3 Innovative Approaches to Process Modeling

In a post titled “Business Etiquette Modeling” I made a plea for modeling business processes such that they naturally deform themselves as needed to accommodate changes.  If we model a fixed process diagram, it is too fragile, and can be costly to manually maintain.  While I was at the EDOC conference and the BPM conference, I saw three papers that introduce innovations which are not completely defined solutions, they represent solid research on steps in the right direction.  Here is a quick summary of each. Continue reading

Business Etiquette Modeling: a new paradigm for process

The AdaptiveCM 2014 workshop this past Monday provided a very interesting discussion of the state of the art in adaptive case management and other non-workflow oriented ways for supporting knowledge work. While there I presented, and we discussed, an intriguing new way to think about processes which I call “Business Etiquette Modelling” Continue reading

Collective Adaptive Systems (CAS)

The BPM 2014 conference, Sept 7-12, has been moved from Israel to Eindhoven Holland (because of unrest in the middle east) and I will be giving a keynote on Wednesday Sept 10.  There will be an interesting workshop on Business Processes in Collective Adaptive Systems (BPCAS’14) on Monday, associated with a group called FoCAS (Fundamentals of Collective Adaptive Systems). Continue reading

Zero-code BPM Systems

The concept of “zero code” is the wish-fulfillment myth of the BPM industry.  Many advertisements will claim that the processes can be designed without any coding.  This complete hog-wash.  There is, however, a possibility for a zero-code system, but let’s imagine how that would have to work. Continue reading

Complex Behavior Emerges from Simple Rules

At TEDxZurich 2013 Nicolas Perony gave an excellent talk about complexity that has relevance in the collaboration technology field.  He has some excellent examples of how complex systems differ from complicated, machine oriented system, as well as the risks of thinking of complex systems as if they were machines. Continue reading

Absolutely Self-Managed Workers

Why not get rid of management entirely? That was the thesis of Doug Kirkpatrick’s talk at the Building Business Capability conference this week about the Morning Star Company, a company which has tried the radical approach of being entirely flat, and having no managers are all.  Far from failing, they have become the largest company in their domain (tomato processing).  In Dec 2011, Harvard Business Review called them the world’s most creatively managed company. Continue reading

The Origin of Reductionism

I have written many times about how culturally we have a tendency to want to simplify problems, and solve the separate parts, and this is reductionism.  Scientific management is based on this idea, and it is one of the ideas that leads to problematic BPM implementations when your the process is truly complex.  In this post I consider where reductionism cam from. Continue reading

Why you might need a ‘Business Crisis Inducer’

Is your organization running too smoothly?  Is everything being handled with a minimum of fuss?  Perhaps you need a ‘Business Crisis Inducer’ is a tool that causes randomized crisis events to challenge your organization.  Sound crazy?  It is not as crazy as you might first think. Continue reading