It is that time of the year when you can start making predictions on the “future of …”. At first I thought it would be a little silly to talk about the future of ACM (since the name is so new), but since we have been doing ACM (though not by that name) for about 10 years here at ActionBase, I decided to sum up my thoughts on where I think ACM is headed.

I couldn’t make it to Phil Gilbert’s BPM2010 keynote, but caught up by reading Keith Swenson’s excellent summary.  Phil quotes an IBM study that “2.5% of the processes are complex, 22.5% are somewhat complex (less than 200 steps), 75% are not complex at all. This last category is done today by excel over email.”

I don’t usually do unabashed plugs for our product but I just couldn’t resist – 75% of process are done through excel over email! ActionBase anybody???

We had a great panel on Adaptive Case Management at the BPM2010 conference. About 35-40 attendees – and they participated, making it more of a group discussion than a panel. It was great – and it shows that there is a lot of interest in the BPM community about ACM.

One participant (I didn’t get his name) summarized the conversation by the intriguing statement”So BPM is for processes, ACM is for best practices” – from earlier comments he made it was clear he was a management consultant.

I think his statement is a good way of looking at ACM – especially if you come from a management consulting background. According to wikipedia “A best practice is a technique, method, process, activity, incentive, or reward which conventional wisdom regards as more effective at delivering a particular outcome than any other technique, method, process, etc. when applied to a particular condition or circumstance.” also “A given best practice is only applicable to particular condition or circumstance and may have to be modified or adapted for similar circumstances. In addition, a “best” practice can evolve to become better as improvements are discovered”.

For business process the wikipedia entry states “A business process or business method is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product (serve a particular goal) for a particular customer or customers. It often can be visualized with a flowchart as a sequence of activities”

They way I read that is that best practices are guidelines about how certain types of human work should get done (or at least a codification of successful ways the work was done in the past) – but it remain a flexible, high-level framework under the control of the participants, not a step by step structured guide (as would be defined in a BPMN model). On the other hand process (though I don’t completely agree with wikipedia)  is always structured (and so perhaps “unstructured process” and “unpredictable process” are oxymorons).

So given those definitions he is certainly right “ACM is for best practices, BPM for process”. The “good news” is then we have BPM (Business Process Management) and bpm (best practice management  :)

If you are interested I have a previous post on best practices (and how checklists are possibly the right level of modeling for ACM) at “Guidelines, Best Practices and Checklists – the Process Model for Unstructured Processes?“.

Admitting that one cannot control one’s addiction or compulsion;

• Don’t try to structure every process. Most of the world’s business processes are currently unstructured and executed using email and documents. Many of these just can’t be structured. Even though more and more processes will get structured over time, an even greater number of unstructured processes will be continue to be created.

Recognizing a greater power that can give strength;

• The reason that there are so many unstructured processes is because in the world of knowledge work, that is how people get things done. Don’t try to structure processes that are inherently unstructured – you’ll fail. Here are some basic questions to help ascertain whether your process can be structured or not:
  • Does the process have a lot of ad-hoc, unpredictable activity associated with it (i.e does it change each time it is executed)?
  • Are there a lot of exceptions associated with process?
  • Is the process a people process that is heavily dependent on the skill and knowledge of the participants –do they need to be in charge of the flow? Is negotiation and discussion between participants a major part of the process?
  • Does the process require investigation and research?
  • Is the process generating and gathering (for the most part) unstructured data and content (i.e. documents)?
  • Does the process flow change based on the accumulated documents and content?

Examining past errors with the help of a sponsor (experienced member);  

• Get an adaptive case management (ACM) mentor (come join us at the ACM mentor camp on Sept 17) and learn to ask some basic questions about your processes and their structure.

Making amends for these errors;

• Take a look at your processes from a new angle – maybe they should remain unstructured, and you need to provide just enough of a framework to make them manageable, but not so much as to strangle them. Maybe there is a reason people stick to email and documents for certain processes.

Learning to live a new life with a new code of behavior;

• Don’t think every process should be modeled.  Maybe your process can’t be rigorously modeled. Maybe the structure will emerge over time, or maybe never. Maybe tracking and monitoring can take place of control and rigorous modeling. Maybe “trust but verify” works better than “lock it down”. Maybe a BPMS and BPMN just aren’t the right tools. Think about the social and human aspects of your process and process participants (and the process experience).

Helping others that suffer from the same addictions or compulsions

• Help spread the word in the process community. There are structured processes – which is where BPMS excel. Unstructured, unpredictable human processes – they exist, and aren’t just “processes that haven’t yet been structured” – that is where ACM can help.

I started to think about this while reading an article in the Harvard Business Review about “When Emotional Reasoning Trumps IQ“. When I think of BPM, I think of processes that have been analyzed and modeled – i.e. smart people have gotten togther to analyze, understand and model a process using their IQ.  When I think about dynamic or adaptive case management (ACM) I think about processes that evolve as part of the negotiation, interaction and collaboration between the participants of the process as they strive toward a goal – of course IQ is involved, but so is a lot of EQ.

