I will apologize in advance if this comes off as a snarky comment: I remember a fellow who covened a group to discuss advances in business process re-engineering, but then moved on to business analytics because there was nothing left to say about process redesign and its implementation (which seemed to confound the old guard working those complex issues...). Decades pass, and here we are again.
Ok- on to hopefully more productive feedback. My view about technology enabled business process changes is that in the past, the team that was going to have to operate in the people-process-technology "to be" ecosystem tried to understand specifically which requirements the technology could enable that was useful for them in terms of speed, cost, or quality, and the places where the technology results could be problematic so that process guardrails with human roles to implement them were needed to ensure the quality of results. But of course that is not agile iterative prototyping- which is why such projects run slower and are costly in human resource commitment to flesh out the reality of what the technology can do to help solve real business problems.
Dave, I actuallly moved on from knowledge management to business analytics. I moved on earlier from business process reengineering to knowledge management. My general thinking is that if very few people are interested in the topic I am pursuing, then it might be time to move on to another (often related) topic. So that's what I did. I am happy to find that people are interested in both reengineering and knowledge management again--but not business analytics!
I have been coaching an "outside-in" approach to business process for a couple of decades now. Oneof the main catchphrasesis that "the business process is the DNA of the business". I am amazed to hear that US businesses have not got this yet. It also has shed light on why there is so much talk about workflows. So the country that brought us CMM and CMMI and re-engineering the corporation is not the one that took process optimization to heart 😀
You name the root cause yourself: most companies don't know who is responsible for their processes. That's not a process design gap. That's an ownership gap.
You can design the new process. You can implement the technology. If nobody owns the outcome, not the project, but the result the process is supposed to deliver, the effort collapses the first time it gets hard.
The companies that get this right define accountability before the redesign starts. Not after implementation stalls.
Yes, many companies--particularly in the US--have struggled with the idea of process owners. Just having AI and agents available for better processes doesn't make it possible to implement them without clear and supportive ownership.
The older way was slower, but it made the team really work through where the technology would actually help on speed, cost, or quality, and where it might create problems and need human checks around it. That took more time and more effort upfront, but it also kept the work tied to real business problems.
What I keep wondering is what the best middle ground looks like now. How do you balance that kind of rigor with the push for agile prototyping and faster iteration?
Tom, this article is spot on so critical that an organisation redesigns it’s business processes if it wants to deliver business value from it’s AI Initiatives interesting similarities between the business processes reengineering initiatives in the 90s and AI initiatives easy way out is to simply downsize your workforce I also think knowledge management is a critical enabler of AI initiatives and again something most organisations don’t do well
I agree. I hadn't thought so much about the knowledge management angle, but I am doing a research project with someone from Celonis--the process intelligence company--and their customers are saying that you can't redesign or operate new processes without knowing the context--how it's performing, what are the rules, and what is the common information used in the organization to describe things.
I will apologize in advance if this comes off as a snarky comment: I remember a fellow who covened a group to discuss advances in business process re-engineering, but then moved on to business analytics because there was nothing left to say about process redesign and its implementation (which seemed to confound the old guard working those complex issues...). Decades pass, and here we are again.
Ok- on to hopefully more productive feedback. My view about technology enabled business process changes is that in the past, the team that was going to have to operate in the people-process-technology "to be" ecosystem tried to understand specifically which requirements the technology could enable that was useful for them in terms of speed, cost, or quality, and the places where the technology results could be problematic so that process guardrails with human roles to implement them were needed to ensure the quality of results. But of course that is not agile iterative prototyping- which is why such projects run slower and are costly in human resource commitment to flesh out the reality of what the technology can do to help solve real business problems.
Dave, I actuallly moved on from knowledge management to business analytics. I moved on earlier from business process reengineering to knowledge management. My general thinking is that if very few people are interested in the topic I am pursuing, then it might be time to move on to another (often related) topic. So that's what I did. I am happy to find that people are interested in both reengineering and knowledge management again--but not business analytics!
So true! We in Germany are really good in workflows and it took me quite a while to understand what the US people are talking about 😅
I have been coaching an "outside-in" approach to business process for a couple of decades now. Oneof the main catchphrasesis that "the business process is the DNA of the business". I am amazed to hear that US businesses have not got this yet. It also has shed light on why there is so much talk about workflows. So the country that brought us CMM and CMMI and re-engineering the corporation is not the one that took process optimization to heart 😀
You name the root cause yourself: most companies don't know who is responsible for their processes. That's not a process design gap. That's an ownership gap.
You can design the new process. You can implement the technology. If nobody owns the outcome, not the project, but the result the process is supposed to deliver, the effort collapses the first time it gets hard.
The companies that get this right define accountability before the redesign starts. Not after implementation stalls.
Yes, many companies--particularly in the US--have struggled with the idea of process owners. Just having AI and agents available for better processes doesn't make it possible to implement them without clear and supportive ownership.
Spot on. I think the AI integrators and change management experts are going to be big winners.
This is in line with my observations too.
The older way was slower, but it made the team really work through where the technology would actually help on speed, cost, or quality, and where it might create problems and need human checks around it. That took more time and more effort upfront, but it also kept the work tied to real business problems.
What I keep wondering is what the best middle ground looks like now. How do you balance that kind of rigor with the push for agile prototyping and faster iteration?
Tom, this article is spot on so critical that an organisation redesigns it’s business processes if it wants to deliver business value from it’s AI Initiatives interesting similarities between the business processes reengineering initiatives in the 90s and AI initiatives easy way out is to simply downsize your workforce I also think knowledge management is a critical enabler of AI initiatives and again something most organisations don’t do well
I agree. I hadn't thought so much about the knowledge management angle, but I am doing a research project with someone from Celonis--the process intelligence company--and their customers are saying that you can't redesign or operate new processes without knowing the context--how it's performing, what are the rules, and what is the common information used in the organization to describe things.