Experience in managing business processes in a new way, or how ACM replaces BPM, CRM, ECM, SCRUM, ITSM - in one fell swoop
Do you believe in the God “IT system for all business processes”? - thus begins the infection of the idea. I warn you, in this article there will be facts that can damage your picture of the world ... irrevocably.
Probably many will say that - no! No such! The IT landscape of the organization will always consist of a zoo of various IT systems!
And I agree with that.
But did you know that about 2000 years ago - such IT was already invented ... Her name is paper .
Paper is the main, convenient and most popular storage medium in the history of mankind.
This is IT! Who doesn’t believe? We open the dictionary of the Russian language and read:
- technology = science of technology
- technology = everything that was invented by man and did not exist before him in nature
- information technology = everything that is created by a person to work with information
- IT = the science of the creation and development of information technology.
Did paper exist in nature? Not! So - the technique. Is it designed to work with information? Yes - textual and visual. She appeared as a result of scientific research? Yes! From here: paper = IT.
Yes, I understand that it’s hard to realize, but I promised you to send a picture of the world! So no offense! If breathing quickens it is better to stop reading right from this line! I warned you!
Is there any IT that can challenge a piece of paper? Really for 2000 years there was no daredevil? The answer is under the cut ...
Who will argue with the fact that almost all business processes, almost all organizations use paper as their main IT !?
So my statement at the very beginning is not so wrong? Paper is universal IT for almost all business processes.
Projects? Treaties? Finance? Marketing? Production? - All business processes are based on paper.
Various modules such as CRM, ERP are screwed to it ... but the paper still remains the basis ...
And until now we are working with an information system whose name is GSDOU. The first mention of this system I found in the area of the 50s. But in the form that we know now is the 80s. GSDOU - in fact, this is one of the first branded IT systems with a huge number of users, it used paper as a medium.
How did she do it? The secret lies in its flexibility and simplicity. That is why, so far, with all the initiatives of “electronic document management”, the territory of paper as IT is only slightly reduced. But she is in no hurry to give up ...
You can certainly say that the whole thing is the inertness of human nature, the strength of habit ... but I do not believe in it. And who am I? Who am I to affirm such things? Let's just say that I have behind me projects to create information systems in a wide variety of industries, from production and trade, to municipal administrations and regional governments. The largest project was to create a system for 1,500 employees. Anyone who has met with implementation projects knows the essence of the monster of change , he will understand what the project of changing the organization of 1,500 people means.
If there were stupid people, I would have noticed them. But all my experience says one thing - there are objective reasons for everything. If some tool leads, then it is better than the rest.
Not that I don’t like paper - I really love it! And I love to use it, but 60 years ago a computer was invented, and then the Internet. And this has opened up new IT opportunities that need to be developed. You could even say - there has been a revolution in IT. Yes, it’s such that many even forgot the essence of IT, replacing it with games on PCs, and learning about different programming ala jQuery, Delphi, C #, Oracle ...
Let's call it all - computer technology (from a word - computing, we reduce it to CT). It is strange why many people think that CT = IT? Although in reality CT is only a very small particle of IT.
Painfully? I understand :)
So, with one piece of the picture of the world shook? Going further?
For a long time I tried to understand the meaning and meaning of abbreviations: ERP, ECM, CRM, BPM ...
But all I understood was that I didn’t understand anything. And the more answers I found, the more questions surfaced ...
And so it went year after year ... I tried to organize business processes from project to project, on a variety of platforms: 1C, DIRECTUM, IBM Lotus Notes, TeamWox, Megaplan, Basecamp, Google Apps … and much more.
Almost all of these decisions - I like, but each, for some kind of their own tasks and their own situations.
And here is what I definitely did not like about them: they are either too complicated, or too narrow, or very expensive.
And this is precisely the reason why they lose paper. Some fights win (some processes manage to get away from paper or significantly reduce it), but in general - not. At the same time, the costs are off-scale and the further you go, the more these costs grow exponentially.
