I was born nearly 50 years ago in a building on Lower Circular Road in Calcutta, not far from Sealdah station. I have very limited memories of living there, so limited that I question whether they are real. But I’ve visited that building many times, my family technically owned it till 1980.

It seemed huge. Because it was huge. Floor upon floor of rooms laid out enclosing a massive inner quadrangle, vaguely turret-like towers at the four corners with gigantic reception rooms and hallways fronting all this. And a basement where the printing press used to be. A basement where I had the best of both worlds during a rebellious adolescence, a place I could vicariously call home every now and then despite enjoying all the comforts of home with the family elsewhere.

I wasn’t one of those people who discovered their love for their home town years after they left it, I started missing Calcutta while still on the train to Delhi en route London. It wasn’t one of these “absence makes the heart grows fonder” deals, I have always treasured the place and will continue to do so. Particularly the memories of the times I had there, family and friends and school and university and everything.

But you know something, I never knew it was called the City Of Palaces until a few years after I left; it was when I was reading an article about the works of the Daniell brothers that I first came across the term.

Since then I’ve been searching for, digging up and collecting a whole variety of artefacts that relate to the City of Palaces, somehow revelling in the fading grandeur and nobility that Calcutta represented. Can’t quite explain it. It was more than just arguing about India Coffee House or Eden Gardens or the Maidan or Tagore or Ray or Sen or what could become a very long list. It wasn’t about the capital city or the Black Hole or St Xavier’s or the movie halls or Clive Street or Mother Teresa or Joi Bangla or Amahdayr Dabi Mahntay Hobay or a democratically elected communist government. It wasn’t about the RCGC or the Tolly or the Swimming Club or Belvedere or Park Circus or the trams or minibuses or Nizam’s or Bihar’s or the bookshops on College St, on Free School St or in Gariahat. It wasn’t about the jhal mudi or puchkas or the Strand or Victoria Memorial or lounging at the British Council or quizzes and the DI and Neil O’Brien and Sadhan Banerjee and Francis Groser. It wasn’t about watching Sugarfoot form and play and grow. It wasn’t about Moira St and all that it represented.

It was about all of it. And I’ve been privileged to be able to afford and find and collect said artefacts, from Magnolia and Firpo’s menus to photographs of the City in the latter half of the 19th century to diaries and journals and family albums depicting life in the first half of the 20th century.

With all this in mind, I enjoyed looking through a collection of photographs provided in a comment by Stuart Isett. Go take a look, it brings to life the glory and the mundaneness that makes Calcutta Calcutta.

I’ve been on the road for the first time since going bionic, and for some reason I listened to my cardiologist’s advice. Which meant conserving my energy, going to bed earlier than I would have otherwise, resting as much as possible in general.

All this also meant that I didn’t get to blog. In fact, ever since the heart attack I haven’t been posting that often, and the eleven-day break since my last post is probably the longest I’ve had. So I thought I’d take a look at the effect of my laziness on the various ways people rank this kind of activity.

On technorati I have drifted gently from around the 5000 mark to around 10000; on alexa I’ve moved from nothing to nothing, too irrelevant to be measured (although I tell myself that it’s because most people who read this don’t use Internet Explorer <g> ).

For some reason my inactivity seems to have made me more popular on google. (Alright, alright, enough of the laughter). Since Christmas, if you search for “jp” on Google, I get included in the top 8 results. Seems to vary according to the time of day.

I’m sure there’s a lesson in there somewhere. I have no idea why the result is the way it is, given I’ve never Optimised For Search Engines, pay nothing for such things, sell nothing, buy nothing, and have relatively trivial rankings elsewhere.

But there it is. Google says I am more popular when I say nothing <g>.

It’s been a long time since I started out on the Four Pillars journey, sometime in the middle of 2003 I guess. At the time, I suggested that enterprise applications would converge to become one of four “pillars”: Publishing, Search, Fulfilment and Conversation.

Most people got the Search pillar, where all I was stressing was that we would move from deterministic models of looking at information through to probabilistic ones, particularly as we realised the lack of accuracy of the information we were getting via the traditional forms-based or tree-structure approaches. I guess most people “got it” because search had been around for a long time, and everyone was familiar with the concepts.

While this was not the case in the middle of 2003, most people have now “got” two of the other pillars, Publishing and Conversation. RSS readers are common now, people understand the syndication of content; blogs, wikis and IM, the constituents of conversation applications (beyond the traditional e-mail) are also common, even if usage patterns show an inverse relationship with age.

What many people didn’t get was the pillar I tried to describe as Fulfilment. The process by which a customer gets what he wants. Buying a book, booking a train ticket, selling the contents of your garage, eating out, watching a film, whatever.

