This statements pops up in my mind many times when thinking and talking about BPM. Also I think this is true when analyzing how companies struggle with SOA and integration issues.

Einstein stated “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Last year I was asked by four companies to help them solve problems around IT solution delivery times. They did everything according to the books, implemented BPM, buying beautiful BPM(S) and integration tools and invest heavily in modelling their processes.

In all cases the symptom was not a faster IT delivery but actually IT responsiveness was slowed down much to the dismay of people running their daily business. Most of these companies Architects and CIO’s blamed their Business Design people for it. Since they lack IT knowledge to properly assess a business change impact for IT. So they asked me to help them do that job.

In my opinion it is not at all caused by lack of knowledge but by an added bureaucratic layer we refer to as BPM. For some reason IT bureaucrats where not very good at documenting and therefore businesses added another layer of bureaucrats on top of IT bureaucrats. That layer is now filled with so-called business consultants, business  analysts and business Process consultants now also responsible for modelling frantically in their great new BPM tooling.

So in order to change programming/configuration to the business requirements, we now need to go through 2 layers before we come to a solution. 1^st the modellers layer and then 2^nd the IT layer. This mechanism results many discussions between IT and Business consultants where the actual business reason for change is often lost.

Adding to the confusion is more IT Bureaucracy we now call “Enterprise Architecture”. I will not state that Architecture is a bad thing, however I will state that traditional reactive architecture is a bad thing.

Reactive architecture is when enterprise and solution architects draw pretty pictures of what business consultants and IT consultants have already built. Last year Gartner already stated that the days of traditional Architecture are numbered. http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1358913

I propose that companies should move to a more holistic (cross technology and cross organisational) and pro-active architecture. The goal of this pro-active architecture should be to drive higher IT responsiveness.

To do that CEO’s, CIO’s and Enterprise Architects need guts! They need vision to simplify their IT landscapes.  To come up with IT product line-up that will support their business in changing. As a result they need to come up with new organisational models to support these line-ups. Buzzword Management really will not help, you now have to think for yourself!

“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius — and a lot of courage — to move in the opposite direction.” -Einstein

What prehistoric events have driven our human need to “manage” everything?

One thing is certain, whatever event or causality was part of our evolution, the change from caveman to modern human was caused by genetic “errors “ that improved our ability to survive.
“Errors” are part of nature and the very reason species will/can adapt to their environment.

Also I am very certain that many great inventions were not done by ratio but rather by accident (error). Only after the accident we used ratio to find out what happened.

In my opinion BPM is just an expression of our human habit to fight this natural disorder. I find no certainty BPM(S) will improve anything. BPM(S) might also cause more bureaucracy on an already bureaucratic society and therefore cause the “extinction” of a company.

Since I am not so sure we have gone very far from caveman I could even argue that it is best not to manage at all, and leave people to do what they do best of all species…socialize! Let them create goals to achieve and let them make mistakes so that they can adept to their changing business environment.

A great example of how that works is a 1500 people homecare company in Holland.
No BPMS, No expensive IT, No managers just clear goals…the result, a very successful homecare company in Holland.

For those who think that it does not work in production environments I would like to refer to the WWII scenario where in the US due to absence of “skilled men” the “unskilled women” group had to drive the war machine production plants.
This is where the concept of Kaizen was born and where small groups of people socialize on how to smoothen the road to their goals.  Later this concept was brought to Japan for post WW2 rebuilt and was finally referred to as Kaizen.

To improve this “socializing” aspect of human species I indeed think that technology plays a huge role actually it might even be the catalyst. Modelling however does not need to be a part of this technology.
Already I have seen great examples of small groups of people creating a paper based workable solution to improve their processes, during the process a form of extreme programming is used to built and maintain the software to support the ever changing process. Modelling would only slow change down.