Business processes and practices
Ross Mayfield's perspectives on the
demise of business process and the rise of social software, which the other Neil has previously
commented on, continues to spark debate. This time, fellow analyst
Mike Gotta over at Burton Group
enters the fray, stating:
the topic would have been better served by framing it as a process vs. work practice debate.
Mike's premise is that
the greater the elasticity of the process, the greater the variability in work practices and the greater the value social software can deliver to make that process perform more efficiently and effectively (the assumption being that with more variables "in play", social software can provide greater collective intelligence in navigating through multi-faceted, cause-effect decisions.
The notion of business process versus practices echos some of the thoughts of
Ray Ozzie in this
excellent Q&A over at ACMQueue:
In most major enterprises, there are formalized business processes that people understand. You have some companies that are very, very into the structured process aspects of their business and the process optimization, whether it’s Wal-Mart with the logistics or Dell, which is very focused on business processes.
On the other side of the spectrum are what I would refer to as the business practices – the more unstructured things that people do at the edge of the organization, and that’s really project-centric work. It’s really important for companies to understand how they focus and optimize their business processes and how they support their people in terms of their day-to-day practices.
Whilst I certainly agree that day-to-day business operations depend on a mixture of highly structured activities and ad-hoc, unstructured, collaborative activities, I struggle with this distinction between business processes and practices. The problem is that when we in IT talk about business processes, what we are actually referring to, as my business partner put it in
his response to an
earlier post by Ross, is the shadow they cast on IT:
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.
Instead of this artificial distinction between business processes and practices, which I think many enterprises will struggle with, I believe it is far better to focus on business processes and recognise that they are far more sophisticated than their comparatively simple IT shadow. We discuss this in depth in our report on
business process management but I shall attempt to summarise it here.
To really understand business processes and how they can be optimally supported by IT assets and services it is essential to recognise that they vary in terms of their organisational context: how they serve to differentiate the business and their "level" within the organisation - whether they support "execution", "management" or "strategy" activities. They also vary in terms of the implementation environment: the extent to which the roles within the processes receive automated support rather than being carried out by humans - role automation - and the degree to which the interactions and collaborations between roles are automated - process control automation. Straight-through trade processing in financial services, for example, has high levels of both role and process control automation, whilst the vast majority of strategy-setting processes in the majority of businesses receive very limited support through IT automation and are largely ad-hoc in terms of interaction and collaboration.
When Mike and Ray talk about business processes and practices, they are really highlighting the differences in the implementation of environment - business practices have low levels of role and process control automation but are business processes nonetheless.