Fulfilment. A state of feeling that you got what you wanted, where you wanted it, when you wanted it and how you wanted it. A state of satisfaction.

I’ve written a number of posts on why customer experience is the only remaining differentiator in a commoditising world, particularly when guest blogging for Shane Richmond at the Telegraph last November: on the economics of the customer, on customers and differentiation, on customers and predictability.

One of the reasons I chose to work where I work is that everyone here is focused on this issue, on improving the customer experience. And with all this as backdrop, you can understand why I want to figure out ways of improving processes that serve the customer. Giving the customer what he wants, precisely what he wants, as quickly as he wants it.

This is not going to happen unless we get our processes defined right, refined right. So we spend a lot of time trying to work out what that means, making sure we are documenting the processes correctly, that they really do reflect the customer experience. Making sure that we understand where we’re losing time or accuracy. Making sure we understand what we’re going to do to gain back the time and the accuracy.

Which is where the opensourcing of processes comes in. Why Michael Hugos’ post on visibility resonated with me so much, and why I wrote my earlier post on the subject.

Many many years ago, probably in the mid-1980s, I remember reading an article called Don’t Allocate, Isolate. Probably in the Harvard Business Review or the Sloan Management Review. While looking at aspects of cost analysis, the authors were suggesting that enterprises spent too long arguing about who paid and how much, rather than really understanding what was spent and on what.

I feel similarly about processes. We should document rather than analyse or critique them. Just document the reality. There’s nothing magical or differentiating about processes per se, it’s how we execute them that matters. Which means that standardisation of processes should not be that difficult. Unless we want to make it difficult.

Maybe we do the same thing with the time and accuracy aspects of processes. Maybe we should avoid getting into the angels-dancing-on-pinheads syndrome. No finger-pointing, no blame cultures while we do something very simple. Measure how long it takes for the customer to get what he wants. Measure how often we get his want right.

These things need to be incontrovertible truths, not for debate. Truths that cannot be varied by the diktats of the Word-Excel-PowerPoint troika.

Expose the process, as if it were code. Expose the completion times and error rates, as if it were code. Let everyone see them. Even the customer. Particularly the customer. Why don’t we learn from the Fedex model?

Michael Hugos’ Universal Product Codes are elements that can be expressed adequately in the tag-meets-microformat spaces; when we do this, we have the DNA we need to track processes across systems silos as well as departmental silos.

When we expose the simple things, we may start seeing some of the magic of democratised innovation:

The Linus’s Law effect, as transparency attracts eyeballs; the peer ratings effect, as people compete for peer recognition by improving things faster and better; the collaborative filtering effect, as people learn from a people-who-did-this-also-did approach; the Because Effect, as customers flock and stay because of the experience and not with shackles and restraints.

There is so much we can discover as we do this. I’d like to believe that one man’s department is another man’s firm, that processes by themselves aren’t different in different firms, that we just like believing they are.

An aside. First we believe that our processes are different. Then we believe that our processes are differentiating (in order to keep the Emperor Clothed). And we keep on believing it, even though we also believe in open architectures and platform independence and the power of standardisation and Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law and Gilder’s Lemma and the War for Talent and and and.

You know what? Sometimes I think we make enterprise processes behave like vendor-lock bloatware. We work to ensure that any and all efficiency gains are absorbed by Topsy-related process growth.

We must find a way to apply opensource principles to core processes.

Following a recommendation from a trusted source (friend and twice-colleague Gary Casey) I went and read Visibility Is Your Friend, a post on CIO.com by Michael Hugos. Excellent post, I thoroughly recommend it, and I will be adding Michael Hugos to my regular reading stack. It also made me revisit something that’s been bothering me for a while.

Systems to me have always been about people, processes and technology bound together by culture and values. Technology, both in hardware terms as well as in software terms, is commoditising; Moore, Metcalfe and Gilder keep marching on, augmented and accentuated by democratised innovation and the opensource community. Stop there for a moment and hold that thought.

While technology has been commoditising, vendors have fought hard to differentiate via lock-in, mostly staying within the letter of competition law rather than its spirit. As a result democratised innovation has not had quite the impact it could have had, and commoditisation has been slow.

At the same time, while there has been considerable talk about process automation and business process reengineering, not much has changed since the late 1980s when these were dominant buzzphrases. Project management has always been about the management of change, but somehow we’ve managed to create a whole new discipline of change management in the meantime. After all, we needed someone to blame for all the reengineering failures we had. What better scapegoat than the change function that wasn’t there at the time?

