Experience in managing business processes in a new way, or how ACM replaces BPM, CRM, ECM, SCRUM, ITSM - in one fell swoop
Do you believe in God "IT system for all business processes"? - so begins the idea of infection. I warn you, in this article there will be facts that can damage your picture of the world ... irrevocably.
Probably many will say that - no! No such! The organization's IT landscape will always consist of a zoo of various IT systems!
And I agree with that.
But did you know that about 2000 years ago - such IT was already invented ... Its name is paper .
Paper is the main, convenient and most popular information medium in the history of mankind.
This is IT! Who does not believe? Open the dictionary of the Russian language and read:
- technology = science of technology
- technology = everything that man invented and did not exist before him in nature
- information technology = all that is created by a person to work with information
- IT = science of creation and development of information technician.
Did paper exist in nature? Not! So - technology. Is it designed to work with information? Yes - text and visual. She appeared as a result of scientific research? Yes! From here: paper = IT.
')
Yes, I understand that it is difficult to realize, but I promised you to shake a picture of the world! So no offense! If breathing has become more frequent, stop reading right from this line! I warned!
Is there IT that can challenge a piece of paper? Really for 2000 years there was no brave man? The answer is under the cut ...
Who can argue with the fact that almost all business processes, almost all organizations use paper as their main IT?
So my statement at the very beginning is not so wrong? Paper is a universal IT for almost all business processes.
Projects? Treaties? Finance? Marketing? Production? - all business processes are paper based.
Different modules of the type CRM, ERP are fastened to it ... but the foundation still remains paper ...
And so far we are working with an information system whose name is GSDOU. I found the first mentions of this system in the region of the 50s. But in the form that we know now - this is the 80s. GSDO - in fact it is one of the first branded IT systems with a huge number of users, used paper as a carrier.
How did she do it? The secret is in its flexibility and simplicity. That is why, until now, with all the initiatives called a “electronic document circulation”, the territory of the paper as IT is only slightly reduced. But she is in no hurry to give up ...
You can certainly say that the whole thing is in the inertness of human nature, in the power of habit ... but I do not believe in it. And who am I? Who am I to say such things? Let's just say, I have behind the projects of creating information systems in various sectors, from manufacturing and trade, to municipal administrations and regional governments. The largest project was to create a system for 1,500 employees. Anyone who has met with implementation projects knows the essence of the monster of change , he will understand what the project of changing the organization of 1500 people means.
If there were stupid people - I would have noticed them. But all my experience says one thing - there are objective reasons for everything. If a tool leads, then it is better than the others.
Not that I do not like paper - I even love it very much! And I love to use it, but 60 years ago a computer was invented, and then the Internet. And this has opened up new IT opportunities that need to be developed. You can even say - there was a revolution in IT. Yes, such that many have even forgotten the essence of IT, replacing it in games on a PC, and in studying different programming ala jQuery, Delphi, C #, Oracle ...
Let's call it all - computer technologies (from the word - calculations, we will reduce to CT). It's strange why many people think that CT = IT? Although in reality, CT is only a very small particle from IT.
Painfully? Understand :)
So, with one piece of pictures of the world shook? Go ahead?
For a long time I tried to understand the meaning and meaning of abbreviations: ERP, ECM, CRM, BPM ...
But all I understood was that I understood nothing. And the more answers I found, the more questions popped up ...
And so it went year after year ... I tried to organize business processes from project to project, on a variety of platforms: 1C, DIRECTUM, IBM Lotus Notes, TeamWox, Megaplan, Basecamp, Google Apps ... and a lot more.
Almost all of these decisions - I like them, but each, for some of their problems and their situations.
And that's exactly what I didn’t like about them: they are either too complex, or too narrow, or very expensive.
And this is exactly the reason why they lose to paper. Some fights win (some processes can be taken away from the paper or substantially reduced), but in general - not. At the same time, costs - going off-scale and the farther they are, the more these costs grow with a geometric progression.