Or let's just say that we are leaving the paper, but as a result, the business process becomes shaky and becomes even worse than it was.
One of such abracodabras is BPM. An incomprehensible beast, which can be represented as an attempt to schematize processes. Like, first we try to build a process diagram through BPMN notation, and then using BPM systems or WorkFlow to make people run along these diagrams. I just suspect that this approach has been inherited from the industrial age, from industrial enterprises, from where everything runs on the assembly line. And many “consultants” are now mocking organizations by drawing schemes for them (which then gather dust on shelves) and putting shackles on employees in the form of WorkFlow. I have a lot of experience working with WorkFlow - the routes themselves worked like clockwork, but the quality of business processes (you can use the term KPI) did not really improve there.
There are positive examples, but there are very few of them, and I have one more hypothesis on this score, which is very long and here we will keep silent about it.
The 20th century iscoming FOX , the prerequisites appear, and then he - His Majesty the Internet. And here a new paradigm enters the scene. A shift is taking place, almost one of the 3 strongest in the history of mankind (1st - the appearance of speech, 2nd - the appearance of writing, 3rd - the appearance of the Internet).
And HTML "pages" are entering the scene. What pages do you work with more often today? With paper or with HTML?
Against the background of the development of technologies and their complications in the direction of simplification, social networks, web 2.0, and graphs appear that simplify the work with these pages.
Pages are multifunctional, dynamic, but not much more complicated than paper pages.
You can work with them from anywhere in the world thanks to mobile devices and the Internet.
In this environment, a new toolkit is developing - CMS as information carriers.
Take WordPress - tens of millions of sites around the world, billions of views. No. 1 among CMS and I think that by the number of views HTML-pages around the world. What does it mean? What as an IT tool and as a storage medium, WordPress is the first contender for competing with paper.
Yes, this is not Druapl and Joomla and no other CMS (fans of other CMS - please breathe more evenly). All of them are just children in comparison with the power of simplicity and popularity of WordPress.
See for yourself:
1. WordPress as an IT tool has almost the same characteristics as paper:
1.1. Easy to view and read
1.2. Easy to create and write
1.3. Ease of constructing classifiers (taxonomies)
1.4. A huge community around the world (by some numbers it is 10 or 20 times larger than that of Druapl or Joomla)
2. But at the same time, it has the advantages of modern CT (computer technology):
2.1. the ability to work on one page for several people at once
2.2. social web 2.0
2.3. hypertext (HTML)
3. Modularity and extensibility - I decided to separate this item separately from item 2, because:
3.1. it is a different modularity and extensibility with respect to our beloved 1C
3.2. the module here is simultaneously autonomous as in SharePoint, but at the same time deeply integrated and interconnected with other parts of the system as in 1C
3.3. and with all this - the module can be easily disconnected and sent for repair (in 1C it’s not possible)
3.4. Well, one of the very powerful advantages regarding corporate systems is that the kernel is updated, but we don’t touch the modules. This avoids problems such as “we worked on improvements for a year, the update came, now we need to work on the update for a year to save the improvements.”
Are these completely objective reasons for WP leadership? Does even one IT have such a set of advantages?
That's why if we take the absolute standings among IT in all weight categories, throughout the history of mankind, then we have 2 obvious leaders:
1. Paper
2. WordPress
I certainly could be wrong, but I could not find arguments refuting these facts. Can the community open my eyes?
WordPress - I cited only as an example of the opportunities that led to the emergence of a new ideology. It is called Adaptive Case Managment (ACM).
ACM is fundamentally changing the approach to process management, but it took me 7 years to figure this out. Therefore, I do not promise that I can disclose this idea as a whole within the framework of one article.
Let's start with the opinions on ACM , thesis is:
1. Someone thinks that ACM is an extension of mail services (gmail + CMS or gmail based on CMS)
2. Someone thinks that ACM is an offshoot of BPM
3. Someone believes that ACM is the end of BPM and a fundamentally new approach to process management.
Examples - the following guys came up very close or almost to the point of this concept:
1. GitHub (Issue section)
2. ZenDesk.com
3. JIRA
But you try to implement CRM on their basis or at least part of PMBOK, ITIL ... so it turns out that this is close, but not ACM yet.
