Category Archives: Future of work

Musings on where work is going

The tragedy of free floating data

Posted on April 24, 2012 by | 9 Comments

We’re getting exceptionally good at grabbing metrics from anywhere, and in real time, too. Business intelligence tools have evolved into visualization apps and as a result, colors, shapes and lines tell us whether we should be happy or unhappy about data. We are awash in ‘cues’ from inside and outside our enterprise. But by itself, more data and better visualization aren’t the answers to better business outcomes; they are just free-floating data.

Getting to the reward

Cues are only as good as the behaviors they stimulate in response. Without paying close attention to the behaviors, which we call business processes, we end up with a ‘fog’ of activity that isn’t repeatable, isn’t accountable and is unlikely to gain the reward (which can be avoiding a disaster or increasing revenue) that the cue signaled. Worse, we can’t be sure activities that should cross functional boundaries are doing just that. This is the tragedy that befalls most organizations.

Context

Beyond a response, processes form the context for metrics. Organizations that haven’t modeled their enterprise may have the greatest dashboards but lack an ability to know how and where to make change when data shows a problem or offers an opportunity. Cues are wasted when they aren’t understood or framed properly. “That’s the way its always been done around here” is a great answer when there’s no better explanation for why and when we respond to a cue.

Best-selling author Charles Duhigg talks about the management of responses to cues in his bestseller, The Power of Habit. The cookie story is a great analogy for not understanding the context of a metric, poor organizational response and an undesired business outcome. His message is simple but powerful: Understand the cue, be deliberate in response, and gain the most favorable outcome.

Continuous improvement

Once we’ve figured out when and why we measure, we need to understand what to do when data tells us to act. We need to be constantly looking for better ways to respond and make the reward more consistent and larger. We need ways to know that each member of the organization is aligned with what cues mean, what activities cues prompt, and what outcome we’re expecting. That requires either an enormous amount of labor or automation tools that can make the effort manageable.

Going beyond data

At some point, enough cues have been analyzed, put in proper context in a business model and outcomes sufficiently optimized that the organization reaches a higher level of sophistication. Better and more meaningful cues are developed, targeting more specific opportunities, resulting in an ability to manage complex events with complex responses. The most sophisticated organizations have created a platform for a cycle of analysis, correction and organizational change. It is a virtuous cycle that only starts with data but ends with predictable reward.

What are your thoughts on the tragedy of free-floating data?

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Posted in Data Analytics, Disciplines, Featured, Future of work, Process Management

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Look to IT for Process Innovation?

Posted on March 29, 2012 by | 8 Comments

The following was first posted on Harvard Business Review:

Suppose you’re a senior executive at a large financial services company such as Nationwide Insurance or ING. Would you look to your information technology organization for ways to improve customer service? Would you ask IT to come up with ideas for new financial products and services, or new ways to deliver them?

Probably not. While you realize that all your products and processes depend on information systems (which is why the industry spends far more on IT than any other), you associate the IT function with the drudgery of maintaining the firm’s ancient systems. You think your IT organization is overwhelmed just keeping all the old systems running.

If this is you, you’re likely missing out on the product and process ingenuity of your IT people. Just consider how Nationwide and ING have tapped the brains of their IT organizations. What they’ve done provides lessons for broader organizational change and adaptation.

How are they doing it? David Bogaerts and Jael Schuyer are process improvement experts (“Lean Master Black Belts” and “Agile coaches”) in the IT and operations group at ING, a leading bank based in the Netherlands. When I asked them about skills their IT organization has brought to process improvement activities, their answer was quick: The IT organization knows how to get people working together as teams.

ING is in the middle of a transition from traditional step-by-step (“waterfall“) software development approaches to using cross-functional teams to make quick, small changes to systems (called “agile scrum” methods). It has worked very effectively at a team level, and they’ve scaled up to 40 “scrum” teams.

When I asked them whether their company as a whole could work this way, they gave an emphatic “yes.” Building on their team successes, they created an “Agility capture team” of senior IT leaders to address larger issues. They have weekly planning meetings and conference calls twice a week to work on internal customer service improvements. While the IT organization is driving this, more importantly they have roped in business unit and functional heads to surface their needs. As a result, process improvement activities have begun rippling out from the IT project team level to the core operations of the business.