Or we say so - we leave paper, but as a result, the business process becomes shaky and becomes even worse than it was.
One of these abracodabras is BPM. Not clear beast, which can be represented as an attempt to schematize processes. They say, first we are trying to build a process diagram using BPMN notation, and then using BPM systems or WorkFlow - to make people run along these schemes. I only suspect that we have inherited this approach from the industrial age, from industrial enterprises, from where everything goes along the assembly line. And many “consultants” are now mocking organizations by drawing diagrams for them (which then gather dust on shelves) and putting shackles on employees in the form of WorkFlow. I have a lot of experience working with WorkFlow - the routes themselves worked like watches, but the quality of business processes (the term KPI can be used) is not much improved there.
There are also positive examples, but there are very few of them, and I have another hypothesis about this, which is very long and keep silent about it.
The 20th centuryFOX is coming , prerequisites appear, and then he is his majesty the Internet. And this is where a new paradigm comes on the scene. There is a shift, perhaps one of the 3 strongest in the history of mankind (1st - the appearance of speech, 2nd - the appearance of writing, 3rd - the appearance of the Internet).
And HTML pages appear on the scene. What pages do you work with more often today? Paper or HTML?
Against the background of the development of technologies and their complication in the direction of simplification, social networks, web 2.0, and graphs that simplify working with these pages appear.
Pages are multifunctional, dynamic, but not much more complicated than paper.
You can work with them from anywhere in the world thanks to mobile devices and the Internet.
In this environment, a new toolkit is being developed - CMS as information carriers.
Take WordPress - tens of millions of sites around the world, billions of views. Number 1 among CMS and I think that the number of views of HTML-pages in the world. What does it mean? As an IT tool and as a storage medium, WordPress is the first contender to compete with paper.
Yes, this is not Druapl and Joomla and no other CMS (fans of other CMS - please breathe evenly). They are all just children compared to the power of simplicity and popularity of WordPress.
See for yourself:
1. WordPress as an IT tool has almost the same characteristics as paper:
1.1. Easy viewing and reading
1.2. Easy to create and write
1.3. Ease of building classifiers (taxonomies)
1.4. A huge community around the world (in some figures it is 10 or 20 times larger than that of Druapl or Joomla)
2. But at the same time he has the advantages of modern CT (computer technology):
2.1. possibility of working on one page at once to several people
2.2. social web 2.0
2.3. hypertext (HTML)
3. Modularity and extensibility - this item decided to allocate separately from paragraph 2, because:
3.1. this is a different modularity and extensibility relative to our beloved 1C
3.2. the module is at the same time autonomous as in SharePoint, but at the same time deeply integrated and interconnected with other parts of the system as in 1C
3.3. and with all of this - the module can be easily disconnected and sent for repair (in 1C so it is impossible)
3.4. Well, one of the very powerful advantages about corporate systems is that the kernel is updated, but at the same time we don’t touch the modules. This avoids problems like “worked on improvements for a year, an update has come, now we need to work on an update to save improvements”.
These are quite objective reasons for WP leadership? Does at least one IT have such a set advantage?
That is why if we take the absolute test among IT in all weight categories, throughout the history of mankind, then we see 2 clear leaders:
1. Paper
2. WordPress
Of course, I could be mistaken, but I could not find arguments refuting these facts. Can the community open my eyes?
WordPress - I only cited as an example of the possibilities that led to the emergence of a new ideology. It is called - Adaptive Case Managment (ACM).
ACM significantly changes the process management approach, but it took me 7 years to figure it out. Therefore, I do not promise that I will be able to reveal this idea in one article.
Let's start with the opinions about ACM , thesis:
1. Someone thinks that ACM is an extension of mail services (gmail + CMS or gmail based on CMS)
2. Someone thinks ACM is a branch of BPM
3. Someone thinks that ACM is the end of BPM and a fundamentally new approach to process management.
Examples - the following guys came very close to or almost to the point:
1. GitHub (Issue section)
2. ZenDesk.com
3. JIRA
But you try to implement on their base CRM, or at least part of PMBOK, ITIL ... so it turns out that this is close, but not yet ACM.