This aspect of ACM  vs. BPM isn’t mentioned much. Maybe because most of the people in the discussion are from a techical background. From my experience, when people collaborate – they negotiate, which is natural part of the give and take of getting the job done. Negotiation and discussion may be the most important part of the whole process – and certainly key to understanding why the flow of a specific instance of unpredictable process emerged as it did. Emergent processes emerge just as much by EQ as by IQ.

A key aspect of ACM is managing and supporting negotiation. How does ACM link the negotiations and discussions back to the goals of case? Negotiation and discussion are a first class part of any knowledge process, and need to be supported, managed and integrated into the process flow. 

ACM needs to support EQ just as much as IQ .

Well, Google killed Google Wave.  I think the key reason was that there was a mismatch between the targeted marker (consumers) and the market that could have benefited most (enterprise). Another reason was that it was essentially an infrastructure play – it defined a protocol that could be used as platform for building interesting collaboration paradigms. It was complex infrastructure too – not just a simple services call.  Complex infrastructure adoption (especially in the enterprise market), doesn’t just magically happen in a single year (mainstream enterprise adoption of Wiki in the enterprise is just starting to happen now – 15 years after Wikis were invented).  Finally it wasn’t integrated into email (or gmail) but was a standalone product – requiring people buy into the paradigm completely and leave email, or manage two separate systems. Keith Swenson has a good post on the subject: http://kswenson.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/google-wave-no-effect-on-bpm-acm/.

I think that if Google would have built Wave into an enterprise extension of Gmail, and provided the features needed by the enterprise – they would have had a winning combination. I have written about this in the past in my blog (http://blog.actionbase.com/does-google-wave-docverse-adaptive-case-management-by-google, http://blog.actionbase.com/can-google-wave-become-a-disruptive-good-enough-bpms) and in articles http://www.information-management.com/newsletters/enterprise_collaboration_tool_technology_email-10016792-1.html. Of course they would have also needed to move away from an advertising based model, to a more standard fee based enterprise software pricing model. So all those taken together (especially the enterprise business model part) is my guess why Wave was pulled from the market.

As the Adaptive Case Management (ACM) discussion is maturing, and the community is starting to define what is needed by an ACM system – I still think that Google Wave, Google Docs and Docverse could have been pulled together in such a way that it would have made a real impact on the business process management (BPM) market.  Those Google tools, integrated into Gmail – along with a robust reporting and analytics would have been a real game changer in the ACM market – especially for mid-size enterprises. Google had all the pieces, they just needed to pull them together – and the will to really enter the enterprise market.

I am sorry to see Google Wave depart, especially since they didn’t even try to enter the enterprise market.  It could have turned the business process management market on its head.

Another topic came up during the Tweetjam – what are standard use cases for ACM? There were a lot of examples – but twitter being twitter, none were described beyond a few words. I thought this would be a good time to flesh out a pretty popular use case – tracking executive management decisions, especially at the board of directors level. I like this example since it clearly differentiates ACM from BPM – I don’t think even the most diehard BPM evangelists would attempt to use a BPMS to create a board of directors decision management tool.

For example, let’s take a process initiated as a result of a decision taken during a board of directors meeting. In this example the meeting takes place, decisions are made and processes are initiated – but the actual processes executed is different every time, dependent on the context of the board meeting. For example, a bank’s board may be worried about the risk profile of the bank, especially their loans. So they initiate a process regarding the risk management of loans to European real estate and construction projects. In this case, the bank made large loans for the construction of commercial real estate projects in a number of European countries, and those projects have reached a point where they will be asking for additional funding to enable the project’s completion. In the period since the original loans were granted, both the macro and micro economic environment has changed, causing the bank to revisit the original assumptions underlying the loans. These loans now represent large, relatively risky loans and have the possibility of external scrutiny of the handling of those deals – so the board decided to take a closer look. The board requested that the international banking division and the real estate division jointly look into the viability and risk of the projects, taking into account various deal parameters such as the current legal situation of the country involved, the macro economic outlook, the expected amount of financing that will be requested, the financing sources for the projects, the capital structure of the projects, the current viability of the developers. Of course such a deep dive process will generate a lot of activity involving numerous people throughout different divisions in the bank, and experts from outside the bank, the specific participants and information assembled are dependent on the specifics of the loans being examined.

As I stressed in previous posts, for ACM to work – there needs to be a process owner, someone with the responsibility of ensuring the needed work gets done, and the process is driven to completion. In this example, there is a senior executive that owns each part of the process, but it is the corporate secretary’s role to provide oversight, make sure that process is completed in a timely fashion, and the board is briefed on the results. Today, such a process would probably be executed via emails and documents (e.g. spreadsheets) – without any management visibility, and without any IT support for managing the process. Missed handoffs, lost follow-ups and old versions of documents can all conspire to cause the process to fail. An adaptive case management system can ensure that the corporate secretary can provide an appropriate level of oversight and insight into the process – without the need to completely dictate the execution of the process and the work being done. The ability to have the process owners (and the corporate secretary) monitor, track and report on the process without providing so much management as to strangle it, lowers the process risk and increases corporate compliance and governance.