I saw this ripple effect at Nationwide Insurance after speaking to Tom Paider and Tim Heller, managers in the firm’s Application Development Center. They told me that entrepreneurial people in IT at this $20 billion financial services provider started using a process improvement (“lean”) development framework and rapid (“agile”) development techniques several years ago to standardize system development approaches. “It enabled us to take teams that were having successes and build on them to scale,” Paider said. “We now have dozens of teams with industry-leading quality and productivity statistics. We are adding 1-2 teams a month to this model.”

Fifty companies have visited Nationwide in the last 12 months to learn how the company has embedded process improvement into the work of the IT function. Building a new mindset of making many smaller changes and learning from each one, instead of getting a detailed specification and delivering it, has been a concerted cultural transformation. This continuous improvement thinking is well known in manufacturing, but few do it well or consistently. At Nationwide, it’s not an elite group’s job to improve work every day — it’s everybody’s job.

I see a big opportunity for senior executives to embrace the process innovation successes that are bubbling up from IT organizations such as those in Nationwide and ING — and then expand on them. Improving the performance of the IT department is hard enough. But by adopting the techniques of process improvement leaders, Nationwide and ING are doing what’s nearly impossible at most large organizations: forming cross-functional teams to quickly design and implement better ways of serving customers and improving enterprise performance.

In the past, IT functions at even the most IT-intensive companies have struggled to get a seat at the business strategy and operational improvement table. However, today IT functions in financial services firms (more than any other sector) are in a leadership role to drive competitive advantage.

Question: Have you seen IT functions that are leading the way in their companies to make cross-functional process innovation happen?

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Posted in Continuous Improvement, Disciplines, Future of work, IT Strategy, Strategy

Coworkers in different jobs

Posted on March 10, 2012 by | 1 Comment

My husband and I are fortunate to work from our home in Pasadena. We each have our desktop and toil away on separate problems each day. There are intersections during our work where we share a meal and late in the afternoon, usually a hike or run. We are coworkers in different jobs, but the support we give each other is more than we can get from our actual coworkers. We wouldn’t have it any other way.

Just one hitch…you have to like each other. When you spend all day together, working or not, relationship matters more. Yup…you quickly find out if you like each other or not. We’re fortunate again and we do.

The new way

This is a new way to work, and we think it will be an even bigger story in the future as the best talent is found where it lives, not in an office building, and not even in the same country. The days of going in two different directions to spend most of the day with relative strangers are a curiosity of the industrial revolution and not necessarily the future.

We have a working marriage. Do we mean it works? It does, but that ‘s not the point. We spend all day every day working together, except for the occasional travel. Our life and our work are inseparable. It may start early in the day, and may end on late night phone calls, but that’s just part of the ebb and flow of coworkers in different jobs.

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Posted in Future of work, Workplace reality

You had me at, “Would you like a grande latte?”

Posted on February 22, 2012 by | 17 Comments

My local Safeway isn’t what I would call a very modern store. And the employees are either high school kids bagging groceries and collecting carts or middle-aged cashiers, bakers and butchers. It was a big step forward a few years ago when I could sign for my credit card purchase on an electronic device.  I had just finished my transaction today when the store manager stepped up and said, “Mr. Taylor?”. I nodded my head slowly as I didn’t think he knew my name. I was even more surprised when he said, “My system tells me you’re one of our best customers. Would you like a grande latte? I’d like to offer you a grande sized drink of your choice at our Starbucks.”

I asked him how he knew.  He pointed to his smartphone and said, “It’s a new thing we are doing to show our appreciation.” Huh…my low-tech local grocery store has taken a big step up in having the right data, in the right hands, at the right moment, and with the right context. I wasted no time getting my latte and left the store with a big smile on my face.

Personalization

But I have a secret…we really like shopping at Trader Joe’s. We go to Safeway because it is closer to my house and carries some things TJ’s doesn’t. Recently, we’ve begun gradually spending less at Safeway and more at the other store, probably something he didn’t know. The ‘personal’ touch he showed, however, is more than we get elsewhere and provides something to think about before we take our business a few miles away.

