Socialist BPM

There’s me sitting in Beijing talking to 2 people from one of our clients, a massive Chinese bank. Slightly odd (to my western sensibilities, don’t take this as any kind of slur) almost military type people, very straight-backed and not even the merest inkling of the tiniest possibility of the smallest chance, that a smile could even begin to ponder approaching their lips…

For a whole 1.5 hours. (which seemed a lot longer…)

However there is always something to learn and this is what I got…

Apparently in many Chinese organisations the whole of concept of a cross-functional process is as alien as it is to some western companies (still…) however their problem is much bigger. You can define a cross-functional process and attempt to implement it, however feedback and any changes you might need to make are going to be painful:

If you’re a middle manager and you see something that should change, you absolutely can’t go and talk to your colleague in the next silo down the process, you must escalate to your silo head, who in the fullness of time may deign to communicate it to your colleague’s silo head, who may in turn pass the info to your colleague. Clearly the message may have become distorted by then (insert your own favourite chinese whispers joke) and may never even reach it’s intended target.

All of which poses some (!) organisational challenges to process collaboration and improvement, but also to collaboration features in software which are probably designed (by western companies) to assume that collaboration is a many-to-many construct. Therefore nobody’s action list gets too big.

The comment from one of my Chinese colleagues was that they were finding it difficult to use the collaborative functionality as about 5 people were getting actions from about 1 million employees….

For BPMN to succeed the zealots need to understand what it can’t do

So I’m reading Bruce Silver’s blog about something to do with BPMN method and style or some-such and it strikes me that they (the BPMN zealots) are really fighting a losing battle.

Why? Because they haven’t understood that to be sure of winning your battle you need to understand your competition, then define your battle field and terms of engagement very carefully. If you don’t, you risk trying to fight too big a war that you just can’t win, ask any military type.

Let me explain with a historical analogy: Esperanto…

Explanation over.

BPMN is, regardless of what the OMG (oh my god?) say, a graphical programming language. If you don’t believe me I won’t labour the point, just read some of the definitions of the objects (anybody fancy an intermediate boundary interrupted compensation event?).

So why-oh-why would you try to take a language designed for silicon-based intelligence, artificially simplify it (BPMN Lite or whatever it’s called) and then say that carbon-based lifeforms should use it as well? Makes no sense at all.

Esperanto didn’t work – translators and interpreters still make a pretty good living – guys learn the lesson!! you will never get the countless millions of normal business people to learn a completely new language, just because you want them to, sorry.

BPMN people, listen up: your battlefield should be limited to getting all the BPMS folks to buy-in to your language, imlement it and use it as a standard for the cool  silicon-based stuff that they build. Trust me, that is a big enough battle to be fighting anyway, but it is one that you could win.

You can’t win the ‘everybody’ battle so stop trying, you only confuse the issue and annoy normal business people (like me for example… )

P.S. a word about what the carbon-based language could be in a later post.