Or take the same Basecamp or Megaplan, try to implement a critical path technique there (aut. I. Goldratt). I could not get. And this is a key problem in managing large projects in large organizations.
For ACM, these are all seeds, while externally it remains as simple as the page with this article on HabraHabré. Our version even looks almost the same.
I had a number of projects where there was an attempt to implement an idea close to ACM on different platforms, but it was all "NOT THAT".
ACM is a consequence of web technologies, and I did not use web systems, the results were good, but not great.
I have been looking for a tool for a long time that would fit the ACM architecture in my vision (my vision may of course be different from the vision of others, especially since there is no single standard).
And here is one respected IT architect expressed in his blog the idea that the spirit of ACM is closest to WordPress. By that time, I had just finished one of my first WordPress web projects (I had suffered from Joomla about six months before) and had a warm feeling for this CMS for its simplicity and convenience.
Seeing that dear people are talking about ACM and WordPress, I decided to try, and so a new project was born that is still going on, but with results that already allow conclusions to be drawn.
Here I will briefly talk about how in one rather large organization (for 1000 employees and 20 offices in the Russian Federation), on the basis of this system, we were able to build very interesting solutions and optimize the following business processes:
1. ITSM \ ITIL - this was the first pilot project on which we tested the performance of our hypothesis
1.1. The number of requests for technical support? Share solutions in terms of SLA? Service catalog? IT support costs in terms of services or facilities? (servers, applications, computers, printers ...) - or any other section of information.
1.2. SCRUM? Backlog? Changes by version? Release dates? Sprints? Discuss any change in the comments ...
2. Projects? Briefcases? Programs? Project teams? Who is RP? Timing and timely closure of projects? - all this is present here and is more transparent than ever.
3. Lawyers? Courts? Claims? Contract work? - easy!
4. Marketing - projects? activity? production of products (banners, badges, business cards) - yes.
5. Staff. Looking for employees? Reception employee? Adaptation? Automatic creation of accounts, registration in information systems? Registration in the training center? All this interdependence and starts automatically as an employee adapts. All departments are coordinated by the system. All information is stored within a single social network.
6. Control Panel. The section that shows a set of widgets, the main part is KPI (as Google Analytiks, only on business process indicators)
7. Own gosuslugi.ru
Has anyone ordered a passport on a new portal of public services? Noticed how convenient all the services to see in one place? Now imagine that every department within a company is a service provider, a service catalog for a hundred, and not just an IT service catalog. And all this is available in one place. Need a business card? Want to apply for an employee search? Agree a contract? Check out a vacation? Apply to IT? - all this on one page. So that you do not want, at least from any department.
And further:
1. All this with responsive design for any type of device. You come in from a PC or tablet - one look, you come in from a mobile - the design adapts.
2. Next to this system, on the same WordPress, knowledge bases for departments, with the unsurpassed convenience of sharing knowledge and documents, with the strongest taxonomy search system are built.
3. each element of the system is imbued with the spirit of GTD (lists, priorities ...), which makes it necessary to focus efforts at the same time on one task, while you can see the perspective on tasks in various sections (periods, deadlines, customers, branches, departments milestones ...).
Can anyone name alternative IT tools with similar capabilities?
1. Gamification - we are slowly looking at the elements of gamification to build a more effective system of employee motivation.
2. Building a knowledge testing system
3. Expansion of the CRM block
4. Development of integration modules with other web applications (first of all - Google)
Now this system is under active development, there is a prototype in a single copy, but which really works and is used.
We want to release this product into open source.
In my opinion, ACM as an architecture will manifest itself in the coming years, and our implementation based on WordPress will take a worthy place among its peers.
PS Take this opportunity: anyone who wants to join the project, in the role of a developer, an experienced rabbit, or in any other role - write.