Now, I don’t think he really knows me personally, but his systems were smart enough to capture that a good customer just punched in their discount code at register 3 and provided him with the name. The elapsed time between identification of the client and the offer of a token of appreciation was probably less than ten seconds. To redeem my drink, I simply used my code again at the Starbucks register and watched the sale ring up as $0.00. Having that data just a minute later would have been too late as I would have left the store and the opportunity would have been lost.

But wait, there’s more

If that was where it ended, it would have been a nice story. The manager also offered a big discount on roses from the flower shop. I replied that I buy my flowers from somewhere else, and he said, “Yes, that’s why I’d like you to get them here.” He knew what I didn’t buy at his store. He was making an attempt to capture my business without selling against himself. I said that I couldn’t today but asked if it was good for next time, and he replied, “I’ll put the offer on your account through the 31st of December.” I loved it.

I probably will buy the flowers another time.

This story is likely to become something we all see happening at an increasing pace as more enterprises move toward better tracking of customer trends, improved availability of key data, and strategic use of mobile devices. It isn’t just about loyalty, either, as the rose offer showed…it is about expanding revenue by having the tools to increase revenue in creative new ways. When the ’2 Second Advantage’ can happen at Safeway, it can happen anywhere we find ourselves.

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Posted in Data Analytics, Event Enabled, Featured, Future of work, IT Strategy, Markets, Retail

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What Cleopatra can tell us about Social BPM #BPM #SocialBPM #CES

Posted on January 22, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Tens of thousands descend on Las Vegas every winter to see the gadgets and gizmos that we’re told will change the world. For some it is a chance to see the butterfly effect while  the monarch is still flapping its gossamer wings in Africa. The Consumer Electronics Show is a chance to predict and benefit from future ‘hurricanes’ in consumer and business markets.

For others it will be a chance to make their voices heard as a waterfall of tweets brings us individual analysis of the ‘real meaning’ behind this year’s CES; hype that often outweighs reality. Case in point…2012 was all about the ‘ultrabook’, essentially a thin laptop. As one writer observed,  “If you want to be the first to own a new ultrabook, travel back to 2008 and buy the first MacBook Air.” Ouch. Hype just took a shot to the jaw.

CES is so compelling because it offers brand-new, shiny things that grab our attention and help us believe that the answer is ‘out there’. But what if the answer to what will change our world is actually ‘in here’?

Social data

It was alluded to in this month’s National Geographic, no where near as anticipated and talked about as CES. The February 2012 issue has an info-graphic entitled “United Dates of America”. Dating websites were analyzed and profile terms were mapped by density to their zip code. It was a geographic map of what people are talking about. It showed “acting” in Los Angeles, “musician” in Nashville, “God” in Georgia and “cornbread” in Mississippi. While those may not seem so surprising, why was “Cleopatra” the hot topic in New Mexico? There is significance behind it if we look.

‘Cleopatras’ at work

Data is what we see in National Geographic and can find in the socially enabled enterprise. It is far more useful than the newest hardware gadget but less sexy and less hyped. Social data is a treasure trove of information around what people are talking about…not just what words are being used, but topics that are of interest either broadly or within segments of the workforce (or customer base, but that’s another topic). And data we don’t expect to see or don’t understand, ‘Cleopatras’, provide valuable insight into inefficiencies and opportunities. They can be the organizational pain points or concentrations of passion. Either way, meaningful data shows up on the social radar before any BPM initiative can ferret them out, but only for enterprises that enable conversations and pay attention to the results.

Data

We don’t need to travel to Las Vegas conventions to understand what’s coming next and will change the world as we know it. We don’t need to follow vendor hype. Data is the new/old technology and news ways of using it are the shiny part. The organizations that gather and understand their data will be able to put it to competitive use. And social data can tell us a great deal.

What if we start by using our social ‘radar’ to read our own data as a way to better focus our BPM resources?

