Successful Workplace

In a Wall Street Journal article just out today, it was announced that Google Search will be more social.  They’d like users to be able to recommend search results to their online community of contacts.  This is a bold new direction for a company that makes its living from a 10-year old agorithm that has been […]

So many theories about business process management, it can get more confusing the more the information you find.  The term seems to apply to everything from pure automation/workflow to continuous improvement and everything in between.  It seems to just depend on the source.  Wikipedia doesn’t narrow it down much, either. Making it real The only […]

Business process is all too often a back-office or IT-driven function, as BPM is seen as an expert’s system in the hands of a few experts.  Lots of diagrams, plenty of content, but not updated, not ‘owned’, not change-managed and not in the hands of the people who need it.  Documents, links and other content […]

What should I be doing and when?  Where do my activities fit into the big picture?  If I do a great job, who will know?  What, exactly, are my goals?  Business process management, done well, needs to answer these questions for everyone from the top to the bottom.  Gone are the days when management was […]

Shared services, outsourcing, in-sourcing, managed services…all just ways to remove business activities from their existing home and entrust them to the care and feeding of others. Is it that easy? The business case is clear but I have some doubts…like about how you transfer that which isn’t already very well defined or isn’t mature?  How […]

Ah, frameworks…perhaps the most confusing term in BPM.  Maybe it is more than one person can tackle in a reasonably short blog.  I’ll try. A framework is simply a skeletal structure upon which you build more specific things.  Like a house when the wood framework is there but no drywall, electricity, or plumbing.  The rooms, […]

(No spoilers here)  Just saw The Adjustment Bureau.  The movie’s concept was great…there are many paths to many different outcomes, each choice having a “ripple effect” on the future.  Paths are managed in book-like technology with many complex symbols leading to “inflection points”.  This spaghetti-wired mess is only intelligible to the trained agents of The […]

Who stocks warehouse nowadays?  The real question is, “Who owns warehouses…or sub-assembly plants…or even manufactures products?”  Cisco, Intel, Micron and others lead a trend where rapid fluctuations in markets and technologies have led to supply chains that rely on external organizations to create just-in-time supplies of parts and even whole products.  What does this mean […]

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What happens when a whole generation that has lived their entire lives with the ability to feed information to themselves (and at a time and format of their choosing) becomes the dominant group in the workforce?  What happens when this group of entirely social, entirely digital, entirely in-command-of-their-world workforce is running the critical elements of […]

Welcome to my first blog post on the topic of business process management, or BPM.   I started this blog at suggestion of our Nimbus CEO, Ian Gotts (iangotts.wordpress.com), and I’m half wondering if the days of blogs are just getting started or have already peaked.  Time will tell. I’m the VP of Consulting Americas […]