Users In Charge

It's Sunday and therefore the kickoff of this year's PC Forum. The theme this year is "Erosion of Power: User's In Charge" and it couldn't be a better way to sum up my feelings about process management in 2006.

It's not about rules or code, it's about users. Rules-orientations and code-orientations get in the way of promoting 21st century changes throughout the organization - whatever the organization is!

Do you think it's a coincidence that rules vendors and code vendors have such a bad reputation with "the business"? It just could be that the tools are the problem, not the users!

As Esther Dyson says in her conference preamble.... "The power institutions once held over [people] is eroding" for three reasons: more information, mass customization and people move faster than institutions.

The goal of business process management is only partially to automate process into simple workflows... it is also to empower organizations to adapt as quickly as humans through visibility and accountability.

Users aren't in charge yet, but when they're empowered with some of the best of today's process and social software, they soon will be.

Technorati Tags: Esther Dyson, PCForum

Comments

[Sandy Kemsley]

I agree that the business is still, in many cases, a slave to IT. However, I don't think that the solution is to just give the users direct hands-on control of the process or rule creation, its to facilitate a better collaboration between business and IT. James Taylor had a great post on this regarding rules, I referenced it and further think that his words apply to BPM as well: http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/column2/archives/2006/03/businessit_coll.php

[Ethan Freeman]

right gnome will percieve plane without any questions: http://www.carmike.com/ , to play TV you should be very tremendous

[James]

In thinking about identity management, one should ask what changes if you don't have a system in the middle but a user. I guess the same thinking can be applied to BPM. Will blog on this shortly...