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Posted in Data Analytics, Future of work, Social

A view from PEX Week – There’s an app for that #BPM #PEXWeek

Posted on January 18, 2012 by | 4 Comments

I sat on a PEX Week 2012 panel yesterday with Clay Richardson, Sandy Kemsley, Nathaniel Palmer and Steve Towers. The question for the panel was what we saw coming in BPM.  I’ve weighed in on this topic recently with my 2012 predictions and a broader view of BPM’s future. I was prepared to restate much of what I’ve been saying, that BPM needs to be broadly seen as a soup-to-nuts practice that involves everything from structured to unstructured work and from human activities to automation. But spending time talking with people and listening to speakers put me on a different tack.

Data god

The reality of how we work is different from the way software vendors design applications. An application thinks in data terms; how information is routed and modified in the act of conducting business. As workers, we have been forced into this view by ERP, CRM and other systems that make humans slaves to transactional systems instead of making systems that are easy to go straight at what we need. Think of the number of clicks to get to most data, and the onerous tasks of updating sales forecasts, leads, time sheets, and expenses. In each case, centralized data is our god and we serve it through cumbersome interfaces that we love to hate. Truthfully, if you don’t think about data design in your interactions with these systems, you end up scratching your head over the error messages and prompts to complete a required field. We’re there because we serve the data, and not the other way around.

Process bits

Our reality is more like work in process fragments. Unless we’re on an assembly line, we do things that require us to stop and start nearly everything we do. Done well, our day fits together like a puzzle as we sandwich in less structured work between our structured tasks. Spending hours on a single, high-value task is a luxury saved for long flights or, unfortunately, evenings and weekends. Do our work systems align with this reality? Not at all. The time to get into and out of a data-focused system is often greater than the time to accomplish the task at hand.

An app for that?

The rise of the app, mostly thanks to Steve Jobs’ vision, is a perfect example of going at things differently. Apps serve a tighter purpose than long workflows…they are light, quickly developed and go straight at the problem. If you’re like me, you spend some part of our day moving in and out of other apps, like banking, blogging, tweeting, Facebook, LinkedIn. We check things, create things, respond to others all while living our life. We love the iPhone because it enables this pattern. Why couldn’t the same thing be the dominant feature of how our work is done? Back-of-the-napkin, here are some ideas for work apps that would keep us a safe distance from that monolithic system that saps our will to live:

  • Time card, expenses apps (using my phone’s camera to snap receipts)
  • Payroll and benefits apps
  • Corporate travel app (maybe linking to expenses app, if that makes sense)
  • Safety procedures app
  • Enterprise social media app
  • Managers approvals app (out of the box on this one)
  • Compliance reminders/acknowledgements app (if not on social media)
  • Training/testing apps
  • Leads, forecast apps
  • Form app that structures input I need to receive from multiple sources
  • Complex event app that allows me to choose discreet data and get an alert
Apps are light, purposeful and mobile.  They don’t care where the user is and they assume a limited screen size. The investment is small and therefore they can be approached as trial-and-error. Doctors are already using the Physician’s Desk Reference app and other narrow-purpose tools to treat in healthcare facilities, so why wouldn’t this approach work just as well for business process? I believe it would. In the end, an app approach would make it easy not to care where the data is located, where the user is coming from, and what platform they’re using. Just the right information in the right hands at the right time and place. 

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Posted in Future of work, Social

Tang, Teflon and the Great Shift to mobile #MobileBPM #BPM #BPMFuture

Posted on December 27, 2011 by | 5 Comments

If you’re like me, when you hear the drum beating for a new technology or application of technology, you have a fair amount of skepticism. There are lots of vested interest out there in keeping us on the bleeding edge of technology and those who would like to use us secretly as beta testers of new ideas. If we follow every over-hyped new idea we end up with both organizational cynicism and an empty checking account. I work in software sales and consulting, so I’ve seen it all…many times over. There are far more ideas than good ideas.

Paradigm shift

There’s a another important reason for my own skepticism. If you’re as old as I am, you remember being told that both the powdered drink mix Tang and the non-stick coating known as Teflon were created as part of the Space Race. Computers started as room-sized arrays of vacuum tubes long before I connected a Commodore Vic-20 to my TV. For most of my life, technology was designed, built and proven by enormous government and commercial R&D budgets. Innovation was owned by the few and shared with the many.