UDP: cleaned emoticons, added warnings to the preamble, lowered the degree of selfishness. I left the essence unchanged :)
Probably many will say that - no! No such! The organization's IT landscape will always consist of a zoo of various IT systems!
And I agree with that.
But did you know that about 2000 years ago - such IT was already invented ... Its name is paper .
Paper is the main, convenient and most popular information medium in the history of mankind.
This is IT! Who does not believe? Open the dictionary of the Russian language and read:
- technology = science of technology
- technology = everything that man invented and did not exist before him in nature
- information technology = all that is created by a person to work with information
- IT = science of creation and development of information technician.
Did paper exist in nature? Not! So - technology. Is it designed to work with information? Yes - text and visual. She appeared as a result of scientific research? Yes! From here: paper = IT.
')
Yes, I understand that it is difficult to realize, but I promised you to shake a picture of the world! So no offense! If breathing has become more frequent, stop reading right from this line! I warned!
Is there IT that can challenge a piece of paper? Really for 2000 years there was no brave man? The answer is under the cut ...
Paper is the undisputed leader
Who can argue with the fact that almost all business processes, almost all organizations use paper as their main IT?
So my statement at the very beginning is not so wrong? Paper is a universal IT for almost all business processes.
Projects? Treaties? Finance? Marketing? Production? - all business processes are paper based.
Different modules of the type CRM, ERP are fastened to it ... but the foundation still remains paper ...
And so far we are working with an information system whose name is GSDOU. I found the first mentions of this system in the region of the 50s. But in the form that we know now - this is the 80s. GSDO - in fact it is one of the first branded IT systems with a huge number of users, used paper as a carrier.
How did she do it? The secret is in its flexibility and simplicity. That is why, until now, with all the initiatives called a “electronic document circulation”, the territory of the paper as IT is only slightly reduced. But she is in no hurry to give up ...
about the author
You can certainly say that the whole thing is in the inertness of human nature, in the power of habit ... but I do not believe in it. And who am I? Who am I to say such things? Let's just say, I have behind the projects of creating information systems in various sectors, from manufacturing and trade, to municipal administrations and regional governments. The largest project was to create a system for 1,500 employees. Anyone who has met with implementation projects knows the essence of the monster of change , he will understand what the project of changing the organization of 1500 people means.
If there were stupid people - I would have noticed them. But all my experience says one thing - there are objective reasons for everything. If a tool leads, then it is better than the others.
What is IT?
Not that I do not like paper - I even love it very much! And I love to use it, but 60 years ago a computer was invented, and then the Internet. And this has opened up new IT opportunities that need to be developed. You can even say - there was a revolution in IT. Yes, such that many have even forgotten the essence of IT, replacing it in games on a PC, and in studying different programming ala jQuery, Delphi, C #, Oracle ...
Let's call it all - computer technologies (from the word - calculations, we will reduce to CT). It's strange why many people think that CT = IT? Although in reality, CT is only a very small particle from IT.
Painfully? Understand :)
So, with one piece of pictures of the world shook? Go ahead?
Abracadabra
For a long time I tried to understand the meaning and meaning of abbreviations: ERP, ECM, CRM, BPM ...
But all I understood was that I understood nothing. And the more answers I found, the more questions popped up ...
And so it went year after year ... I tried to organize business processes from project to project, on a variety of platforms: 1C, DIRECTUM, IBM Lotus Notes, TeamWox, Megaplan, Basecamp, Google Apps ... and a lot more.
Almost all of these decisions - I like them, but each, for some of their problems and their situations.
And that's exactly what I didn’t like about them: they are either too complex, or too narrow, or very expensive.
And this is exactly the reason why they lose to paper. Some fights win (some processes can be taken away from the paper or substantially reduced), but in general - not. At the same time, costs - going off-scale and the farther they are, the more these costs grow with a geometric progression.
