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How are you going to involve your business experts?

A good friend of mine claims that a typical business user is not able to describe his or her daily work in such a way that the information could be used to derive a process model from it. Hence, a platform like AlignSpace is not going to provide value.

I agree that people often don’t think or describe something in a structured way (we are not all mathematicians, are we?), but I do believe that people are able to describe what they do, how they do it and when they do it. The trick is not to force them into thinking about a process model, but to give them something that they are familiar with - a list or a whiteboard. Now simply ask them to write down what they do. Surely, the output will contain some or maybe even a lot of information that is not relevant for deriving the process model, but the nuggets of information are there.

More importantly, AlignSpace lets you do this collaborative gathering of information without requiring everybody who is going to contribute to be in the same room. People can work together independently of location, time zone, skill set and organization. Also, the platform helps to keep track of who has contributed what piece of information. In my opinion, this is a break-through in BPM process discovery compared to the current approach where dozens of interviews and an even higher number of hand-written notes result in slow projects that are error-prone.

How are you going to involve your business experts?
 

This entry was posted on 26.06.2009 14:46 by Thomas Stoesser. It is filed under AlignSpace. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, leave a trackback from your own site or Delicious bookmark this on Delicious
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5 Responses

  1. 1. Frank
    29.06.2009 15:15

    Edward Deming said “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process. You don’t know what you’re doing.”
    Your friend needs help or an attitude adjustment.

  1. 2. Guido
    31.07.2009 14:11

    I agree with your friend to some extend, Thomas. And I do not see a contradiction between the things you write and your friends statement.

    I do not agree with Edward, though. Being a low-paid person working as a cashier in a supermarket I simply do not care why I am doing things and what impact my actions have on the overarching process that I am (without knowing it) part of. Therefore, I am only able to describe that I press a button here, leave my package of receipts there and call Mr. Miller if I have a problem. Does that information really help to describe the process behind it? Not so sure...

  1. 3. Watershawl
    11.08.2009 01:41

    "Dozens of interviews and an even higher number of hand-written notes result in slow projects," this is so true, but it there is a large people-element to process discovery. Because of Office Space, no one wants to talk to us for fear they are going to get laid off, where all we want to do is bring some professionalism to what they are doing.

  1. 4. Thomas
    11.08.2009 15:08

    @Watershawl
    I agree with you that there is a huge people and politics factor in every initiative that promotes change. I believe this is not something that can be solved with technology. Just recently I met with a professor from the European Research Center for Information Systems at the University of Muenster and we talked about potential research that would show how the use of networks impacts process innovation. Also, they have a BPM maturity assessment that helps to understand what the current state of BPM maturity in an organization is and what they need to do to further improve. I would be surprised if the "people factor" is not part of this assessment.

  1. 5. Martin Jahr
    19.08.2009 12:47

    I'm pretty sure that business experts "know what they're doing". Question is whether they can externalize all aspects of their daily work. I don't know the context of Deming's quote, but ask a dancer (or even a plumber) to describe the "process" when they are in a "flow" that represents their competence. If you force too much, you will get incoherent and even incorrect answers.

    What is the goal? We do want to improve enterprise processes, don't we? So we surely need the "gut feeling" of the experts how to deal with tricky parts of their business, but we need to extract and streamline the "nuggets" as well and need to sort them into the big business process picture.

    So yes, networking is fine to get an exchange platform for ideas, trends, best practices. Ideally, experts have the ability to store insights immediately while they are in their current work.

    In addition, a phased approach is required.
    A moderator should be able (and obliged) to take every potential nugget, chew on it, verify its validity and store it in a "normalized" format for later use. Having a trace back along this process would be enormous helpful. How often did you scratch your head and wondered where THAT requirement came from? It was somewhere in the interview notes, and some early conclusions and transformations buried the way back.

    In conclusion, process analysis and discovery changes from a solitaire to a flow. When you add process monitoring data out of existing BPM systems, this in fact would be a major breakthrough

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