On Business Programming

Much is made about how BPM is “going to change the way businesses are run” by having “the business” become involved in the development, optimization and evolution of these process applications. This is a cause for consternation by experienced technologists who are [understandably] worried about having the business “run amok” with programming tools. There are enough shoddy applications that contribute to IT’s maintenance nightmare; we don’t need more of them, we need fewer. Maybe, then, “don’t let the business harm the business” should be included in the hypocratic oath of BPM.

On the other hand, the business is clamoring for tools. Tools to help them take control of their own business processes. Tools to help them emerge from under the “iron boot” of unresponsive IT departments. Tools to let them be productive in groups - like Microsoft Office has allowed them to be productive individually. Prospects tell me that “our customers are making demands on us - we have to move faster! We know technology can help us, but it takes so long to do anything, we question its value.”

So here's the dilemma: on one hand, IT needs to be more agile to respond to the marketplace at a faster pace than ever, and on the other hand, much of the clumsiness is a result of "just doing something" which resulted in all these silo'd systems (and people, too).

It's the irony of our times that the very systems that have allowed business to scale have become so complex they are the obstacle to scaling further, faster.

How do we get the power of people doing business in agile, de-centralized ways, baked into our technology? Or, stated differently, how do we embed technology so deeply into the business, that business programmers can take over without doing harm to themselves?

What can we agree on?

First, let’s find some common ground. To do this, I’d like to look, say, 30 years into the future and propose that:

• Business people will be smarter about technology than they are today.
• Tools will be easier-to-use than they are today.

I don’t think those are too controversial. That's certainly been true over the past 30 years. If you agree, then you'd probably also agree that at any point along that "30-year path", there are incremental improvements.

People getting smarter: It's difficult to plan for the increased savviness of the work force, but it happens. It's usually the result of fundamental shifts in technology. Whether it's the Walkman or the web, everyday people get smarter about using technology in their daily lives. And while we can't really affect the timing of this, technical literacy rises over time and it is what it is (or will be). So let's simply assume a line that depicts the rising technical capabilities of line-of-business people over time.

Tools getting easier: As to the second assertion – that tools will be easier-to-use – hopefully we can agree that the state of these tools is going to get a lot better. Bill Joy, in his famous speech to The Commonwealth Club a few years ago, pointed out that the difference in energy between a matchhead and an atomic bomb is about 10**12 and that with the advance of hardware and software technology, that’s about the power differential of personal computing between 2000 and 2030. The impact this will have on user experience and accessibility will be staggering. By then, we'll be negotiating contracts via Second (or Third or Fourth) Life, directly with our customer's avatar and the result of the negotiation will be represented in the process model, a contract will be generated, triggers based on the agreed SLAs will be established and a choreography will be instantiated. And you won't have to know a damn thing about "process"...

So tools get much easier to use, over time, as this chart shows:

This trend started with the first personal computers and VisiCalc, through to today's Microsoft Excel and Google Spreadsheets; from WordPerfect to Microsoft Word 2007. Today's business is "programmed" by end users in ways largely unimagined 30 years ago. This steady advance in usability will continue, unabated.

This trend is now moving from personal productivity applications to enterprise applications, and will continue until the very business is “programmed” by business people, so that the business’s processes – like today’s documents – are directly manipulated by them. It is simply a matter of time. Is it 30 years? 10 years? How much will the line move over, say, the next 36 months?

Business Programming will occur. Lombardi’s mission is to accelerate that capability for our customers. If you believe that pushing the levers of agility closer and closer to its users (the business), then every advance in tools accelerates the benefits that result from business programming, as the charts below show.

There is a role for IT

Of course, there is and will forever be a role for technologists – people inside the organization who focus on the hard bits of technology. In the same way that increasing computer power enables ease-of-use, so it will also enable complexity (and evil, according to Bill Joy, but that's for another post...).

The pace of change of networking technology will continue to increase and, for large organizations, there will be an inherent advantage to having technologists on the leading edge. Technology - in whatever form - will be a competitive differentiator for many companies, at those edges where innovation is occurring.