Or we say so - we leave paper, but as a result, the business process becomes shaky and becomes even worse than it was.
One of these abracodabras is BPM. Not clear beast, which can be represented as an attempt to schematize processes. They say, first we are trying to build a process diagram using BPMN notation, and then using BPM systems or WorkFlow - to make people run along these schemes. I only suspect that we have inherited this approach from the industrial age, from industrial enterprises, from where everything goes along the assembly line. And many “consultants” are now mocking organizations by drawing diagrams for them (which then gather dust on shelves) and putting shackles on employees in the form of WorkFlow. I have a lot of experience working with WorkFlow - the routes themselves worked like watches, but the quality of business processes (the term KPI can be used) is not much improved there.
There are also positive examples, but there are very few of them, and I have another hypothesis about this, which is very long and keep silent about it.
Ray of Light in IT
The 20th century
And HTML pages appear on the scene. What pages do you work with more often today? Paper or HTML?
Against the background of the development of technologies and their complication in the direction of simplification, social networks, web 2.0, and graphs that simplify working with these pages appear.
Pages are multifunctional, dynamic, but not much more complicated than paper.
You can work with them from anywhere in the world thanks to mobile devices and the Internet.
In this environment, a new toolkit is being developed - CMS as information carriers.
Take WordPress - tens of millions of sites around the world, billions of views. Number 1 among CMS and I think that the number of views of HTML-pages in the world. What does it mean? As an IT tool and as a storage medium, WordPress is the first contender to compete with paper.
Yes, this is not Druapl and Joomla and no other CMS (fans of other CMS - please breathe evenly). They are all just children compared to the power of simplicity and popularity of WordPress.
See for yourself:
1. WordPress as an IT tool has almost the same characteristics as paper:
1.1. Easy viewing and reading
1.2. Easy to create and write
1.3. Ease of building classifiers (taxonomies)
1.4. A huge community around the world (in some figures it is 10 or 20 times larger than that of Druapl or Joomla)
2. But at the same time he has the advantages of modern CT (computer technology):
2.1. possibility of working on one page at once to several people
2.2. social web 2.0
2.3. hypertext (HTML)
3. Modularity and extensibility - this item decided to allocate separately from paragraph 2, because:
3.1. this is a different modularity and extensibility relative to our beloved 1C
3.2. the module is at the same time autonomous as in SharePoint, but at the same time deeply integrated and interconnected with other parts of the system as in 1C
3.3. and with all of this - the module can be easily disconnected and sent for repair (in 1C so it is impossible)
3.4. Well, one of the very powerful advantages about corporate systems is that the kernel is updated, but at the same time we don’t touch the modules. This avoids problems like “worked on improvements for a year, an update has come, now we need to work on an update to save improvements”.
These are quite objective reasons for WP leadership? Does at least one IT have such a set advantage?
That is why if we take the absolute test among IT in all weight categories, throughout the history of mankind, then we see 2 clear leaders:
1. Paper
2. WordPress
Of course, I could be mistaken, but I could not find arguments refuting these facts. Can the community open my eyes?
A ray of light lit a new ideology
WordPress - I only cited as an example of the possibilities that led to the emergence of a new ideology. It is called - Adaptive Case Managment (ACM).
ACM significantly changes the process management approach, but it took me 7 years to figure it out. Therefore, I do not promise that I will be able to reveal this idea in one article.
Let's start with the opinions about ACM , thesis:
1. Someone thinks that ACM is an extension of mail services (gmail + CMS or gmail based on CMS)
2. Someone thinks ACM is a branch of BPM
3. Someone thinks that ACM is the end of BPM and a fundamentally new approach to process management.
Examples - the following guys came very close to or almost to the point:
1. GitHub (Issue section)
2. ZenDesk.com
3. JIRA
But you try to implement on their base CRM, or at least part of PMBOK, ITIL ... so it turns out that this is close, but not yet ACM.