Or take the same Basecamp or Megaplan, try to implement the critical path technique there (auth. I. Goldratt). I could not get. And this is a key problem in managing large projects in large organizations.
For ACM, this is all seeds, despite the fact that outwardly it remains as simple as the page with this article on HabraHabr. Our version even looks almost the same.
I had a number of projects where there was an attempt to implement an idea close to ACM on different platforms, but all this was “NOT THAT”.
ACM is a consequence of web technologies, and I did not use web systems, the results were good, but not excellent.
For a long time I was looking for a tool that would fit the ACM architecture in my vision (my vision, of course, may differ from the vision of others, especially since there is no single standard).
And here one respected IT architect expressed on his blog the idea that WordPress is closest to the spirit of ACM. By that time, I had just finished one of my first WordPress web projects (I had been tormented with Joomla for about six months before) and felt warm feelings for this CMS for its simplicity and convenience.
Seeing what respected people are talking about ACM and WordPress, I decided to try, and so a new project was born, which is still ongoing, but with results that already allow us to draw conclusions.
Here I’ll briefly talk about how in one fairly large organization (for 1000 employees and 20 offices in the Russian Federation), based on this system, we were able to build very interesting solutions and optimize the following business processes:
1. ITSM \ ITIL - this was the first pilot The project on which we tested the performance of our hypothesis
1.1. The number of requests for technical support? Share decisions in time for SLA? Service catalog? The cost of IT support in terms of services or facilities? (servers, applications, computers, printers ...) - or any other section of information.
1.2. Scrum? Backlog? Changes by version? Release Dates? Sprints? Discussion of any changes in the comments ...
2. Projects? Briefcases? Programs? Project teams? Who is the RP? Timing and timeliness of closing projects? - all this is present and transparent as ever.
3. Lawyers? The courts? Claims? Contract work? - easy!
4. Marketing - projects? activity? production of products (banners, badges, business cards) - yes.
5. The staff. Looking for employees? Reception employee? Adaptation? Automatic account creation, registration in information systems? Registration in the training center? All this is interdependent and starts automatically as the employee adapts. All departments are coordinated by the system. All information is stored within a single social network.
6. The control panel. The section that shows a set of widgets, the main part is KPI (like Google Analytiks, only by indicators of business processes)
7. Own gosuslugi.ru
Has anyone ordered a passport on the new portal of public services? Have you noticed how convenient it is to see all the services in one place? Now imagine that each department within the company is a service provider, a catalog of services - under a hundred, and not just a catalog of IT services. And all this is available in one place. Need a business card? Want to apply for an employee search? Agree on a contract? Make a vacation? Apply to the IT department? - all this on one page. Whatever you want, at least from what department.
And further:
1. All this with an adaptive design for any type of device. You go in from a PC or tablet - one view, you go in from a mobile - the design adapts.
2. next to this system on the same WordPress are built knowledge bases by department, with unsurpassed ease of sharing knowledge and documents, with a powerful search system for taxonomies.
3. every element of the system is imbued with the spirit of GTD (lists, priorities ...), which makes it possible to focus efforts at one moment in time on one task, while you can see the prospects for tasks in a variety of sections (periods, deadlines, customers, branches, departments , milestones ...).
Can anyone name alternative IT tools with similar capabilities?
1. Gamification - we are slowly looking at the elements of gamification to build a more effective employee motivation system.
2. Building a knowledge testing system
3. Extension of the CRM block
4. Development of integration modules with other web applications (primarily Google)
Now this system is under active development, there is a prototype in a single copy, but which really works and is used.
We want to release this product with open source code.
In my opinion, ACM as an architecture will prove itself in the coming years, and our WordPress-based implementation will take its rightful place among the analogues.
