Transparency and Open-sourcing of Process

In two terrific blog posts, CIO of the services arm of British Telecom JP Rangaswami blogs about visibility and openness as the heart of process excellence. He talks about documenting the reality of your company - and of your customers' interactions with it - and leaving behind the failed "process" approach of ERP, CRM, SCM (and I'd add EAI, so-called "integration-centric BPM" to the list).

Bravo, JP!

Where you didn't go in the posts, but I suspect have in your head, is whether we should open-source process frameworks and KPIs for companies. While the dirty details of implementation (at, say, the BPMN level and below) are not something most companies would want to share (not because of of competitive advantage but because of competitive disadvantage, disclosing weaknesses in process that could be competitively exploited), I think that higher level process and strategy maps would be valuable to standardize: a tangible Zachman for your industry for example, along with the specific metrics and KPIs that you are expected to achieve. Wall Street is almost certainly already judging you on these (the higher level ones anyway, which have implicit, just not explicit ties to the lower-level ones). Why not just agree on them? In the same way that every company is currently reinventing the wheel with respect to non-differentiating technology (how many redundant WebSphere administrators are there in the world?), companies are also wasting their collective time on drawing the same high level process maps and agreeing the KPIs that are linked to them.

Excellent companies in _any_ industry are process-excellent. The KPIs of these processes are almost always known (most truly excellent companies share them, even with competitors, for they are not "insecure," another aspect of JP's posts I am glad he discusses). Toyota is famous for sharing its methods and results with competitors, for example. These companies compete on their ability to innovate and improve, not on some static state of today's process (of course, certain technical processes, like painting methods, are secret).

Visibility, transparency and a willingness to change (I call this culture) are the key elements of BPM, not execution and workflow. Those are simply two of the many artifacts of where you are at any given point in time on the Process-Driven journey. Great BPM technology should encourage the visibility, transparency and cultural change parts of your journey to become process-excellent... we've already got enough technology that simply encourage how to build workflows.

So read JP's posts (here and here). And for a similar set of thoughts, as well as the beginnings of how to go about achieving this process excellence, click on the picture of my forthcoming book, Process Driven, and you can get a copy of Chapter One, where I discuss shining a light on your company, and the four pillars of BPM.

ps = And for those of us north of the equator, happy first day of spring, when the sun shines its light for longer periods of time on the state of our lawns and gardens. Driven by guilt or desire, we improve them constantly. Then winter's rest, and then they reappear, a little better, the next year. We're in our sixth year at our current place, and each year the garden is in better shape. Maybe it can be springtime at your company, too; it just requires a little sunlight and a willingness to improve.

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