Or take the same Basecamp or Megaplan, try to implement a critical path technique there (aut. I. Goldratt). I could not get. And this is a key problem in managing large projects in large organizations.
For ACM, these are all seeds, while externally it remains as simple as the page with this article on HabraHabré. Our version even looks almost the same.
I had a number of projects where there was an attempt to implement an idea close to ACM on different platforms, but it was all "NOT THAT".
ACM is a consequence of web technologies, and I did not use web systems, the results were good, but not great.
I have been looking for a tool for a long time that would fit the ACM architecture in my vision (my vision may of course be different from the vision of others, especially since there is no single standard).
And here is one respected IT architect expressed in his blog the idea that the spirit of ACM is closest to WordPress. By that time, I had just finished one of my first WordPress web projects (I had suffered from Joomla about six months before) and had a warm feeling for this CMS for its simplicity and convenience.
Seeing that dear people are talking about ACM and WordPress, I decided to try, and so a new project was born that is still going on, but with results that already allow conclusions to be drawn.
How does the ACM lay on the shovels of the rest of the cracks?
Here I will briefly talk about how in one rather large organization (for 1000 employees and 20 offices in the Russian Federation), on the basis of this system, we were able to build very interesting solutions and optimize the following business processes:
1. ITSM \ ITIL - this was the first pilot project on which we tested the performance of our hypothesis
1.1. The number of requests for technical support? Share solutions in terms of SLA? Service catalog? IT support costs in terms of services or facilities? (servers, applications, computers, printers ...) - or any other section of information.
1.2. SCRUM? Backlog? Changes by version? Release dates? Sprints? Discuss any change in the comments ...
2. Projects? Briefcases? Programs? Project teams? Who is RP? Timing and timely closure of projects? - all this is present here and is more transparent than ever.
3. Lawyers? Courts? Claims? Contract work? - easy!
4. Marketing - projects? activity? production of products (banners, badges, business cards) - yes.
5. Staff. Looking for employees? Reception employee? Adaptation? Automatic creation of accounts, registration in information systems? Registration in the training center? All this interdependence and starts automatically as an employee adapts. All departments are coordinated by the system. All information is stored within a single social network.
6. Control Panel. The section that shows a set of widgets, the main part is KPI (as Google Analytiks, only on business process indicators)
7. Own gosuslugi.ru
Has anyone ordered a passport on a new portal of public services? Noticed how convenient all the services to see in one place? Now imagine that every department within a company is a service provider, a service catalog for a hundred, and not just an IT service catalog. And all this is available in one place. Need a business card? Want to apply for an employee search? Agree a contract? Check out a vacation? Apply to IT? - all this on one page. So that you do not want, at least from any department.
And further:
1. All this with responsive design for any type of device. You come in from a PC or tablet - one look, you come in from a mobile - the design adapts.
2. Next to this system, on the same WordPress, knowledge bases for departments, with the unsurpassed convenience of sharing knowledge and documents, with the strongest taxonomy search system are built.
3. each element of the system is imbued with the spirit of GTD (lists, priorities ...), which makes it necessary to focus efforts at the same time on one task, while you can see the perspective on tasks in various sections (periods, deadlines, customers, branches, departments milestones ...).
Can anyone name alternative IT tools with similar capabilities?
Perspectives
1. Gamification - we are slowly looking at the elements of gamification to build a more effective system of employee motivation.
2. Building a knowledge testing system
3. Expansion of the CRM block
4. Development of integration modules with other web applications (first of all - Google)
Total
Now this system is under active development, there is a prototype in a single copy, but which really works and is used.
We want to release this product into open source.
In my opinion, ACM as an architecture will manifest itself in the coming years, and our implementation based on WordPress will take a worthy place among its peers.
PS Take this opportunity: anyone who wants to join the project, in the role of a developer, an experienced rabbit, or in any other role - write.
UDP: cleaned emoticons, added warnings to the preamble, lowered the degree of selfishness. I left the essence unchanged :)
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/172229/
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