ActionBase Blog - Thoughts on Collaboration Process Management Unstructured Compliance and Audit » human

Some Thoughts on “Thinking for a Living”

Jacob Ukelson — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 09:45:06 +0000

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).

Human Processes – Content is Just Something to Talk About…

Jacob Ukelson — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:14:38 +0000

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.

The Collaboration Explosion – Web Apps Galore

admin — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:58:44 +0000

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…)