It seems like there's been a lot of interest in groupings these past few days. Hierarchical groupings. Reorganizations. We feel like we must create structure in human reporting and work relationships, it seems, so that business will work better. Will scale. Although I expect it is something much more primordial than that...

We have to get out of this mindset. Software provides the ability to build in flexible "work structures," if you will, without needing to resort to the corporate version of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

In his post Emergent Bureaucracy, Nick Carr says

What a disappointing species we are. Give us a clean slate, and we create great honeycombed bureaucracies, vast bramble-fields of rules and regulations, ornate politburos filled with policymaking politicos, and, above all, tangled webs of power.

Or as Roger Waters more succinctly put it

Give any one species too much rope and they'll f*@# it up!

It's not just in the IT or business world, either. We create complex structures to mimic, what, the "real" world? Peter Hoekstra, Republican Chairman of the House Intelligence committee sees that we're doing it, again, in the government around national security:

Ally Warned Bush on Keeping Spying From Congress
Mr. Hoekstra [R - Michigan] also expressed concern about the intelligence reorganization under John D. Negroponte, the first director of national intelligence, who he said was creating "a large, bureaucratic and hierarchical structure that will be less flexible and agile than our adversaries."

Global Task Management, Local HR Management

Organizational mapping in the future will be done in a new BPM _layer_ of software, and task assignment will be subject to the same notions of "mass customization" that we brought to manufacturing in the 1990's. As customers are to products, so workers will be to tasks... processes will support the same degree of flexibility at the instance level that, say, a computer has. Sure, it's still a MacBook Pro, but it's configured just for me. In the same way, it's still the New Hire process, but this person needs to be interviewed by three people instead of six because they've previously worked for us...

An interesting, if controversial, example is Al Queda. As Hoekstra points out, while we're "busy reorganizing to develop an agile response organization" (a corporate oxymoron), Al-Queda is focused on the virtual, skills-based side of things. Implicitly (or who knows, maybe explicitly) they use metadata to "route" tasks. They don't need to know who reports to whom... the operational ownership for this particular process are probably completely masked... but certainly there are attributes of other people that determine who Terrorist A routes a particular task to. Separately, I imagine, a cell leader manages the "HR side" of things.

Highly distributed task management, but very localized mentoring and HR management. This is the model of the highly adaptable organization.

Today, we effectively use a "crowd" to define HR reporting _and_ task oversight responsibilities... and, more troubling, we generally have oversight of particular people instead of oversight over tasks. This means that, effectively, we are informing the task by the hierarchy. Instead, the hierarchy should be informed by the task.

As an example, I have all of Lombardi's Products Group reporting up through me. However, there are many tasks which those people who report to me perform that actually should probably be overseen by our HR group (like a recruiting task) or our Sales group (say, a presentation about our Dev processes). There should be a triage of priority based on some corporate metrics, as opposed to my myopic view of, say, hitting a release date. The point is that corporate goals should drive prioritization of work. And work is defined by the process instance (or task or case). People in the organization should be working "for" the person responsible for the process instance that they are working on right then, which may or may not be their HR manager.

Instead, we need to consider our organizations as a collection of skills - or as a collection of any number of other attributes. And then, based on the project (or process) we should more freely leverage those skills independent of the HR reporting roles. We are, in effect, creating crowds of people, homogenizing their tasks, and hoping that wisdom will "emerge."

Jaron Lanier (coiner of the term "virtual reality") says in an interview critical of wikipedia's formal editing hierarchy (yes, wikipedia has a big hierarchy of control... see you can't escape it. wiki's don't eliminate the need for editors...):

"I reject the word 'wisdom' with regard to crowds. A crowd is not good with ideas. A crowd is absolutely inarticulate, vulnerable to going crazy. A crowd is actually idiotic. It's a statistical accountant, a calculating device, a certain type of thermometer or barometer. You can use a crowd as a scientific instrument.... It's almost a postmodern form of suicide. The motivations are easy to understand. There's death denial. People die but computers and crowds, maybe, don't. And there's liability avoidance. As an individual, you have to be responsible. As a member of a crowd-or a user of information systems-you're not responsible anymore."

Of course, matrixed org charts have attempted to deal with this... but in the era of mass process customization, you can't create enough matrices... so we need a new concept of virtual org charts, determined in real-time at run-time. Primitive concepts of this, like skills-based routing, exist in today's BPM products. But this is an area where there is great potential, and where that potential needs to be realized quickly.

The Mass-Customized Organization

We've talked about a "virtual company" for years, but I think we've thought about it wrong... this is not about telecommuting or offshoring. This is about how we can move our largest companies in the world to be more entrepreneurial. The thing about an entrepreneur or small company is that (a) people are more flexible about what they do and (b) when something needs to be done, you just do it. That is, reporting structures and separation of concerns don't get in the way when there is work to do. You determine the priority of a specific task, and if it's at the top, you just get 'er done.

Well at big companies the cool thing is that you actually have deep skill sets in almost every area of interest. Great marketers. Great engineers. Whatever. So if you could design a system where you could tap into that great talent (instead of the entrepreneur's mediocre talents in some areas) yet allocate work as quickly and against a common set of goals in the same way that a small company allocates work, then you'd be on to something.

It's this ability to tap into the individual, instead of the bureaucratic crowd that gets in the way, that reveals one of the real promises of BPM: the ability to make your big company more like a small company. Great BPM turns the notion of "process" on its ear!

Will The Real Human-Facing BPM Please Stand Up?

Too many people believe process, and specifically BPM, is about, well... PROCESS. 20th century, 1950, "screw that nut right there, Jack, and don't ask questions" type of process. They think BPM is about the "process" of moving data from one machine to another, or maybe, golly, from one human drone to a machine (wahooo.... look BPELIS4PEOPLE2NOW!!). But this is nothing to do with the BUSINESS... MANAGING... their PROCESSES...

The greatest companies of the 21st century processes will break out of the notion of an org chart as the definition of the work entity. Instead, they will spend a lot of time understanding what skills they value, and mapping those skills to the individuals who posses them. Processes will be designed to tap into those skills, and assist the people in prioritization of tasks when multiple task owners are involved. Further, those organizations will also come to understand that management is a local thing. Management by walking around isn't a bad way to manage and mentor... and "managers" will be stationed more closely to the actual workers. It's just that managers will become more like mentors as opposed to running all the work. Global "staff meetings" will actually begin to fade away as "process meetings" take their place, which will dramatically change centers of power, careers and how to navigate a company. This is going to be hard work, but there is a payoff:

Mass customization applied to your white collar process world, and it will make those processes more productive and efficient, in the same way that mass customization has made the marketplace more productive and efficient.

Technorati Tags: 21st Century Process, BPM, Organization