Both social and maybe even more, mobile, have taken a new route. In both cases, technology was in the hands of consumers long before getting the attention of business and government. This switch in paradigm is a relatively new thing that comes when so many people essentially participate in R&D. Anyone can build an iPhone app, and by doing so, personally innovate alongside millions of others. The Economist in October 2011 referred to the phenomena as “the consumer-industrial complex”.

Consolidation?

I was catching up on friends’ blogs during the holidays and came across a new mobile app, CalParks, that provides detailed information about 45 of California’s state parks. Now I can get up-to-the-minute information on the nearest trails in one of the world’s greatest park systems. The app was developed in cooperation with EveryTrail, which happened to be reviewed on another blog I read. In a few minutes, I download both, signed in using Facebook and was marveling at my new mobile capabilities and looking forward to mapping and posting our own explorations Facebook on our personal site. In one moment, I saw the end of carrying a GPS, using my PC to download GPX files and posting them to our blog. Multiple devices and applications were now one, simple, mobile platform.

Leap to business

The leap to business from here is easy to make. My own company already has a process app that allows process to be consumed on the fly, a visualization app that significantly extends the reach of analytics, and a social app that provides Facebook-like capabilities but for the enterprise. Just as with EveryTrail, the abilities of these apps not only reduce reliance on built-for-purpose devices but also enable a mobile workforce like never before. The real proof to me is when old-school organization like the US Army decide that warfighters of the future will be equipped with mobile technology using apps. Keeping your iPhone charged will become life or death instead of just an annoyance. An interesting next step will likely be apps that are built on other apps, just as Facebook has become a backbone for authentication.

Leaping

We’re about to see an explosion of mobile capabilities for the workplace. SAP, Oracle and others are working to make for easy development of apps for their products. Inventory, production and sales numbers are already found through apps. The PC is fast-becoming the factory, with the output being the ability to interact with people and systems anywhere and anytime. Business process in just a few years will be captured, understood, changed and communicated in a mobile fashion. Like other technology leaps in the past, there will be those who leap and those who quickly fall behind. I plan to leap. I will likely create my own apps to get my work done as will many of us.

Technology timeline

Just for fun, here is my rough cut at a timeline of technology leaps that stand out in my mind. If you were born before these dates, you lived in a world without:

As each new technology creates a new way of thinking, the limitations created by our skepticism continues to drop. Teenagers today are able to envision things that their parents have a hard time accepting. This is a wake up call to be less skeptical and more open minded about how our personal and business worlds will be changed by mobile technology.

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Posted in Future of work, Mobile

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Gartner and my BPM predictions for 2012 #BPM

Posted on December 21, 2011 by | 8 Comments

Just to kick things off, there’s a new Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Process Analysis, and it is interesting to say the least. This leads well into today’s post.  What are my BPM predictions for 2012 as we stand on the verge of the new year?

The competition

Competition is heating up between the top 4 of OpenText/Metastorm, ARIS/SoftwareAG, IBM, and Nimbus/TIBCO. Never mind the Gartner positioning…these are the true top four, and some of the companies in the Magic Quadrant aren’t BPA tools at all.

BPM stack

There will be a new focus on the technology stack versus the BPM point solution. BPM has such a diverse following that only a solution that works for many can have wide acceptance across business and technology folks. The question will be, “What can you give me for automated and non-automated work?” The most competitive products will have integration between the layers. The stack also has a social angle throughout, with heavy requirements for social at the top layers.

Cutting through the stack are the requirement to capture, analyze, communicate, collaborate, automate and change manage. Real work and value moves up and down the stack (maybe multiple times) as work flows through the value chain.

End user

Race for the eyes of the end user. The many debates around BPMN are the evidence that people are starting to understand the importance of making it easy for end users. This has a great deal to do with mobile technology as well and for that, see below. The end user is the one who actually performs work in the enterprise, and for too long, they’ve been outside the BPM loop. This makes the end user the mostly unconquered frontier for BPM. There are products that are geared specifically to this crowd, and more will follow as the value of social and mobile increase.

