Comments on: More musings about the opensourcing of process

By: Musing about nouns and verbs | confused of calcutta

Musing about nouns and verbs | confused of calcutta — Sun, 27 May 2007 08:37:06 +0000

[...] quote from that post: As I suggested in the opensourcing discussion, we cannot talk about processes in any productive way unless we are as â€œepistemologically [...]

By: Made a difference to that one… why customer service is not a numbers game | confused of calcutta

Wed, 25 Apr 2007 22:04:13 +0000

[...] the only true differentiator is the quality of the customer experience. You can read about it here; earlier, when guesting on Shane Richmond’s Telegraph blog late last year, I covered it here, [...]

By: Stephen Smoliar

Stephen Smoliar — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 20:59:18 +0000

By way of a post script, I forgot to include the URL for my blog post about writing about processes; it is:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2007/03/everything-i-learned-about-life-came.html

By: Stephen Smoliar

Stephen Smoliar — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 20:58:05 +0000

Phil (an JP), I certainly did not intend to OPPOSE the need for description, just to point out that it is harder than any of us would like it to be. What I DO oppose is the proposition that (in the language of my 2×2) one can describe a transition simply by describing its before and after states (although, in fairness to the “wet brain” crowd, I believe Oliver Sacks once wrote a piece about the movie-camera-in-the-brain, i.e., motion sensed as a sequence of “frames”). Another way of putting this is that, while we are really good at grounding descriptions in nouns and noun phrases (which are basically the building blocks of any database schema), we (or at least information systems) are sadly deficient when we have to account for verbs (particularly with their subtleties of tense, voice, mood, and what not) and adverbs (don’t get me started)! As a curious coincidence, I happened to be writing in my own blog today about writing about processes, suggesting that the best examples could be found in writing about the dance (check out the Arts pages of the TELEGRAPH), sports (in the United States the earlier generations did a much better job, particularly before television intruded), and, for those who want a book-length example and are not offended by bullfighting, DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON. From this we may have to conclude that “documenting the process” effectively requires a LITERARY skill that we have thus far overlooked.

By: Phil Gilbert

Phil Gilbert — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 19:00:59 +0000

Stephen,

Excellent comments and much better said than my own. I don’t have time to give these the time they deserve (and I love your 2×2… I need to study on that for awhile). I will say that I deliberately used the term “artifacts” so that I wouldn’t have to be tied down to what the description was… I agree with you that whatever specific description (or you could say, specific artifact) you use, it will be only an approximation of reality. So, because these are social systems, there will be many artifacts that depict “the process.”

Having said that, the thing I agree most with about JP’s post is that the issue here is “transparency,” not the specific process at any point in time. The manifestation of the process, the snapshot, if you will, is simply a useful model so that we can at some level of granularity begin to understand the linkages between actions and results, so that we can better mold future actions to achieve desired results.

So just documenting the process as it is, and thereby giving visibility to the process, is more important than either getting that model “perfect” from an “as-is” or a “to-be” state!

My company is a “business process management vendor.” We compete every day with companies who talk about BPEL and XODL and workflow and this and that execution-oriented stuff. When the real issue is getting visibility into the processes, into the “hidden factories” where work gets done but not very efficiently. We think process excellence isn’t about workflow, we think it’s about visibility. From visibility does come knowledge, as imperfect as it may be using any specific artifact at any specific point in time…

I hope this makes some sense… and, again, excellent comment!

Phil

By: Stephen Smoliar

Stephen Smoliar — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 17:34:52 +0000

I have been lurking quietly during this discussion, but Phil Gilbert has now awakened the kraken in me! As is often the case, this is achieved through a single trigger-word; and the one Phil used was “artifacts.” This was enough to convince me that, however simple we may want to this to be, we are up against ontological and epistemological problems that cannot be ignored.

