I watched an interesting lecture by Clay Shirky on information overload (Its not Information Overload, its Filter Failure), and quite a few of his points have meshed with what we have found at ActionBase. One of his points is that information overload has been with us for a long time – as a term it has been around for around 20 years, and for hundreds of years there has been more information free available then a person could manage. What has changed is the social based filtering systems that help alleviate the problem of information overload no longer work.

Using his argument – much of email overload is a social system design problem – there effectively no cost to sending an email (as opposed to the cost of say, printing a memo and sending it) so there is very little thought at the source about whether to  send an email or not. Especially, which has an economic incentive to pepper people with useless email (though there are technical solution helping with that). But what about the rest of  you email, the ones that aren’t spam, but aren’t critically important?

ActionBase helps alleviate the email overload issue by creating a different class of email called “ActionMail”.  Even though it is as easy to do as regular email (and you use the same tools), it actully has social mechanisms that helps with filtering at the source – ActionMail remains in the senders inbox until the process is complete, and the resulting email conversations are tracked. Those two additional features utilize normal human social systems to ensure that ActionMails aren’t just more spam, but indicate that the source (the initiator of the ActionMail) has done some filtering and has decided that this email is actualy somethingof import that shouldn’t be ignored.

By dividing everyday email into two classes (regular email and ActionMail) with similar but slightly different social paradigms, ActionBase ensures that your ActionBox is short and to the point, containing business email that really requires your attention, alleviating the problem of email overload.

That in a nutshell what Human Process Management is – a way to solve the issues with human processes that are done today  using regular email and documents (issues such as information overload, followup,  tracking, visibility), while allowing users to remain in their familiar email and document environment.

SharePoint is on fire. It the fastest-growing server product Microsoft has ever released. Bill Gates, during 2008’s SharePoint conference, remarked “SharePoint is a product that’s based on a vision of letting workers share information in a better way, and making sure that it’s done in a very broad fashion, creating a product that you can assume everyone in a company has access to, and creating templates that everybody is familiar with and they just use as a matter of course to get their job done.”
It has done a very good job of that on the document side. It provides a shared workspace that users can create themselves, and allows to groups to quickly form a collaborative site without IT involvement. In a report I read looking at actual usage of shared workspaces in the enterprise (actually done with EMC, not Sharepoint), the Gilbain Group states “a shared workspace fulfills several roles. It’s important to be able to access easily the single source of ‘the truth’ – most up-to-date versions of items where the shared workspace is the repository of reference. Proactive communications is also a factor. One-third of our respondents use a shared workspace for its communicative capabilities exchanging information, often as part of an ad hoc business process or a collaborative task, and a step beyond sending and receiving email messages.” – Collaboration and Social Media-2008, Taking Stock of Today’s Experiences and Tomorrow’s Opportunities, Geoffrey Bock , Steve Paxhia, The Gilbane Group June 9, 2008.
So how do link SharePoint with the group’s human processes? Well, you could try and use Workflow Foundation – but that is a developer tool – which means you have to get IT involved (to model and code the process, not exactly ad-hoc). You could use another BPM tool that supports SharePoint but again you need IT involved (to model and code the process, not exactly going to happen with ad-hoc processes). So most people just resort to using plain old email along with SharePoint workspaces for their ad-hoc, collaborative processes (same is true for all the other shared workspace products link EMC’s e-room). The problem is SharePoint (just like every other shared workspace product) has no real support for email based processes. That is exactly what “ActionBase for SharePoint” solves – finally a way to support ad-hoc, human email based processes in SharePoint. You can kick off email based processes from SharePoint, and manage and monitor the processes from both Outlook and SharePoint.

I am currently reading Thomas Davenport’s book “Thinking for a Living”. Though I had scanned sections of it before, this is the first time I am giving a thorough end-to-end reading. As I read it, I thougI would pcik out the parts relevant for Human Process Management.  In chapter two he gives a classification of different types of knowledge intensive processes which I think does a good job of segmenting the standard tools available today for knowledge workers.

• Transaction Model – Here companies use either bespoke applications, with the rules embedded in the app (e.g. CRM), or use BPM to build the app
• Integration Model – that is where BPM is most valuable, and BPM focus today.
• Expert Model - Browsers, Document repositories and  personal productivity applications are the tools available.
• Collaboration Model – This is what Human Process Management addresses. These are the unstructured, ad-hoc processes that people do everyday in email and documents, where  the overall work product is dependent on groups of knowledge workers collaborating. The fact that email reigns king for knowledge worker collaboration and coordination is show in a different chart, with knowledge workers spending about 20% of their day in email (even though the data is about 5 years old, itstill holds).

SharePoint is a great tool for collaboration between people, or as Microsoft puts it “SharePoint is an enterprise information portal that can be configured to run Intranet, Extranet and Internet sites.  Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 allows people, teams and expertise to connect and collaborate”.

The one piece that is missing from that description is the idea of business process – which I describe as the business context in which the documents exist and the collaboration takes place. Microsoft isn’t blind to this and in SharePoint 2010 is promoting “SharePoint Foundation 2010” which is a enhanced version of the current “Windows Workflow Foundation” to allow programmers to create workflows associated with a SharePoint site. Basing the process implementation on Windows Workflow Foundation has a number of problems from a technical perspective (requires programming, processes are limited to the boundaries of the SharePoint Site Collection and processes can’t be changed at runtime). This makes its OK for structured processes – but completely in appropriate for human processes – the ad-hoc, unstructured process that we manage here at ActionBase.