PS Taking this opportunity: everyone who wants to join the project, in the role of a developer, an experienced rabbit, or in some other role - write.
UDP: cleaned emoticons, added caution to the preamble, lowered the degree of selfishness. The essence was left unchanged :)
Probably many will say that - no! No such! The IT landscape of the organization will always consist of a zoo of various IT systems!
And I agree with that.
But did you know that about 2000 years ago - such IT was already invented ... Her name is paper .
Paper is the main, convenient and most popular storage medium in the history of mankind.
This is IT! Who doesn’t believe? We open the dictionary of the Russian language and read:
- technology = science of technology
- technology = everything that was invented by man and did not exist before him in nature
- information technology = everything that is created by a person to work with information
- IT = the science of the creation and development of information technology.
Did paper exist in nature? Not! So - the technique. Is it designed to work with information? Yes - textual and visual. She appeared as a result of scientific research? Yes! From here: paper = IT.
Yes, I understand that it’s hard to realize, but I promised you to send a picture of the world! So no offense! If breathing quickens it is better to stop reading right from this line! I warned you!
Is there any IT that can challenge a piece of paper? Really for 2000 years there was no daredevil? The answer is under the cut ...
Paper is the undisputed leader
Who will argue with the fact that almost all business processes, almost all organizations use paper as their main IT !?
So my statement at the very beginning is not so wrong? Paper is universal IT for almost all business processes.
Projects? Treaties? Finance? Marketing? Production? - All business processes are based on paper.
Various modules such as CRM, ERP are screwed to it ... but the paper still remains the basis ...
And until now we are working with an information system whose name is GSDOU. The first mention of this system I found in the area of the 50s. But in the form that we know now is the 80s. GSDOU - in fact, this is one of the first branded IT systems with a huge number of users, it used paper as a medium.
How did she do it? The secret lies in its flexibility and simplicity. That is why, so far, with all the initiatives of “electronic document management”, the territory of paper as IT is only slightly reduced. But she is in no hurry to give up ...
about the author
You can certainly say that the whole thing is the inertness of human nature, the strength of habit ... but I do not believe in it. And who am I? Who am I to affirm such things? Let's just say that I have behind me projects to create information systems in a wide variety of industries, from production and trade, to municipal administrations and regional governments. The largest project was to create a system for 1,500 employees. Anyone who has met with implementation projects knows the essence of the monster of change , he will understand what the project of changing the organization of 1,500 people means.
If there were stupid people, I would have noticed them. But all my experience says one thing - there are objective reasons for everything. If some tool leads, then it is better than the rest.
What is IT?
Not that I don’t like paper - I really love it! And I love to use it, but 60 years ago a computer was invented, and then the Internet. And this has opened up new IT opportunities that need to be developed. You could even say - there has been a revolution in IT. Yes, it’s such that many even forgot the essence of IT, replacing it with games on PCs, and learning about different programming ala jQuery, Delphi, C #, Oracle ...
Let's call it all - computer technology (from a word - computing, we reduce it to CT). It is strange why many people think that CT = IT? Although in reality CT is only a very small particle of IT.
Painfully? I understand :)
So, with one piece of the picture of the world shook? Going further?
Abracadabra
For a long time I tried to understand the meaning and meaning of abbreviations: ERP, ECM, CRM, BPM ...
But all I understood was that I didn’t understand anything. And the more answers I found, the more questions surfaced ...
And so it went year after year ... I tried to organize business processes from project to project, on a variety of platforms: 1C, DIRECTUM, IBM Lotus Notes, TeamWox, Megaplan, Basecamp, Google Apps … and much more.
Almost all of these decisions - I like, but each, for some kind of their own tasks and their own situations.
And here is what I definitely did not like about them: they are either too complicated, or too narrow, or very expensive.
And this is precisely the reason why they lose paper. Some fights win (some processes manage to get away from paper or significantly reduce it), but in general - not. At the same time, the costs are off-scale and the further you go, the more these costs grow exponentially.
Or let's just say that we are leaving the paper, but as a result, the business process becomes shaky and becomes even worse than it was.
