The complex nature of business processes...
A couple of days ago I came across an intriguing post titled "
Fear, Greed and Social Software" on Many2Many, a pretty thought-provoking blog from Corante. Some interesting thoughts, but one point in particular caught my eye. Ross Mayfield points to "The Only Sustainable Edge":
'In the one business strategy book you must read this year, The Only Sustainable Edge, by John Seely Brown and John Hagel, the authors not only argue that innovation is the only sustainable edge, but that collaboration underpins innovation itself. [...] the readers of this blog will be interested in this. "95% of IT expenditure in companies supports business processes. Almost nothing goes into the social fabric." Meanwhile, the vast majority of what workers actually do is handling exceptions to process, what you could call the domain of business practice.'There appears to be some dangerous thinking in here, of the "if all you have is a hammer, anything looks like a nail" type. I'm not sure if it's a misunderstanding within "The Only Sustainable Edge" or by Ross Mayfield, but it sounds dangerously like an assumption that "social fabric" - which is an enabler of collaboration within a business - is somehow not related to business processes.
Business processes and "social fabric" within enterprises are certainly disconnected today - but that's the fault of the technology we have; it's nothing to do with the nature of business processes. Business processes are rich, collaborative, often unpredictable and organic. It's just that the shadow that they cast onto IT - the systems that we have built to automate parts of business processes - is highly structured and often rigid.
It's dangerous to look at the shadow that business processes cast onto IT systems today, and assume that this is what business processes really look like. Because then we all miss the real challenge of enterprise use of IT in the next five years: harnessing all kinds of information management and communication technologies, and blending them in ways that truly provide structured support for business processes as they really are.
