Eleven Tips for Creating a Meeting Agenda

Some of us would live blissfully if one never had to attend another meeting. Like it or not, meetings are still critical means to organizing groups of people. The worst meetings are those called for some vague purpose that is never clearly stated. People waste the first part of the meeting discovering and clarifying the purpose of the meeting. Avoid that by making a clear agenda so people come to the meeting prepared, and to complete business as quickly as possible.

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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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Develop for Self-Managed Organizations

Here is a message from my friend, Robert Gilman, about participating with us on an open source platform for supporting a sociocratic organization.  It is the most interesting thing I have been involved in for years. 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