Successful Workplace

This review was a collaboration between myself, Ron Webb, and John Tesmer (@johngtesmer). One of the teams I work on recently started a test of Asana, a product touted as “…the next big step in productivity”. We were looking for tools to help us manage the work we do on a regular basis. I’ll put […]

Ken Robinson recently delivered yet another great talk on the state of American education.  He pointed out that countries that take a more organic approach (e.g. Finland) perform much better overall than those who take a mechanistic, standardized approach (e.g.  The United States with “No Child Left Behind”, emphasis on testing). Remarkably, the organic approach, […]

There’s an increasing perception across the enterprise that the role of the CIO as we know it won’t survive the decade. This isn’t anecdotal evidence, either, as respected institutions like the Harvard Business Review, the Economist and others are publishing studies that show that the average CEO is unhappy with the status quo of their […]

If you have been bitten by the process bug, like me, then you always see parallels between business, process, and everyday life. It drives my wife, mother, and friends crazy, but I always see them, and it is usually in the context of how I can make the process better at the airport, church, restaurant, […]

There’s nearly unanimous belief that email blasts and other one-way messages are becoming less and less effective. What’s less clear is how to manage the customer path to purchase with a serious of nudges. It all makes sense, right? We approach customers from a combination of directions and with a combination of messages, but where […]

Your processes are in a mess. You have no idea how much work actually comes into the organization. You want to invest in a Case Management tool but just don’t know where to begin. The vendors all pitch forward with suggestions and want a few coins for a decent licence sale so it makes sense […]

Most organizations continuously strive to achieve operational excellence, but they spend less effort understanding customer needs — and few marry these two sources of customer value effectively. While a focus on lowering costs, improving quality, and providing consistent, reliable service will continue to be important, I see a shift in the coming decade to combining […]

What type of company makes a good target to be acquired? There are the obvious revenue, strategic, market, product, and R&D considerations. Those are all opportunity plays and are in themselves good reasons, but what about the risk? How do you decide in advance which companies can be acquired without being destroyed? For that, there […]

It has been a long time coming, but it appears there will be process standards developed and implemented globally in the very near future. The World Economic Process Academy for Simplification and Standardization (WE_PASS) announced the upcoming release of globally-accepted and implementable process standards for all enterprise processes. Change is finally here In a statement […]

In a blog today, Theo Priestley asks the question, “Are we that afraid of the customer to create a paperless society?” How is it possible that we’re still talking about that in 2013? As crazy as it seems, paper is stubbornly hanging on across vast swaths of industry, including government, healthcare and even overnight shipping. […]

One of the foundational keys to consistently achieve business  benefits – whether they are related to inward looking drivers (such as efficiency, costs,  etc.) or outward looking (such as customer orientation,  customer service quality,  customer satisfaction, etc.) is the process. So as evangelists of ‘process thinking’, we all believe strongly that getting the process right […]

Recently, I’m finding that I’m working with more and more startups. This is exciting – to get an early glimpse at tomorrow’s industries and products. It’s also rewarding in that it shows that today’s startups (as opposed to their extinct Web 1.0 ancestors) are consciously leveraging the proven body of management theory in savvy new ways. I took […]

Living in a world where customer experience is the ultimate goal I sometimes wonder whether organizations lose a bit of internal focus and forget about the employee experience. Going from good to great to pretty shocking I’ve been involved in many changes programmes where the directive from on high is to increase cost efficiency, process […]

There is a misconception that benchmarking is a very involved and arduous process. I’m not going to tackle that issue in the blog post; I’ll cover that in my next one. But, that is one of the largest barriers we hear from organizations wanting to use benchmarking to examine a real business problem. The Logic […]

Rules are everywhere. Literally. You can observe them in everyday life all around you whether you’re in the office or not. I see people standing on empty streets waiting to cross the road and blindly obeying the crossing sign for the sake of common sense. I watch people automatically line up to fob their ID […]

Put the ‘BPM as a Concept’ aside for a bit and look at BPMs tech-related benefits. One of the things at the top of your list is likely to be how it is a Rapid Application Development platform and how it helps you quickly put together process based solutions with much less development effort than […]