Big data and complex events

Big Data and complex event processing will have a play as companies need to make their processes very Big Data aware but in context…see my Safeway example from this weekend at BPMForReal. As our capacity to create and store data outpaces our ability to mine, the ability to look for and act upon the right BPM data becomes more challenging. This filtering out of noise is going to rise in importance and tools will be responding to this need.

Mobile

We are very quickly moving toward mobile applications that bring the right data in a compact and on-the-fly format. What started in our personal lives is now accelerating in the working world. We’re moving away from the Web and toward an app-enabled world. Apps that allow for rapid capture, communication and change of business processes will take off. If you can’t change manage your BPM on a mobile device, what good will it be?

Social

The capability that pulls it all together at both design and execution time is a social one. There has been so much written on this, but I dare say most people can’t envision what it actually means. BPM is about managing the value chain and how work gets done, and the ability to tap into the many is irresistible. The social landscape is littered with tools that are very specific to an application (like Chatter is for Salesforce.com) and I predict that platform agnostic tools will be the ones that rise. Keep in mind that the rise of social is also the demise of email as a BPM tool. Structure is going to be a key to how this happen.

2012 should be a great year for BPM for all of the reasons above, provided the Mayans weren’t right…

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Posted in Data Analytics, Event Enabled, Featured, Future of work, IT Strategy, The 7 Deadly Sins

Will social technology kill email? #BPM #SocialBPM #Social

Posted on December 14, 2011 by | 10 Comments

Two weeks ago, the French information technology company Atos declared they will eliminate email for intra-employee communication over the next 18 months. Even before this announcement, there was no doubt that email is under pressure and that this could be a great thing. If you consider that the whole spectrum of BPM involves a significant amount of human decisions and work, email has been an end user BPM tool of choice since its inception. Emails define processes, kick off processes, and are used to track processes. Here are three classic ways emails have provided BPM value over the years.

Definition and collaboration

“Do you agree we should create a presentation specific to that customer?

Email is being used to define and collaborate around a sales process step. It could have been sent to one or many people, and the replies might be in more emails until two or more people talk about the question. Easy to do, but not repeatable and not governed. Necessary, however, because there is no centralized way to collaborate on process. From a transparency perspective, this is worst-case. Lots of energy being consumed, few lasting effects.

Notification

“A new action was added to the process, ‘sales process’”

Email just became a communication tool to let the user know there is an event that should be known. It acts as a pointer to data in another system where the user goes to find meaningful information and maybe to collaborate. This is only valuable because the organization can’t be certain that people would be aware otherwise. It is necessary because there is no centralized place for people to get information in real-time…no where people ‘live’ for work purposes.

Documentation

“Customer X, your account review is complete and your current balance reflects any adjustments.”

Communication is forwarded, time stamped, archived. Email is an output of process and not the way process is created, discussed, decided and conveyed. This use of email for BPM isn’t a necessary evil, but more likely connected to a compliance or regulatory requirement. Even this won’t last forever, as the step beyond personal social to professional social is likely to be a collision of our personal and professional social worlds. There’s no reason why it can’t be so. Why can’t a doctor notify a patient through social media?

Transparency

Transparency is the key. Social technology has at its core the ability for the few to speak to the many as well as point-to-point communication. It allows conversations to be discovered, joined, and augmented by the greatest number of voices or as few as should be allowed. It ‘finds’ us through clever tools like hash tags and topics. It gives us the benefits that email simply never will.

Ubiquity

For email not to be the go-to for BPM, there needs to be an always-on, always front and center way to positively acknowledge communication. Social holds that promise and in fact is already through its first implementations at places like TIBCO and is showing surprising returns. When a social technology is the fastest, easiest, most accurate and timely way to communicate, it will dominate the space that email currently occupies.

What about the stats?

“30 million horses were shod this year and that’s 10 percent more than last year!” would have been a believable statistic in the early 20th Century. It could have been used to argue that the automobile will never replace the horse. There’s a significant problem with statistics…they don’t always indicate trends. In this made-up example, the World’s population was growing, and maybe more people were able to afford horses but not cars…yet. Movements emerge before the statistics catch up as the population first understands and then adapts to new ideas. 