That is main driver behind this use case – risk management. The key to managing risk for unstructured processes is managing the handoffs between participants, managing the documents involved and providing real-time and historical visibility into actual process execution. That is what ACM provides.

Our book, Mastering the Unpredictable has many more real world ACM use cases.

I read an interesting article in the McKinsey Quarterly (free registration is required) on “Five ways CFOs can make cost cuts stick“. From my perspective most interesting part is the graph that shows that while cost of goods sold (COGS) has gone down 2.7% over the last decade, sales, general and administrative (SG&A) costs haven’t budged.

A lot of things go into SG&A (like travel and offices), but for most companies the bulk of SG&A is in compensation, or people costs. I think that explains the lack of progress in the area – most SG&A type work is knowledge work (or call it it office work if you like) and there have been very few effective widespread productivity enhancers for this type of work in the last decade.

I believe that to bring real, widespread productivity gains to this type of work – we will need a combined process+collaboration perspective focused on knowledge worker productivity. The key will be to bring transparency to knowledge work – and just enough control to manage the process, but no such much as to strangle it. The article alludes to the need for transparency in the article and Jim McGee has an excellent post on the need for transparency - “Managing the visibility of knowledge work“. Solving the problem also needs collaboration within the process context as John Tropea discusses in his latest blog on “Have we been doing Enterprise 2.0 in reverse : Socialising processes and Adaptive Case Management“ .

I am hoping that Adaptive Case Management will be the begining a real focus on this issue. Maybe this can be the decade that we really start lowering SG&A cost by enhancing knowledge worker productivity.

A reminder – we will be having a tweetjam on Adaptive Case Management on July 15 at 12pm EDT, to find out more click here.

There have been a growing number of conversations on the web around the differences between business process management (BPM) and adaptive case management(ACM) – for example here.  A lot of those conversations end up discussing the definition of BPM, and whether BPM Suites (the BPM tools, not the discipline) can actually handle ad-hoc, unpredictable human processes or not.

I don’t think we’ll ever find a definition of BPM (the discipline, not the tool) that everyone will agree upon. Just for argument’s sake I’d like to use the definition – “BPM is discipline of making work processes simpler”.  I know it isn’t a perfect definition – but using it does have interesting implications. 

• What is a work process? Well, I think that is intuitively simple – those are the processes used to generate the work products required by the business. A more rigorous definition could be nice, but at least for me – that is good enough.
• What make a process simple? Well first off, it has to be correct (i.e if the process doesn’t generate the required work product, then it may be simple – but the “null” case of simple doesn’t matter). So beyond correctness – what makes a process simple? I think that is a very hard question – but I found a nice set of ten “Laws of Simplicity” that I think are interesting to think about in this context (see John Maeda’s Laws of Simplicity).

1. The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
2. Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
3. Savings in time feel like simplicity.
4. Knowledge makes everything simpler.
5. Simplicity and complexity need each other.
6. What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.
7. More emotions are better than less.
8. In simplicity we trust.
9. Some things can never be made simple.
10. Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.

I think the first four laws sum up a lot of how BPM makes a process simpler and what the modelling stage of BPM is about. As complex as models are, they are simplifying metaphor used by BPM practitioners. The model is BPM’s expression of law 4, the model is the knowledge about the process, and that knowledge is what enables the process to be made simpler.

I see  lot of the arguments between BPM and ACM around Laws 5,6 and 9 – about whether it is even possible to apply the BPM simplicity metaphors to certain processes. Applying laws 5,6 and 9 is a lot of where the line between BPM and BPMS blur. Models can mean lots of things – it can be as rigorous as a BPMN model or as loose as guidelines and checklists – almost every BPMS leans towards rigorous BPMN models. ACM proponents believe that there are a whole set of processes that can not be simplified using the basic BPM simplification tool, the rigorous model.

Law 7 is why I think Google Wave is an interesting paradigm for BPM – it focuses on discussions and conversations, things that get people involved and participating. The Social BPM movement is a step in this direction – but only for a very specific process, the process of creating a model.  These is nothing special about modelling – there are many other processes like it that would benefit from the appropriate tools. Also, BPMS would be better off if they started to account for Law 7 (though it sort of is “anti-techie”) and focusing as much effort on the end user experience as the process models. People use tools that they like and  that empower them – that is true both in a consumer and business settings.

As BPM has evolved a technical platform to support more and more process types – the tools have already become quite complex – and now vendors are adding rules and events. I think ACM is partly a backlash to that complexity - trying address Law 8 by limiting the scope of BPMS (though sometimes I think that Law 8 is just not appropriate for technical tools – technical people love complexity and features when it comes to their tools, the problem is when they think everyone feels that way too).

Finally Law 10 – This is an interesting law from a BPM perspective – isn’t BPM about exposing and codifying the routine (which is version of the obvious)? So maybe BPM’s job is to lay the groundwork so we can get to Law 10 in business processes, and something else will need to come along enabling the next step towards Law 10.