At the same time, more configurable technology will be used by a wider audience. Look, for example, at cell phones. They are easier to use than ever, and more people use them, but there’s a lot of technologists at phone companies keeping the dial tone on. What we’ve done with cell phones is push out the “business use” of the infrastructure to simple devices at the edge of the network – and hidden the complexity of the network from the user of those simple devices. Those simple devices aren't only doing simplistic things, they are just simple to operate, and operate with very evolved interfaces into the core network which, at, say, Sprint vs. Cingular is different, and people with special technical skills and experience are required by each of those companies.

I was at one customer recently who has an investment in their core systems which measures in the 10's, if not 100's, of billions of dollars. That infrastructure isn't going away in my lifetime! Yet, their need for agility and the ability to compete using those systems - indeed, leveraging those systems as assets and not liabilities - is the key to profiting in this century.

Hiding this complexity, enabling process control and visibility, and working in partnership to foster change is the issue. And in order to do this, it's going to take all the technical and business expertise available, focused on the important problems in your company. If there's competency in the business, let's grab it!

What does this mean?

So in order to facilitate the move to business programming, BPM technologies need to strongly evolve in the following areas:

• Business Strategy: Massively easier-to-access tooling, and easier-to-use UIs for business users, to get started quicker, without IT involvement, and specific easy-to-understand ways to collaborate on "final mile" issues that require IT.
• Collaboration: Embrace the highly collaborative post-internet world, beyond simplistic ECM and into wiki’s; beyond simple, structured ad hoc routing and into sharing; beyond over the web and on the desktop to an access anywhere, anytime, well beyond the connected-only world of Web 2.0, and into the mobile world we live in.
• Modeling: A more expansive view of modeling the business, not simply modeling a process. Mixing modeling with process execution to a degree not seen before, recognizing that “simulation” and “historical data” must be mixed in order to truly model an organization; and moving models well beyond process diagramming and into living entities that are on a par with running processes… because modeling the business is a real-time, production effort and the asset – visibility – is more important than the assets of, say, ERP.
• Governance & Behavior: Better tracking of governance (maturity) and behavioral (motivation) models so that the enterprise competency of BPM can be grown, made visible, and incented.
• Infrastructure: Hardening the vertical communication touch points, but not the paths. Ways to control the interfaces into the legacy network must be provided so that business people can easily discover previously-used data, and also facilitate the collaboration between business and IT when new data requirements exist.

"If you aren't first, you're last"

BPM is the technology for these times because it's the only enterprise technology that embraces the technological "perfect storm" you are competing in: the convergence of highly distributable technologies, a highly connected world, and a new majority of users in the business who are capable and eager proto-technologists. And because it does it in a connected, heterogeneous way instead of being "rip and replace," it's a technology you can actually use from large business to small!

So next time you think about BPM, think for a moment about these trends and about what you want to enable over the next few years at your company. Business programming is coming, and like Ricky Bobby said, "If you aren't first, you're last." Whatever that means.

Technorati Tags: 21st Century Process

Comments

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Phil
Interesting post. I think there is a fundamental difference in perspectives between programmers and business folks that must be addressed (see http://www.edmblog.com/weblog/2005/08/different_persp.html) and that business users want to run their business not maintain systems (see http://www.edmblog.com/weblog/2006/08/the_secret_of_b.html). That said I agree with you that systems must evolve to let business users run them more directly - after all, for most companies, their systems ARE their business.

[Paul Browne - Technology in Plain English]

Phil

I happen to agree with you about the following

--Quote--
Business people will be smarter about technology than they are today. Tools will be easier-to-use than they are today.
I don’t think those are too controversial.
--End Quote--

Unfortunately when I presented a similar argument over on the O'Reilly Blog (Links at end), the reaction was at least 80% negative.

A case of the business being delighted with their new found power, and developers being afraid of the change?

Paul

http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2007/01/java_and_those_pesky_google_ap.html
http://www.oreillynet.com/onjava/blog/2007/01/google_spreadsheets_mean_the_e.html