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.
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
What is a Wirearchy? How does it work? When should it be considered? When should it be avoided? What are the advantages? This post covers the basics elements of a Wirearchy. Continue reading
I regularly post about the advantages of using natural (as opposed to artificial) intelligence in the workplace. I also carefully say that there are two kinds of work: routine work that should be automated, and unpredictable work that should not be automated, and it should be fairly easy to distinguish the two. But is it? Continue reading
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
What is the limit of automation? We often think that automation is limited by the technical ability to construct the automation. It is not surprising that automation decreases the ability for those people to do the same job manually. Is there then a point that we should avoid automation in order to retain viable knowledge workers? Continue reading
A new study from Oxford says that 47% of the jobs in America are at risk of automation. There is a lot of fear that a job automated is equivalent to a job eliminated. It is the same fear that fueled the Luddites, however history shows that fear to be misplaced then, as it is now. Automation drives a transformation of the workplace, not an elimination. Continue reading
Harold Jarche has a controversial slide cast this week titled “Subversive thoughts” which explores the relationship between the trends for supporting knowledge work, and the role of management as it is traditionally defined. Continue reading
Here is a slidecast version of the talk I gave at BPM Next in March. In 14 minutes it explains the core ideas of antifragility and how learning organizations are antifragile. Mixed in are some surprising details about adaptive systems. This presentation will help explain why a traditional model-and-automate approach is the wrong thing for an innovative, learning organization. Continue reading
The goal of process management is to improve process. Let’s say you are successful at putting in place a process improvement practice. Can there be too much of a good thing? Experts are saying that it can be. Continue reading
Thinking Matters 