One of such abracodabras is BPM. An incomprehensible beast, which can be represented as an attempt to schematize processes. Like, first we try to build a process diagram through BPMN notation, and then using BPM systems or WorkFlow to make people run along these diagrams. I just suspect that this approach has been inherited from the industrial age, from industrial enterprises, from where everything runs on the assembly line. And many “consultants” are now mocking organizations by drawing schemes for them (which then gather dust on shelves) and putting shackles on employees in the form of WorkFlow. I have a lot of experience working with WorkFlow - the routes themselves worked like clockwork, but the quality of business processes (you can use the term KPI) did not really improve there.
There are positive examples, but there are very few of them, and I have one more hypothesis on this score, which is very long and here we will keep silent about it.
Ray of light in IT
The 20th century is
And HTML "pages" are entering the scene. What pages do you work with more often today? With paper or with HTML?
Against the background of the development of technologies and their complications in the direction of simplification, social networks, web 2.0, and graphs appear that simplify the work with these pages.
Pages are multifunctional, dynamic, but not much more complicated than paper pages.
You can work with them from anywhere in the world thanks to mobile devices and the Internet.
In this environment, a new toolkit is developing - CMS as information carriers.
Take WordPress - tens of millions of sites around the world, billions of views. No. 1 among CMS and I think that by the number of views HTML-pages around the world. What does it mean? What as an IT tool and as a storage medium, WordPress is the first contender for competing with paper.
Yes, this is not Druapl and Joomla and no other CMS (fans of other CMS - please breathe more evenly). All of them are just children in comparison with the power of simplicity and popularity of WordPress.
See for yourself:
1. WordPress as an IT tool has almost the same characteristics as paper:
1.1. Easy to view and read
1.2. Easy to create and write
1.3. Ease of constructing classifiers (taxonomies)
1.4. A huge community around the world (by some numbers it is 10 or 20 times larger than that of Druapl or Joomla)
2. But at the same time, it has the advantages of modern CT (computer technology):
2.1. the ability to work on one page for several people at once
2.2. social web 2.0
2.3. hypertext (HTML)
3. Modularity and extensibility - I decided to separate this item separately from item 2, because:
3.1. it is a different modularity and extensibility with respect to our beloved 1C
3.2. the module here is simultaneously autonomous as in SharePoint, but at the same time deeply integrated and interconnected with other parts of the system as in 1C
3.3. and with all this - the module can be easily disconnected and sent for repair (in 1C it’s not possible)
3.4. Well, one of the very powerful advantages regarding corporate systems is that the kernel is updated, but we don’t touch the modules. This avoids problems such as “we worked on improvements for a year, the update came, now we need to work on the update for a year to save the improvements.”
Are these completely objective reasons for WP leadership? Does even one IT have such a set of advantages?
That's why if we take the absolute standings among IT in all weight categories, throughout the history of mankind, then we have 2 obvious leaders:
1. Paper
2. WordPress
I certainly could be wrong, but I could not find arguments refuting these facts. Can the community open my eyes?
A ray of light ignited a new ideology
WordPress - I cited only as an example of the opportunities that led to the emergence of a new ideology. It is called Adaptive Case Managment (ACM).
ACM is fundamentally changing the approach to process management, but it took me 7 years to figure this out. Therefore, I do not promise that I can disclose this idea as a whole within the framework of one article.
Let's start with the opinions on ACM , thesis is:
1. Someone thinks that ACM is an extension of mail services (gmail + CMS or gmail based on CMS)
2. Someone thinks that ACM is an offshoot of BPM
3. Someone believes that ACM is the end of BPM and a fundamentally new approach to process management.
Examples - the following guys came up very close or almost to the point of this concept:
1. GitHub (Issue section)
2. ZenDesk.com
3. JIRA
But you try to implement CRM on their basis or at least part of PMBOK, ITIL ... so it turns out that this is close, but not ACM yet.