The best way to approach the ontological issue is through Plato’s “Theaetetus,” that now-notorious dialogue misread by Nonaka as a source for a definition of knowledge. If one reads Plato instead of Nonaka, one discovers that Socrates not only defeats the four definitions of knowledge proposed to him by Theaetetus but also demonstrates that the very concept of knowledge its extremely tightly coupled to three other concepts: memory, description, and (the real kicker) BEING. Both JP (“Just document the reality”) and Phil (with his artifact management) seem to be saying that all we need to do is get the description right. However, because of that tight coupling, getting it right about description is no easier than getting it right about knowledge; and, while none of us want to outsource the problem to philosophers, the dead moose on the table that we cannot ignore is that concept of being. Much of what Socrates has to say in “Theaetetus” has to do with the fact that the “being of process” is a decidedly different ontological beast than the “being of artifact.” This gives Theaetetus a very rough time, and it should give us one too!

Unfortunately, the literature does not help us very much, whether it is from the distant past or hot off the presses. However, if we choose to focus on information systems, a CACM paper by Hirschheim and Klein (â€œFour Paradigms of Information Systems Developmentâ€), along with the inspiration it draws from the Burrell-Morgan book about sociological paradigms for organizational analysis, offers some guidance. My own approach has been to try to examine the nature of customer experience within a broader framework of MOTIVATED ACTION, since this concept embraces both the needs of the customer and how those needs are satisfied (both of which determine the experience itself). That approach led me to view the Hirschheim-Klein quad-chart with a slightly different set of axes. One axis is concerned with whether or not the motivation is STATE-BASED or TRANSITION-BASED. The other axis addresses whether the action is TASK-BASED or WORKER-BASED. I originally developed this chart in trying to address epistemological questions concerned with the role of information systems in the service economy, but I think it can also be applied to the relationship between such systems and business processes.

There is a lot more that I can say about this framework. My personal interests have tended towards questions of how both internal and external communication can be made more effective (and the role of technology in achieving that goal); but that exploration does not belong in this particular discussion. So I shall just close by saying that all feedback will be most welcome!

By: Phil Gilbert

Phil Gilbert — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 11:42:06 +0000

ps – in re your comments about the “customer process” above… if you haven’t, you should check out Patricia Seybold’s latest book, Outside Innovation. She does a good job of bringing the customer.com concepts into more of a process focus…

By: Phil Gilbert

Phil Gilbert — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 11:39:50 +0000

Hi JP,

I’ve been thinking about open-sourcing of process maps – the high level processes that make up a company or industry and thir related KPIs – for awhile. One of the things that’s been missing is a forum. The technology open-source community has a set of tooling around which the artifacts of the development process can be sent back and forth, and housed.

In order to facilitate the open-sourcing of process, then, we need to have a centralized way to store the artifacts, and the artifacts themselves need to be structured. Again using the analogy of the technology community, they have standard languages that can be used, and they have standardized the means by which they do version control, etc.

Lombardi recently released a new SaaS-based process mapping and strategy product, and we think it could form the basis for hosting the very open-sourcing you seem to be implying. This isn’t meant to be product spam on your blog but, rather, to let you know that there is some thinking on what these higher-level process maps need to include (it’s not BPMN!), how you tie processes at a managerial level to goals, KPIs and error states, and how you make it available to a broad community.

For now, Blueprint (the product name) is for specific accounts (companies) but we’ve thought about setting up open-source forums for specific industries where people across the industry could develop, in true open-source fashion, their core processes and KPIs. This isn’t about “sharing drawings”… it’s about developing definitive, open-source processes at the managerial level.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,
Phil

ps – I also blogged about these two posts at http://blog.lombardicto.com/2007/03/transparency_an.html

By: Phil Gilbert | Perspectives in Process

Phil Gilbert | Perspectives in Process — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 11:24:23 +0000

Transparency and Open-sourcing of Process…

In two terrific blog posts, CIO of the services arm of British Telecom JP Rangaswami blogs about visibility and openness as the heart of process excellence. He talks about documenting the reality of your company – and of your customers’…

By: Mturk + Opensource Process = ? « Joy Of Innovation

Mturk + Opensource Process = ? « Joy Of Innovation — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 16:22:15 +0000

[...] 2) J P Rangaswami( Confused of Calcutta) in his on going four pillars discourse talks about Opensourcing processes. [...]