I think there was something else going on at the same time. There was a general unwillingness to document and expose processes, particularly in the services sector. This unwillingness was natural and rooted in pure insecurity, as people worried about their jobs and consequently tried their hardest to obfuscate what they did. How was this obfuscation carried out? Usually by enshrining processes that nobody understood into ERP, SCM and CRM systems, thereby legitimising the inefficiencies. And that may be why so many people failed at many things: at using value chain analysis, at implementing project accounting, at documenting processes for quality certification or for that matter Sarbanes-Oxley, at driving value out of ERP, SCM or CRM systems.

All these things depend on processes being correctly described. And on reliable metrics for those processes. Two things that were conspicuous in their absence.

Absent because of human insecurity. Insecurity that was understandable, insecurity that had its roots in words like downsizing and outsourcing and rightsizing and rightsourcing and outsizing and downsourcing. Words that represented things that often failed. Things that often failed because they were based on the wrong information. Information that was corrupted as a result of human insecurity. All understandable, all very sad. And everyone lost. The customers, the shareholders, the employees, even the consultants. Maybe not all the consultants….

When these things were failing, we started doing something else, something very related to our assembly-line roots. We started seeking to standardise jobs. Tried to put people in boxes. Any colour you like as long as it’s red. That way, we had something else to blame when the results didn’t bear inspection.

Because the Emperor had to have his Clothes. We couldn’t actually say that we didn’t have standardised processes, that we hadn’t really documented them anyway, that we couldn’t measure them if we wanted to.

No, it was easier to say our people needed standardising. It was easier to say that while in the same breath claiming we had a War For Talent, however ludicrous that sounded.

And we had help in keeping that perception of the Emperor being Clothed. Help in the shape of meeting minutes and presentations and spreadsheets. Where all the “power” in the organisation began to vest in the people who controlled the spreadsheets, the presentation decks and the meeting minutes. The perception established by these documents became the reality of office life. And everybody lost, except for those who knew how to jockey their way into Perception Control. Maybe that’s when I started losing interest in Office, wanting a more open and collaborative environment.

People. Processes. Technology.

We can standardise technology, and continue to do so. We can and should standardise processes, see what happens when we apply opensource thinking to service processes.

After all, it’s not the technology that will differentiate us. It’s not the process either, though there might be a short-term imbalance.

What differentiates us is the quality of the customer experience, which is about people. It’s about poetry and dance and music and art. It’s about Cluetrain. It’s about markets. And conversations.

No army of monkeys will ever be able to convince me otherwise. However much Shakespeare is perceived to have been produced.

Sometimes perception isn’t reality.

So I will take a leaf out of Michael Hugo’s book, and look for ways to expose processes and their associated metrics in order to adapt and improve them. Make them truly visible, rather than susceptible to gaming by Excel and PowerPoint.

Given enough eyeballs…..

David Gumbrell brings up an interesting point while commenting on a recent post. I had asked the question why people saw iTunes as DRM but not Word. And David said:

I have a suspicion that it’s because people buy iTunes with their own money and MS Office with their employer’s.

This is not about Microsoft per se, or even about Apple. It’s about lock-ins. Now there are many reasons why enterprises buy lock-in products and services:

• The only game in town: In this instance a vendor has a real or virtual monopoly, elects to protect it, and enterprises want what that vendor offers. Lock-in wins. Victims don’t feel too good about it, but at least they understand it.
• Your problem, your solution: Here the enterprise IT decision makers elect to outsource management of the problem, whatever that problem is, and are prepared to live with lock-in provided the problem is solved. Also understandable. And not that painful either, on the surface.
• Stockholm syndrome: In this case the lock-in provider has excelled, the customer is so delighted with the product or service that he pretty much asks for the lock-in, it becomes a security blanket for him. Sometimes that security blanket helps him forget what he’s done, but most of the time he’s happy as Larry. Understandable and apparently pleasurable. Sometimes linked to the fact that decision-maker skills are deeply embedded in the architecture of the lock-in merchant.
• Because it works, stupid: This is the enterprise norm. A selection is made with clear and present lock-in, with the defence that it’s the only solution that works soup-to-nuts. Pragmatism rules OK. Exacerbated by devolved decision-making, which allows people to concentrate on the benefits without worrying about the costs.

I am sure there are many other reasons that people buy lock-in products. Why am I so hung up about these products? I guess I just don’t like having to pay tons of money to try and free up my own information, to move it around, to manipulate it, change it, enrich it, whatever. Especially if the end result is that nothing works anyway.

That’s what DRM 1.0, otherwise called EAI, felt like. Maybe David Gumbrell’s right. If the decision makers don’t feel the pain of their decisions, they will continue to make strange decisions. Incentive misalignment.

I still live in hope, though. Even if my generation puts up with this nonsense, I cannot see Generation M doing it.