Or take the same Basecamp or Megaplan, try to implement the critical path technique there (auth. I. Goldratt). I could not get. And this is a key problem in managing large projects in large organizations.
For ACM, this is all seeds, despite the fact that outwardly it remains as simple as the page with this article on HabraHabr. Our version even looks almost the same.
I had a number of projects where there was an attempt to implement an idea close to ACM on different platforms, but all this was “NOT THAT”.
ACM is a consequence of web technologies, and I did not use web systems, the results were good, but not excellent.
For a long time I was looking for a tool that would fit the ACM architecture in my vision (my vision, of course, may differ from the vision of others, especially since there is no single standard).
And here one respected IT architect expressed on his blog the idea that WordPress is closest to the spirit of ACM. By that time, I had just finished one of my first WordPress web projects (I had been tormented with Joomla for about six months before) and felt warm feelings for this CMS for its simplicity and convenience.
Seeing what respected people are talking about ACM and WordPress, I decided to try, and so a new project was born, which is still ongoing, but with results that already allow us to draw conclusions.
How does ACM put the rest of the crabs on the shoulder blades?
Here I’ll briefly talk about how in one fairly large organization (for 1000 employees and 20 offices in the Russian Federation), based on this system, we were able to build very interesting solutions and optimize the following business processes:
1. ITSM \ ITIL - this was the first pilot The project on which we tested the performance of our hypothesis
1.1. The number of requests for technical support? Share decisions in time for SLA? Service catalog? The cost of IT support in terms of services or facilities? (servers, applications, computers, printers ...) - or any other section of information.
1.2. Scrum? Backlog? Changes by version? Release Dates? Sprints? Discussion of any changes in the comments ...
2. Projects? Briefcases? Programs? Project teams? Who is the RP? Timing and timeliness of closing projects? - all this is present and transparent as ever.
3. Lawyers? The courts? Claims? Contract work? - easy!
4. Marketing - projects? activity? production of products (banners, badges, business cards) - yes.
5. The staff. Looking for employees? Reception employee? Adaptation? Automatic account creation, registration in information systems? Registration in the training center? All this is interdependent and starts automatically as the employee adapts. All departments are coordinated by the system. All information is stored within a single social network.
6. The control panel. The section that shows a set of widgets, the main part is KPI (like Google Analytiks, only by indicators of business processes)
7. Own gosuslugi.ru
Has anyone ordered a passport on the new portal of public services? Have you noticed how convenient it is to see all the services in one place? Now imagine that each department within the company is a service provider, a catalog of services - under a hundred, and not just a catalog of IT services. And all this is available in one place. Need a business card? Want to apply for an employee search? Agree on a contract? Make a vacation? Apply to the IT department? - all this on one page. Whatever you want, at least from what department.
And further:
1. All this with an adaptive design for any type of device. You go in from a PC or tablet - one view, you go in from a mobile - the design adapts.
2. next to this system on the same WordPress are built knowledge bases by department, with unsurpassed ease of sharing knowledge and documents, with a powerful search system for taxonomies.
3. every element of the system is imbued with the spirit of GTD (lists, priorities ...), which makes it possible to focus efforts at one moment in time on one task, while you can see the prospects for tasks in a variety of sections (periods, deadlines, customers, branches, departments , milestones ...).
Can anyone name alternative IT tools with similar capabilities?
Prospects
1. Gamification - we are slowly looking at the elements of gamification to build a more effective employee motivation system.
2. Building a knowledge testing system
3. Extension of the CRM block
4. Development of integration modules with other web applications (primarily Google)
Total
Now this system is under active development, there is a prototype in a single copy, but which really works and is used.
We want to release this product with open source code.
In my opinion, ACM as an architecture will prove itself in the coming years, and our WordPress-based implementation will take its rightful place among the analogues.
PS Taking this opportunity: everyone who wants to join the project, in the role of a developer, an experienced rabbit, or in some other role - write.
UDP: cleaned emoticons, added caution to the preamble, lowered the degree of selfishness. The essence was left unchanged :)