The Unpredictable Crisis

We have somehow endured the fourth week of sheltering at home for the corona virus, and we are beginning to understand the nature of this crisis.  It is also the 10 year anniversary of publication of “Mastering the Unpredictable.”  The corona virus response is unfolding exactly like an unpredictable crisis — both the good and the bad. Continue reading

Agreement Itself Holds Companies Back

In the last five posts I outlined five ways that business process models are dificient when it comes to automating work.  In this post I give a sixth, and quite possibly the most significant problem:  Agreement takes effort, and once you have agreement, that agreement becomes a barrier to further change.

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How BPMN Misses the Target

One bright hope for business process modeling, developed between 2003 and 2010, was the standard known as Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). This would be the way to model businesses!  But today, most people use a simple flowchart in everyday use.  Why is that?

Just this week I received an email from a professor in Germany with some process models and with the apology: “Sorry, these are not in BPMN or any formal notation.”   Well, they usually aren’t and it is time to start asking they question: why? Continue reading

Models and Organizations Don’t Mix

This another installment in the series pointing out the problems with using a hand-drawn business process model.  The last post was how a business process model fails in the promise to be easier than programming.  Even if you get past that issue, and hire programmers to make the models, a static model is not really suitable for a human organization anyway. Continue reading

Time to Stop Using Business Process Models

Whew!  It has been a few months since my last post in October on my way to the EDOC conference in Stockholm.  Presentations and papers went very well there, and I have been working on an entirely new concept.  It all centers around realizing that having to tie an organization down to a fixed, manually drawn process is the main problem.   Instead, a completely new approach is needed for supporting business processes: Emergent Synthetic Processes.

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AdaptiveCM Workshop in America for first time

The Sixth International AdaptiveCM Workshop will be associated with the EDOC conference this year, which will be held in Quebec City in October 2017 and is the first opportunity for many US and Canadian researchers to attend without having to travel to Europe. Continue reading