Thoughts on Collaborative Planning
From Process Wiki
| Thoughts on Collaborative Planning 2010-03-10 | ||
| Keith Swenson is Vice President of Research and Development at Fujitsu. His posts are always very interesting. In this post he talks about the way BPM (and BPMN) has evolved the last couple of years in relation to the practical needs.
I have added the paragraphs about this subject below. Please visit his blog for more details! (ref. to: http://kswenson.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/three-years-90-posts-a-new-name/) | | |
| By: Pvanerk | ||
It seems that “BPM” has come to mean a way to integrate servers, and workflow a kind of document router, both of these with a strong orientation toward very elaborate but fixed processes. Take one look at the BPMN 2.0 spec, and you will realize that this is designed for highly trained esoteric specialists, not for the masses. Instead of something extremely sophisticated for specialists (e.g. jumbo jet cockpit) I think there is more overall good to be gained from by designing for lots of people to use easily (e.g. accelerator petal = speed up, brake pedal = slow down). The more we get dragged into discussion of precise process execution semantics, the more I realize that this misses the point of what successful organization do: communicating from human to human. Automating an organization is important, but the real value is in agility, and agility does not come from elaborate plans, but rather very simple ones.
The real technology that will break the boundaries of what is possible is an ability for people to be empowered to work in new and creative ways in response to needs around them. This is the goal of agility that we seek and need because as Alvin Toffler pointed out in Future Shock, the rate of change will only get faster in the future. We need so desperately to have ways to communicate about plans, as well as computer facilitation of those processes.
Planning is the human activity that allows an organization to approach a new situation with a response suitable to that situation. Large projects are complex, and there way to collaborate on those plans will be key.
By Keith Senson (kswenson.wordpress.com)
