Yes the evolution brought about by Customer Expectation Management (CEM) and Successful Customer Outcomes is well and truly underway. We have talked before about banks giving free money, airlines providing seats at no charge and PC suppliers handing kit to charities at no cost. These emergent strategies have now been articulated in an excellent book (FREE of course) - see the links below.

More so respected magazines such as WIRED are creating waves as they too present reasons and evidence of what the FREE business models implies for all of us, consumers, businesses and society in general. There are a range of books feeding this fire now and we provide several links that you may wish to pursue.

How could your company start giving away its products and services? What would your processes look like if your business started giving away its core product for free? (more…)

By Steve Towers & Terry Schurter

It’s a confusing world out there. At the last count there were over 6,000 improvement methodologies (Wikipedia) all geared to helping organizations get better at business. So at least there’s always been plenty of choice depending on your particular flavor of the month however one has to ask the question why so many and why do even the better ones fail to help our companies adapt and change? (more…)

I was a bit disheartened when doing a checkup on BPM activities from various industry resources recently as I see that there are a number of agencies that are touting BPM as a technology-driven concept – when nothing could be further from the truth.

This touches on a number of big organizations that have chosen to completely forget that BPM DID NOT START with technology. They have chosen to simply ignore this fact because it doesn’t mesh with the story they want to tell, it isn’t where the perceive opportunity for money to be, and – to put it bluntly – they are driven by their own personal desire to achieve financial success.

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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.

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My colleague Steve Towers first really galvanized our attention around this core issue that is stopping many of us from changing our focus from what we now know to be non-value added work to that of value-added work. How did he take us there? He did so by asking the question:

Are you Doing Things Right or are you Doing The Right Things?

The answer to that question takes us to a new place, a place where we must look critically at the work we do, challenging it to make sure it is indeed value-added. That seems quite simple but many of us have found that while we can take this kind of challenge as a mental exercise, moving it to action is a far different thing.

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