This is a very important article for anyone involved in process automation, work flow and process data collection. In reading this article your understanding of process will be transformed…

There’s a widespread belief that the data behind process is unmined gold, a mother lode just waiting for us to dig it out. Much of the premise behind many of the BPM technology approaches is based on this belief. Yet it is a very dangerous belief and for those who are following this path (and yes, you have lots of analysts and pundits telling you to go there) the discovery is that it’s like invading a foreign country. What looked like a clean sweep didn’t turn out that way and once you’re in, you can’t get out. Soon it becomes a resource hog draining the life out of the organization.

What is the fallacy? Let’s set the landscape.

First of all, I’m talking about processes that involve people doing work. You know, all that stuff we do that is NOT physically building products we can all touch and feel.

This distinction is actually the first part of the problem. Data behind physical manufacturing and assembly operations – the stuff that’s really happening “on the floor” – can be measured for discrete and flow operations as a measure of reality because of the tangible nature of manufacturing. But when we move to internal activities that don’t have a direct connection to “real work” things start to go awry.

People do the work in people processes so the data only reflects a possible reality or one aspect of reality. People exist in a natural state of high variability. We continuously absorb the “data” around us then perform work, inform others, adapt “on the fly” to our context and make decisions on what and how things actually will be done. This is as close to reality as we are likely to get.

But data is structured, ordered, and rigidly adheres to rules, relationships and models. Data is the forte of the digital machines, the computers that are a pervasive part of our lives.

Look at the contrast! Human reality is not digital reality. All these wonderful things we do with computers are in most cases semi-related abstractions of what is real. Yet we choose to act on this data – to use and interact with software – as if this is reality. The connection is simply not there. In fact, the only reason why the connection is perceived to exist is because people have chosen to believe its there.

This is where the data fallacy stems from, and why so many organizations consistently align themselves around things that any human (not already immersed in the data) could easily “blink” what the right thing is – and how far off the mark our data analysis has led us.
What happens if instead of aligning ourselves around data, we align around a) our customers and b) our employees – the people doing the work? How does this change things? It changes them fundamentally (except when we are only paying lip service to this alignment in which case we are in even a worse place than digital fantasy land).

I’m serious folks. I enjoy Science Fiction and I enjoy Fantasy Fiction. But what we are doing around the data concepts in today’s business world are way to far-fetched for me! At least the fiction I read has some degree of human reality in it, but the fixation on data that I see in many businesses has nary a shred of “human” any where to be found.

If you’re struggling with this you need to read two books. On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins and Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. These books will give you what you need to put together the missing pieces if the picture hasn’t already become clear.

What’s the guidance from this article? Painful as it may be, we need to completely revamp our view of organizational data. We need to understand that having the data immediately available for given situations that directly help people get their work done (including dealing effectively with those Moments of Truth!) in the right way represents value and that by collecting data behind “work” for the purposes of managing, controlling, analyzing, taking automated actions and adapting EA models is an extreme case of fiction that dwarfs the creative talents of the best SF authors.

This stuff does make for some interesting far-edge speculative fiction but it does nothing but get in the way of producing business success in the real world. We may be good at Doing things Right when it comes to building data artifices but that doesn’t make customers and employees lives simpler, easier and more successful – it makes their lives painful, dissatisfactory, without loyalty, annihilates morale, and fails in every way to contribute to business success. We need to be Doing the Right Things otherwise are efforts are either a waste or a liability.

As I stated in my lead article for 2008, we have a choice – each and every one of us. Making excuses is nothing less than saying you don’t want to go to that better, happier place. That you don’t want to enrich your life and the lives of others. That’s part of the choice.

Its time we got back to the essence of what business is all about – people. Or you can keep living our that data fantasy until the business implodes around you. Remember…

You do have a choice.

Terry Schurter
Director - International Process and Performance Institute
www.ipapi.org