Business process confusion: once more unto the breech
I really like most of Ross Mayfield's stuff on
Many2Many. But in
The End of Process (as
here, which I
commented on previously) I think he's getting a bit carried away.
The piece actually replays many of the points that Ross made back in May, which I disagreed with then and still disagree with. The central argument in this piece seems to be that the processes that companies follow today often deliver poor results - and that if social software can live up to expectations, the role of process will change forever. For example:
Today, some staid corporations are abandoning process all together (I wish I could quote the source for this). Google is a more public example, albeit an exceptionally new large enterprise, where wikis and weblogs enable a culture of working openly in a flatter and decentralized organization.
Don't tell me that Google is abandoning accounting processes, corporate governance/regulatory compliance processes, HR processes, etc. Do you think that Google hires people based on what existing employees write in an open wiki? I very much doubt it. Ross is falling into the same trap as he did before - looking at the shadow that business processes cast onto today's structured IT systems, and focusing on that.
Ross, take those blinkers off! The universe of business processes is strange and wonderful: and social software is just as capable as providing structured support for some business processes, as transactional (eg ERP) software is capable of providing support for others. Some business processes are 80% or more about creativity - and others need to be 80% or more about repeatability. That's a fundamental fact.
This argument:
John Seely Brown and John Hagel point out that while 95% of IT investment goes to support business process (to drive down costs), most employee time isn't spent on process -- but exceptions to process.
Is fundamentally flawed. Just think - let's assume that the 95% of IT expenditure which is allegedly spent on automating processes, went away - that there was no process automation. What would happen then? Would people spend most of their time just managing exceptions, as they do now? Of course not - they would spend all their time doing tedious, repetitive work. The *reason* that people spend most of their time exception-handling, is that technology is automating most everything else. Ross is getting the causality the wrong way around here.
Also, Ross says:
Assume for a moment that the 25% of GDP that is search costs falls. Or the 50% of GDP that is transaction costs similarly declines. ... If a knowledge worker has relevant information at their finger tips, can form the right group to handle an exception, leverage the social context of information and contribute to memory as a natural by-product of getting work done -- what is the role of process?
Come on Ross - what do you think has driven transaction costs and search costs to decline? Process automation. Without automated processes fuelling the creation and maintenance of content and systems now exposed on the web, and without straight-through financial processing, where would we be?
Lastly:
My favorite Clay Shirky quote is "process is an embedded reaction to prior stupidity." That is, there was an exception to process and an expert designed a way for people to work together in one context that should fit all prior contexts. The problem is, the process becomes calcified and accepted as the rule. After all, it's a rule, and in corporations we follow them, even if it fails us or simply doesn't make sense. Because of constant change in our environment, processes are outdated the immediately after they are designed.
In the end, my belief is that Ross is right about the uselessness of some of our implementation and credo surrounding business process. But improving the situation is fundamentally a question of IT-business alignment, IT governance, and enlightened understanding of how the whole universe of business processes can be supported by different types of technology - it's not a question of
throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
