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Permalink Reply by Mike Lachapelle on September 25, 2010 at 3:21pm

Ravilla

I have been thinking about this post for a couple of days on how to wrap my mind around the heart of the problem from that post, from a BM perspective.

Fundamentally I think the problem lies in the client segment area, not the value proposition. If you look at the statement:

"The BPM tools on the market today provide solutions to business people, but are not designed for business people to actually use to solve their problems."

The fallacy here is in the problem or job of the clients that drive the value proposition. Yes there are considerably more business people than IT in any organization, but the business people are focussed on delivering the value proposition of the business to their clients - not in modelling the business process to improve them. The assumption of 'democratizing' process tools is that every one wants to, or needs to work on process improvement.

I have led a number of projects that involve business process mapping, and the business subject area experts in every case had little or no interest or experience in mapping the work. Once done, and they have been educated in how to read and understand the maps, the business people will engage in the change enthusiastically. Just don't ask them to spend time documenting and analysing the processes.

I think the author has the correct view when he states:

"A business person has to charter some kind of project, and get one of those rare IT people to come sit with them to model their process and build a custom solution."

It would be a very small portion of the total business people who has a job to improve the processes of the business. The rest are busy delivering value to their clients - there is no democracy to be accessed. The need for those people, because they don't do this very often, is to have someone with talent and tools to the work for them.

The problem with the proposed view - not understanding who really is the client segment and what the jobs to be done are for the people they think they want to target.

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Permalink Reply by Kenneth McGrath on November 22, 2011 at 6:14pm

The key to engagement in this sort of approach, I think is motivation.  Knowledge Management (KM) systems were introduced years ago (when KM was a buzz word) that were suppose to "capture corporate knowledge".

 

The problem?  I watched many of these large scale implementations FAIL because there were only a few people who actually took the time to input their knowledge into the system.  Most people saw the KM applications as "yet another demand on their time".  In short, while the technology was in place to help leverage people's skills and knowledge, there was little motivation for most people to contribute.

 

Now, had these systems been set up with some sort of "gaming" (points per contribution) model to create incentive's to participate, they might have worked.  Imagine a workplace where you are rewarded for sharing knowledge?... and by rewarded I mean those points translate into things like awards, time off, additional bonuses, etc.

 

My instincts tell me that your friend's model is excellent from the technology side... but what about from the human motivational angle?  Why would people contribute?  How could one make it quick and easy to do so (at the appropriate level of granularity)?  His model is still better than the traditional approach but I think that the HR side of things has to engage people, get them excited about contributing, etc.

 

Just my two cents.

 

- Kenneth

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