BPM and the Knowledge Economy: White-Collar Work
Make no mistake, the future lies with automation of white-collar work. Fewer and fewer business problems these days focus on manufacturing and production processes, i.e., the nothing-but-widgets category. For all the non-widget-centric business activity in the world – which includes just about all every conceivable form of white-collar work – the following needs become paramount.- Ensuring the quality of meta-data.
- Demonstrating compliance based actual rules, rather than the artifacts and effects that IT systems produce.
- Retaining, teaching and repurposing intellectual capital.
- Understanding business strategy as something distinct from business processes (and BPM). Business goals and business risks should be drivers of business process design – not the other way around. You need to be strategy-driven, not simply process-driven.
- Designing core metrics around business goals and business risks – the things that concern C-suite executives the most.
- Realizing that for white-collar work the 3-D world of widgets has vanished, and that tolerances and quality can be expressed only in terms of business rules.
- Treating business rules as a first-class citizen, externalized from process models.[2]
- Identifying operational business decisions (based on encoded business rules) as a crucial focal point in re-engineering business processes.
- Including a Why Button as part of every business solution. Pressing the Why Button leads immediately to the business rules that produced the results you see from any process.
Tags: BPM, business capability, business processes, business processes vs. business strategy, Business Rules, business strategy, compliance, intellectual capital, knowledge economy, metadata, process, Rules, strategy, white-collar, white-collar processes, Why Button, Why Engineering