Considering various definitions of Business Process Reengineering (BPR), you can start to see what's in common:
".
. . the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed." Hammer and Champy (1993)
In reference to BPR, Davenport (1993) says that "Today firms must seek not fractional, but multiplicative levels of improvement – 10x rather than 10%."
We are in the same situation today - but trying to achieve those 10x gains with social systems rather than rigid business workflow systems. 10x, while lofty, has to be the goal to overcome the 9x Email problem discussed by Andrew McAfee (in reference to J. T. Gourville's "Why Consumers Don't Buy: The Psychology of New Product Adoption") and explored further by Greg Lloyd in Enterprise 2.0 - Letting Hypertext out of its Box.
Across whatever set of metrics, Social Software has to give adopters the perception that it's 10x better than the alternative.
Andrew McAfee recently posted an entry which ponders What's the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work? McAfee quotes an E2.
"Progress is slower than I’d like. I don’t know why more people aren’t doing more. I think part of it is that we have a huge Intranet, and these tools can be hard to find. I think a lot of our people aren’t even sure they exist.
”
I am all for the idea of thinking in simple terms, but the suggestion diverges from answering the challenge to deliver a 10x improvement. The suggestion left me wondering "10x over what?" The Search, Ask, Share idea is on target but an action so simple and attractive as Share is dead on arrival if even a few key stakeholders are 9xd in email.
I am on board with avoiding other incumbent tools (except email which is an open wound advertising the pain resulting from broken processes), but it's vital to realize that any time you move communication to an E2.
Taking a social process reengineering approach, I take a Druckerian vision which agrees with Greg Lloyd's stance in Enterprise 2.0 Schism:
I believe that although both technology and broad bottom-up participation are necessary to achieve the Drukerian vision, neither element alone is sufficient to achieve the noble end of re-engineering how ordinary people work together to achieve the ends of enterprises they choose to affiliate with.
Its the mix of social and technology that come together to enable, in Drucker's words, "ordinary people to do extraordinary things." But not every technology works and not every social group can simply pick up a tool and run.
If McAfee's E2.
- What process does the system support for my group, team, department, enterprise? What business pain does it alleviate?
- How, mechanically speaking, do people operate the technology defined in What to achieve the result?
- Why does the How create a perception of 10x ROI - Return On Information
For the last 8 years I've worked on social software with companies and organizations in every pocket of industry, multiple governments in the US and abroad, and non-profits. One of my favorite adoption stories runs counter to what many E2.
Social Process Reengineering is a far cry from Business Process Reengineering which may require fleets of consultants and man-years of programmers to arrive at rigid processes that improve the flow of goods through a supply chain.
Instead, SPR requires that we understand our social processes, find the underlying pain points, understand social artifacts, and figure out how to structure for emergence. Finally, the role of leader is not Evangelist, it's Conductor. The individuals who lead the deployment, who work with teams to pile-on use case after use case, need to coordinate their orchestra of workers to outcomes which are inevitably new and always extraordinary.
Converse to man-month BPR planning efforts, SPR can happen in minutes over morning coffee or in a Stewart Mader style afternoon Barn Raising. By way of example, I've talked to a dozen customers about replacing Excel based processes with a New Way to Work and many made the switch immediately.
In fact SPR's flexible and emergent outcomes offers the perfect balance needed by BPR which seeks rigid rules driven outcomes based on process optimization. BPR aims to produce workflow systems for predictable business problems whereas SPR, using social software as the supporting technology, is the agent that lets us plan for change, face competitive threats and leap onto market opportunities. While SPR and BPR seem like opposing concepts, one may just be the Yin to the other's Yang.
One of our customer stories takes me right to this point. At KUKA Systems, an IT team seeded their social software deployment by deploying a set of spaces where anyone at the firm could post issues pertaining to their enterprise systems. They took a social approach to discussing, tracking and executing on changes to these business critical process systems. This is a perfect example of a social process that, to McAfee's point, is one of the simplest things you can do and, meanwhile, has a meaningful and tangible 10x impact on the way issues are handled as well as on the productivity and performance of business systems. Maybe I've just reached the bigger picture point to which John Tropea was referring when he referred to the KUKA Systems customer story as the "Seminal enterprise 2.0 task-based/process soln."
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Article: Blog1316 (permalink)
Date: June 13, 2010; 2:53:10 PM Eastern Standard Time
Author Name: Jordan Frank
Author ID: jfrank
Date: June 13, 2010; 2:53:10 PM Eastern Standard Time
Author Name: Jordan Frank
Author ID: jfrank