My bold statement: If a social platform or communication method becomes as ubiquitous as email, it will replace this form of BPM. Social communications are far easier to analyze and direct than “dumb data” found in documents, including in email. Email has the same problem as Visio or any other documents-as-data. They lock important information into a source that is more difficult to mine and manage.

Prediction: Email will be around for a while…in the meantime, we need to use it appropriately.

UPDATE:

For another take on this post, see Marco Brambilla’s post, “Are mobile and consumerization keys for event-based Social BPM?“

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Posted in Featured, Future of work, Social

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Anticipating the BPM technology future

Posted on December 6, 2011 by | 4 Comments

Everyone wants to have an oracle at their service. We wish we could know what will happen next so that our bets can be placed in the best places. Even better…don’t place bets but instead make the right investment once and only once. To do this, we need to correctly anticipate what is coming next. There is, however, an increasing challenge in anticipating the future: It is very hard to know the meaningful predictors from the irrelevant noise. As volumes of information increase, the signal to noise ratio moves quickly in an unfavorable direction. Only cleverly applied and cutting-edge technology can cut through this.

The plumber

An old story: A little old lady called a plumber when her home’s boiler developed a problem. He arrived, looked at the boiler and then pulled out a hammer. He tapped once in one place and immediately the problem was solved. The very pleased customer asked, “How much do I owe you?” “Two hundred and ten dollars,” he replied. “That much for just a tap?” she queried? “No,” he responded with a self-assured smile, “the tap was ten dollars. Knowing exactly where to tap, that was two hundred.”

Big Data

Big Data has this problem. We can store increasingly large amounts of data, even beyond what we can sift through. The trick is really to know where to ‘tap’. To bring that point home, consider this: All of the data that was created since the beginning of mankind to 2008 has been increased tenfold just in the past four years. We are awash in data, and our ability to measure, push/pull and store just increases the pressure to do something with all of that intelligence. Traditional databases are quickly losing relevance in an era where real-time means watching for the appropriate data (or pattern) and keeping it in memory to be used at the right moment.

Data consumers

Digital consumption is also evolving rapidly. Why can’t we have in our workplace what we have in our personal lives? We have our iTunes playlist in our pocket, but we search through a SharePoint portal on a desktop PC trying to find a microsite with important processes? Somehow the technology available to us in the wider world is outpacing what we use at work. We can all make personal data consumption decisions very quickly but companies struggle with anticipating what to build or buy because they’ve been burned on cutting edge technology too many times.

Solution

The solution? Avoid investing in point-solution applications and cumbersome front ends and instead create nimble, mobile-enabled platforms that allow the data to be useful regardless of the source and regardless of the need. Let the user interface be a plug-and-play addition to powerful middleware.

My personal crystal ball shows me that next generation business process infrastructure is focused on rapid capture, automation, event processing/rules, analytics, social collaboration, and the Cloud, with a front end technology that is browser enabled with HTML 5. Oh, and let people consume in the way they choose. They will flock to smart solutions that get work done more easily and faster.

Why HTML 5? Because mobile matters enormously going forward and HTML 5 is able to take rich multimedia and make it lighter on any mobile device while maintaining integrity. HTML 5 doesn’t require plug ins like Flash that make development, deployment and consumption a challenge. The web browser has finally become the application interface and we’d be crazy not to take advantage of this power and flexibility.

Why am I not mentioning big ERP? Because it is non-differentiating (companies using the same ERP begin to look very much the same) and very slow to change and communicate change. Too many companies refer to their ERP as “the world’s most expensive ledger.” The increasing pace of commerce will render these systems as transactional and back end rather than business and customer facing. For independent evidence, see the post on why BPM needs ERP for Gartner’s take from last year’s BPM Summit.

The way to avoid being ‘bleeding edge’ is to make the investment in flexible, adaptable middleware systems that allow the next-great-thing to be added quickly and easily. Your users and customer will love you for it.

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