In my previous post I wrote that Microsoft’s approach to process surprised me since they own the business tools most associated with the execution of human processes – Outlook (email) and Office (Documents). SharePoint 2010 could have been the platform for the killer app for human process management – by linking unstructured processes and unstructured data, human collaboration and human processes.

Well here at ActionBase we decided to fill the void. By linking ActionBase and SharePoint, people can easily link together (within a SharePoint site) the documents and the processes related to those documents. “ActionBase for SharePoint” brings to SharePoint users and to the organization a whole set of advantages that radically increase the benefits and ROI of a SharePoint installation:

1. Documents stored in the site can be ActionDocs. That means that documents don’t need to be only passive – they can be used to initiate and track the processes related to them. The simplest way to think about this is “meeting minutes” – “ActionBase for SharePoint” allows the “meeting minutes” document to kick-off and monitor the processes and action items kicked-off at the meeting.
2. The activities of the group can now be managed. This doesn’t mean much if the site is a passive “read-only” portal, but that isn’t what SharePoint is about. It is about collaboration between people – and let’s face it, collaboration between people ALWAYS includes email. “ActionBase for SharePoint” links ActionMail and SharePoint – so the group can know the various activities taking place outside the site in email that provide the context for the site and its documents.
3. From an organizational standpoint, using “ActionBase for SharePoint” enables SharePoint to become the “system-of-record” not just of the documents – but of the context and activities that take place related to those documents. From a compliance standpoint this is huge. This means from a GRC perspective that Outlook + Office (the main GRC tools in most organizations) + SharePoint +ActionBase finally gives organizations a GRC tool that doesn’t require a new platform – or for people to change the way they usually do their work.

We truly believe that these advantages make “ActionBase for SharePoint” the killer extension to SharePoint.

I read an interesting post about ECM meets Enterprise 2.0 – 7 key trends. From a Human Process Management perspective the most interesing of the 7 trends was – “Trend #6 Conversations - Content is Just Something to Talk About”. This something I have been mentioning in previous posts – that the conversation (or the way we prefer to call it – the human process) provides that context for documents that are used by the participants in the process. ECM vendors lose this context  since they don’t keep track of the conversations (or human processes) that relate to the document. BPM vendors have the context – but only for structured processes - and they don’t link even that to content.

This also came up during the last WfMC meeting where we spent the day discussing “adaptive case management” (which in my opinion yet another name for what I have been calling Human Process Management). Other people call it unstructured processes (Gartner), some call it Advanced Case Management (Forrestor), some call it Adaptive Case Management (WfMC), some call it Human Process Management (ActionBase), some call it Wave(Google) and some call it plain old Case Management (Global360)  - but it is clear that the space between collaboration\documents(ECM\Web 2.0)  and process (BPM) - is receiving lot of interest.

After reading Keith Swenson’s recent post, I’m convined; we really are addicted to email. There’s no doubt about it. Or rather, we’re addicted to the methodology and mindset of email – responding with messages and attachments when and where they appear.
This, of course, causes complications, not the least of which is tracking progress and status. But we also have the issue of mutliple instances of documents, multiple copies of mailboxes if you log in elsewhere, and in the case of the bottomless pit of information that is Gmail, a complete mess of any and all content.

Are we stuck in a rut?

I’ll be honest, it’s difficult to wade through the multitude of solutions available for collaboration and communication, that are supposed to be the end of email.

Even among my peers, I encounter a strong resistance to web apps and online collaboration tools, and they still prefer emailing documents back and forth.

If we are to fight this phenomenon, it’s likely going to be a long and arduous battle. It took email years to work its way into the workplace, and now it seems well and truly entrenched. Education is a critical component, and teaching people to “put their toys away”, as Mr. Swenson suggests, is an important lesson.

But we don’t like to be told we’re wrong.  We like our familiar tools, we like what we know. New things come along, but Facebook doesn’t help most of us get more work done.

Getting over ourselves

What most of the collaborative tools and web apps I’ve mentioned try to do is make using them almost fun.

37 Signals have a design philosophy that makes their applications sexy, in computing terms. On the other hand, it doesn’t look like something that belongs in an Enterprise environment. It’s also not suited for non-project work, such as ad-hoc processes and short-term collaboration.

MediaWiki puts Wikipedia in our hands, but it’s got a tough markup, and getting into using it is a tough hurdle for many individuals whose time is too valuable learning new tools.

Google’s applications are so ubiquitous, it almost makes sense to default to using them whenever you need to collaborate with someone who’s not in the same organization as you are.

While these tools make a lot of sense for small companies, freelancers, and highly tech-savvy teams, the same is not always true for large-scale companies in the Enterprise category. Their employees are diverse in their levels of use of technology, the organization often wants to have a lot of control over access to internal information, and compliance requirements are higher than ever — something most of these tools aren’t concerned with.

From a user’s perspective, they are all far from providing the kind of control that users feel they have with MS Word, Outlook, and a good solid connection to a Windows network drive.

I myself, being a fan of many things web, am not crazy about having to login on a half-dozen different web apps, chucking things into The Cloud, and trying to convince my colleagues that this NEW web app is the one.

The key, apparently, is letting people use what they like and what they’re familiar with. Don’t try to force-educate your users – they won’t appreciate it. Leverage their existing skills, and work in your philosophy through there. The idea that email, and desktop applications like Outlook and Word are going to vanish tomorrow just because Google release a new application, browser and operating system for netbooks tomorrow, is naive. We’re not selling buggy whips just yet (Or so I hope…)