Successful Workplace

I had an interesting conversation with a representative of a UK Regulator over the festive season. Having been involved in a number of regulatory and compliance programmes it was refreshing to hear the frustrations from the other side of the corporate electrified fence. Regulation is seen as an unnecessary evil, a mishmash of red tape and endless […]

You’d have to be on another planet to miss the stories of data loss by major companies. It seems amazing that this could happen in an age of encryption, fire walls, and hyper-high tech security. Yet it does. As a consumer and technology professional, I’ve witnessed first hand that Data Loss Prevention (DLP) software, designed […]

The current Barclays scandal has gathered momentum and has now gone way beyond “it had insufficient business controls” as the recent Guardian article today, Barclays Libor scandal: how can we change banking culture? spells out in graphic detail. The UK population has been well and truly ‘bankered’. To sum up the excellent article According to […]

The following is a preview of a soon to be released article on Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) and business process.  To receive a copy, contact me at: tom@successfulworkplace.com. The move to electronic medical records (EMRs) is underway in the US.  This critical component of health information systems is already yielding benefits for an inefficient system. […]

Could healthcare take a lesson from the rock band Van Halen?  Atul Gawande, author of The Checklist Manifesto, describes a simple management tool that Van Halen used to quickly gauge process quality and compliance at their concert venues. By demanding M&M’s with all brown ones removed or face cancellation of the show with full compensation to the band. Evidently, they […]

Organizational change remains the most difficult part of managing business. The reasons for change can be government mandate, greater efficiency, avoiding risks or losses, or capturing a new market. Regardless of the reason, change is very hard. Enormous and small companies alike fail in the face of change. History is littered with the skeletons of […]

Northrop Grumman has a remarkable history that includes developing the B2 Bomber, the EA6-B Prowler, satellites, the new Gerald R. Ford super carrier, and the history-making Apollo lunar module. It is an enormous enterprise with over 130,000 employees and a tough challenge…their principal customer, the US Government, plans to cut $500 billion in spending over […]

Just this week, BP Trends published a case study that is well-worth taking in. ThyssenKrupp Steel USA spent US$6B to create a seamless system for producing rolled steel primarily for the automotive industry.  They made very early decisions to make sure their enormous capital investment broke from traditional industry by focusing on business process rather […]

In the next issue of BP Trends coming out on July 5th, 2011, you’ll see a story about the success of ThyssenKrupp Steel and their ability to ensure an uninterrupted supply chain through a focus on business process and ISO compliance.  One of their very first decisions was to make end-to-end process management the cornerstone […]

I hosted a seminar this morning along with Northrop Grumman’s Dennis Pikop on the topic of how to implement and mature business process and other frameworks.  We used examples that highlighted three circumstances; withing ‘legacy’ businesses that merge or acquire (Northrop Grumman), from the top downward (UPS) and from the bottom up (ThyssenKrupp Steel USA).  […]

We had a great call with Gartner yesterday that helped shift my views on social BPM ever so slightly, but enough to inspire a blog.  The discussion centered around blending classic content collaboration with a realistic social strategy.  It is clear from the blogosphere, conferences and (most importantly) customer conversations that many enterprises are trying to get their […]

Why this study? APQC knew that their Process Classification Framework (PCF) is widely used in business, fairly evident from 100,000 downloads from their website over twenty years.  They were also aware that it has been translated into Japanese, Mandarin, Spanish, Polish and Portuguese.  What they didn’t know, however, were the individual uses of the PCF […]

Cisco, UPS, ThyssenKrupp, Pitney Bowes, Williams Exploration, Sandvik, ING Life…these are enormous enterprises with something fundamental in common…they use frameworks to get real work done.  A recent study by the APQC organization focused on those companies to find out how and why.  As technical champions, Accenture, Nimbus, and Northrop Grumman provided their BPM expertise to seed the […]

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, […]

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 […]