One Common Definition for BPM

Business Process Management (BPM) remains the subject with a thousand faces.  The lack of a well accepted definition is the single most harmful thing to the industry.  Among a hundred articles there will be dozens of differing definitions of BPM.  Without a single common understand of BPM, we can’t make a single conclusive statement about what BPM does or does not do, how you might or might not use it.  This post is the result of hundreds of hours of sorting, sifting, discussing, analyzing and crafting. Continue reading

Case Management Excellence Awards 2014

The Case Management Excellence Awards are the place to see and recognize how organizations could be more effective at getting things done.  You don’t have to call it “case management” … anything that is about helping teams collaborate more effectively may qualify for this public recognition. Continue reading

Should we focus on the negative?

The WfMC and many other who help have been trying to highlight the positive examples of both BPM and ACM by collecting use cases, judging the best, and publishing in compendia.  It was Socrates who said there is value in a focus on the negative:  he would rather be refuted than to refute another because being rid oneself of evil of harboring false beliefs is better than ridding it in another.   Continue reading

Emergence versus Entropy in Management

Julian Birkinshaw professor at the London Business School had an interesting article in Forbes a couple weeks ago titled “Managing Complexity: The Battle Between Emergence And Entropy” which comes close to, but falls just short of, making a good recommendation for dealing with complex organizations. Continue reading

15 Key Lessons for Managing Complexity

Managing Complexity was the topic for this year’s Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna a few weeks ago.  Complexity overwhelms the old style of command and control management, but the followers of Drucker offer better alternatives.  I wish could have attended, but I will have to be satisfied summarizing based on the writings of others. Continue reading