Are You Ready for Extreme Competition?

Recently, I came across a presentation made by Peter Fingar in one of the Gartner Conferences and it came across as a full-bodied wake-up call for the organizations to take a focussed & hard look at how the world around them is changing at a phenomenal pace and what do they need to survive in the 'New World' (..as Peter puts it). Here is an extract which I guess is a prelude to his book 'Extreme Competition: Innovation and the Great 21st Century Business Reformation'. Read on....

In a wired world, the possibilities for assembling, then disbanding, geographically scattered project teams are almost endless. A growing number of companies are relying on electronically-connected virtual project teams to get things done. In time, the primary work unit in the enterprise is likely to be 'the project', not the function performed somewhere in the Org Chart.

Virtual, matrixed teams, composed of diverse competencies, knowledge and capabilities, with traditional hierarchical structures replaced by multi-company teams, will be assembled as needed, sometimes 'on the fly'. Such dynamically formed teams will tackle specific projects to pursue specific opportunities and to counter specific threats in the brave new world of total global competition.

In this new scenario, and to paraphrase Shakespeare, "All the world's a project. And all the men and systems merely play their roles. They have their exits and their entrances." Indeed, the ability to model and implement 'roles' digitally is the key to next-generation collaboration support technologies. 'Connect and collaborate' is the future for forming high performance project teams, but it's not all that easy, and a new generation of collaboration tools will be needed.

Assisting organizations in managing those exit and entrance points in typical collaborations is a new breed of role-based business technology, the Human Interaction Management System - workware technology that animates human work and collaboration in much the way software animates computer hardware. While business executives don't want more and more software, they know they need workware, for they know how complex their business operations have become. This is precisely the kind of business technology needed for teams scattered across the globe to work together effectively. Although just emerging as a business technology, and only catching the eyes of early adopters, the Human Interaction Management System could soon become as prevalent as email is today.

Furthermore, those organizations building new models for success around the work of project teams, whose members are scattered across multiple geographic locations, are coming to realize that leadership of a virtual project team is an art in itself. When it comes to the complexities of getting individuals in vastly dispersed locations to function as a cohesive unit, my colleague and business technology-writer extraordinaire, Sue Bushell turned her attention to Hollywood - that master of reinvention - in her contribution to my new book, Extreme Competition.

Through to the mid-1940s, Hollywood was pretty much a self-contained world of mini-moguls running film production 'factory lines' and controlling everything, including the lives of workers, stars, directors and writers. The moguls had the mindset of dictators the world over, and it was wise to think like them and behave according to their dictates if you wanted to secure your film career. But when the so-called Studio Model began to unravel, Hollywood teetered close to extinction until it did the one thing that Hollywood has excelled at since its inception. It reinvented itself. Recognizing the need to maintain intellectual capital while breaking free of the antitrust lawsuit tethers that were increasingly containing them, the studios chose to adopt what is now known as the Hollywood Model, under which nearly all production was outsourced.

All you wanted to know about BPMN, BPEL & XPDL and did not know whom to ask...

Last week, my friend gave me a good perspective on BPMN, BPEL & XPDL which I am sharing here for benefit of you-all:

BPMN is the business process modeling standard and is the only standard which supports all kinds of Business Process Modeling products. It is a graphical representation of a process model and does not contain any execution details.

While, XPDL Standard is an extremely strong interchange format which not only supports graphical process but also persists all the activities, rules details associated with it. So you can take the process from system to system with same kind of visual representation. In XPDL 2.0 all of the nodes of a BPMN diagram and positions are reliably transferred from one product to another. Depending upon the target systems graphical layout it may look somewhat different.

BPEL Standard defines business processes using an XML-based language. It does not define a graphical representation of processes or provide any particular design methodology for processes. Not all BPMN notation are supported by it but XPDL probably does that rather nicely.

Wondering what to look-out for in your BPM suite?

Rashid Khan, the man who started the company Ultimus and has written a book titled Business Process Management identifies 20 features that he feels are key to any BPM product:

• Robust business rules
• Role-based routing
• Relationship routing
• Relative routing
• Parallel routing
• Ad hoc routing
• Queues and groups
• Process rollback
• Support for sub-processes
• Escalations and exceptions
• Flexible forms support
• Web-based architecture
• Automation agents
• Custom views
• Simulation
• Process documentation
• Status monitoring
• Authentication and security
• Distributed user administration
• Task delegation and conferring

Likewise, Khan identifies ten key modules or capabilities essential to any complete BPM suite environment:
• Graphic designer
• Collaboration design
• Modeling
• Organization charts and directory integration
• Multiple client interfaces
• Business metrics and monitoring
• BPM Administrator
• Web services and integration
• Database connectivity and transaction processing
• Scalable BPM server