – but they still met all the tactical goals in their MBO. Changing business circumstances, unforeseen changes in the business environment or even changes in personal circumstances all mean that business objectives need to be flexible. So if you can’t even dictate goals – how do you dictate and control activities related to those goals?

If we really want to be serious about building ACM tools for knowledge workers we need to create tools that are usable and adaptive enough that we use them ourselves in our own daily work lives. We need to eat our own dog food.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems are designed to manage data about customer in a customer centric way.  It keeps a history of interactions with the customer, and makes it easier for multiple reps to handle the same customer; they can use the CRM system to get a running history of pervious interactions with that customer. Well-designed CRM systems work well and help make customers happier since they see a “single face” no matter whether they get a different rep. As an added benefit, the business gets a “system of record” or “system of engagement” of interactions with the customer – data that can be leveraged for various uses.

Sometimes a customer interaction needs to kick off a process, not just a one off interaction. In many cases the process isn’t one that will managed by the CRM system – e.g. the customer has a unusual request, something needs to be checked, or maybe the process is what the customer is calling for (like the insurance claim example in Deb Miller’s blog) etc. For these processes the rep  goes outside the domain of the CRM system, leveraging various people and systems throughout the organization. In some cases, these are structured processes, and then it makes sense to embed (or link) a BPM system with the CRM systems (as Scott Francis suggested in his blog a while back, I just can’t find the reference).  However in many cases (since these tend to be driven by exceptions) an unstructured process defined by the specific customer and their needs is required. Then it makes sense to link your CRM system with an Adaptive Case Management (ACM) system.

The linkage isn’t only technical (though that needs to happen too). In order to make the link work – some process work need to take place to enable the linkage between CRM and ACM:

1. Who is responsible for the process? ACM needs a specific person to be designated as the owner of the end to end process. Unless you are a pretty big customer, there is no specific rep assigned to your account, but rather the CRM system works as the glue between the various reps you get at different times. That doesn’t work for an ACM process – you need to make sure that someone specific is assigned as the case or process owner.
2. How do the systems interact (and keep each other up to date)? The next time the customer calls regarding the process, the customer rep that answers the phone needs to know about where things stand. Since the CRM system is the face to the customer, the ACM system needs to update the CRM system with the current state of the process (whenever that state changes).
3. Which is the process system of record – CRM or ACM? Since this is a customer process, I would advocate keeping the process in both systems. The CRM system can give a view that cuts across customer processes for analysis, while the ACM system can give a view cutting across all unstructured process (whether or not they were generated by a customer).
4. Where do data and documents reside? ACM is very document centric (CRM also uses documents, but to a lesser extent). Here it makes sense to have a central repository that both systems use. The same holds for the structured data relating to the customer and the case. Appropriate access control mechanisms need to be in place to make sure people can only see what they should.

Linking the two systems correctly will give you an outstanding customer experience – reps will know exactly where things stand, and therefor so will your customers. Nothing falls between the cracks.

I was kinda of in a funk after I saw that Forrester made us only a contender in their analysis of Dynamic Case Management tools. It was a coup for vendor our size to even make onto the list (we are much smaller than the others their) and we have a different focus – but still – only a contender? I guess “Think Different” didn’t buy us many points… Their summary was right on target though –  we are  ”filling the gap between email chaos and process-centric DCM”.

Then I watched the demo for Assana the hot new startup from a co-founder of Facebook. For me it was a feeling of deja-vu. They are targeting exectly the same kinds of issues we address at ActionBase (we do it in email and documents, they do it on the web). They focus on managing checklists and tasks between users that are part of a long running process. They don’t focus on the documents related to those conversations – though I am guessing they do (or will) support attachments. They want their tool to be the “home environment”(or in their words where you live) in your daily work routine  - much the same way email is people’s current “home environment”. Yup – ActionBase in different clothing. They don’t use the word process much – but they are targetting exactly the unpredicticable, unstructured processes that ActionBase (and I believe ACM) targets.

Take a look at their demo and ours - I think that this new paradigm does fit the bill of a lightweight unstructured process management tool (which I believe is the same goal which drives ACM).  I think Google Wave was going down the same path before it was shuttered.

We are seeing all this activity (Google Wave, Asana, ActionBase and even ACM itself) because there is a growing recognition that tools for knowledge workers are lacking. Knowledge workers need lightweight tools to augment their current tools of choice (email and documents), that will both make it easier for them to do their jobs and to manage them.

A lightweight and easy to use tool for managing people’s everyday unstructured, unpredictable processes – that is what I think ACM is all about, and is what differentiates it from other types of case management tools (including Forrester’s Dynamic Case Management  definition as one of legacy case management).

One questions we get a lot is to describe real world business use cases for Adaptive Case Management. There are a number that we find our customers using – managing board decisions, investigations, complex project management, health safety and environment (HSE)  incidents, audits and M&A. We decided to do a video showing how to use ACM (of course our tool) in M&A.  To make it complete, we also use a data room (we used a free version of EMC’s eroom) – which is a standard way companies store and manage documents for due diligence during an M&A process. It is a little long (I spoke as quickly as could:)) – but hopefully informative.  Here it is:

Over the course of 2010 I have had the opportunity to discuss ACM with a variety of people – from deep techies that know very little about the business to business people that know very little about technology. In many of those cases the conversation was around some form of business process management – since (at least to me) it seemed a pretty well-known term that we could use as basis to compare different types of processes – structured business processes vs. unstructured (or unpredictable) processes.

In my mind the right approach to ACM is a platform approach. I think that most technical ACM folks (which right now seem to be most of the ACM community) think similarly. An ACM platform is technology enabling process participants (aka people) to get unstructured processes done better (less lost  info, fewer mis-steps and “lost” processes) and more easily (less cognitive overload and process bookkeeping) than if they used other non-ACM tools like plain email.  An ACM platform can be tailored for specific types of unstructured processes (M&A, Insurance claim processing, sales) providing a specific ACM solution or application (and hopefully you don’t need a technical degree to tailor the platform to a specific type of unstructured process).

Here is the catch – business folks don’t really understand or buy platforms, they buy applications. Technical folks understand platforms – but really believe that all processes need to be structured – it is only a matter of effort (the have been a couple of good posts that contrast this by Michael Poulin (representing the IT side)  on “Why Business Process is Always Structured“  and Keith Swenson (representing the ACM side) -”Structure is in the Eye of the Beholder“ .

The biggest issue with ACM is that business process management suites, which for many are the platform of choice  for process implementation, are sold to IT. The IT department understands platforms but doesn’t understand unstructured process. On the other hand, the business understands unstructured processes but doesn’t understand platforms.

So there seems to be two paths – get the IT folks to understand unstructured process, or get the business folks to understand platforms.

It seems to me that right now most of the effort is to get IT people on board with ACM. The problem is that (for some) means attempting to paint unstructured process management as just a “simple” extension of structured process management. It isn’t, and it requires a different way of thinking about process. I think that path will drastically limit the business impact ACM could have.  

To make a real impact on managing unstructured processes the shift needs to be driven by the business. For ACM to really catch on we need the business side – CEOs, CFOs, and COOs to really get on board with the business need of managing unstructured process, and to a platform oriented approach to managing unstructured processes. The only person that can do that is the CIO – the only question is how to convince them they should…