With emerging Cloud technologies and some creative thinking on the part of organizational leaders, this paradigm could shift – and organizations could suddenly discover that the people who understand the day-to-day workings of the business are now able to contribute their knowledge and insights into everything from strategy to process improvement.

More than the technology – the Cloud brings a real opportunity to broaden the reach of process participants and consumers of business models. Successful cloud and SaaS-based applications bring more than a new delivery method. They also bring self provisioning and management, online guidance, simplified user interfaces, and integration with other cloud-based tools like social computing.  All of this adds up to the potential to harness the power of the collective knowledge of the organization in ways not possible or practical in the past.

Take business modeling as an example.  Within our customer base, we have found that our Cloud modeling tool (Metastorm M3) is enabling business people who have not been engaged in enterprise modeling in the past to create, reference, maintain, and share all kinds of models – strategy, rule, organization, process, etc. – with no technology installation and virtually no training. We are seeing spontaneously formed crowds of business people capturing models, sharing them with their colleagues, and then using the resulting models to communicate issues, changes, and recommendations to management, business architects, and even IT.

The key to uptake and broad appeal is leveraging the patterns of Cloud services and providing sufficient breadth in the types of models people can capture, while simplifying the approach. Each day, people capture high level activity and process models – and even more create organization charts, location maps, and goal hierarchies.

Crowd-based modeling in the Cloud is becoming a powerful discovery tool and can be an important way for business and enterprise architects to leverage the tacit knowledge spread throughout an organization – and more importantly for senior executives to get more insights into the realities of what is going on in the business. Since any credible cloud-based modeling tool will also support bi-directional integration with full-scale enterprise architecture and BPM tools, business architects and enterprise planners can seed a baseline of work by providing customized guidance, template models, and pre-configured building blocks for crowds to use. Organization structures, corporate goals, and measurements are all good examples of crowd-enabling building blocks.

Just as models build relationships between the different moving pieces in our organizations, the patterns and technologies of social computing build relationships among our crowd modelers.

Social computing was one of the first capabilities and services offered by the Cloud and embodies all the traits of cloud computing. Collaboration is one of the best examples of how social networking can be applied in a business situation, and it is a key component in any valid cloud-based modeling platform –allowing real-time, multi-user modeling sessions with requirements capture and in-context discussion, collaboration turns modeling into a multi-way knowledge sharing session amongst the crowd.  Subject matter experts on the business side learn more about the art of capturing their world in models, and business architects and analysts learn more about the how the organization is shaped and operating.

While collaboration breathes new energy into modeling sessions, the tie to BPM tools gives us the power to bring our models to life.  Combine BPM execution with cloud-based modeling and visibility and you have a closed loop feedback mechanism that gives people at all levels of an organization access to processes and process information, complete execution, and the real-time feedback on business operations that comes with it.

We have customers who create hundreds of models every day and provide view-only access to these models to thousands of people.  Many of these models become executable applications, either through BPM or custom development.  With the Cloud, more people can now leverage the context-rich information that is being captured by the BPM system and fed back to the goals, strategies and assumptions that drive process design.  With the instant access that cloud modeling and collaboration provides, the degree of participation and decision-making is suddenly advanced from view-only to a rich, real-time operational tool that delivers greater insight, control and agility.   

The power of crowds in the Cloud has the potential to transform the ways organizations operate and finally deliver on the promise of continuous improvement. Learn more about Metastorm M3 and Metastorm Enterprise applications at www.metastorm.com.

Related posts:

1. Metastorm Raises the Bar on Social BPM There continues to be a great deal of buzz around...
2. Collaboration in the Cloud—Introducing Metastorm M3 In our recent blog post about the Future of Social...
3. The Future of Social BPM Over the years organizational development processes have evolved to meet...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

En route home from one of my latest trips, I received an email asking me to write a blog post about business process improvement projects.

As I sat on the airplane, and the pilot announced that we were next for takeoff, I thought, “This is all going just as planned. The process is working great, and in a few hours I will be home after a week of traveling.”

That’s when the engine and plane stopped. What had gone wrong?

Well, planning is the answer. The air traffic control out of Atlanta had stopped us on the taxiway because of some sort of congestion. Although there was undoubtedly a plan for us to take off at a certain time, some other factor had disrupted it.

That is when I started to think about how, to any business process improvement project, proper planning is just as important as process discovery. Planning out your work, goals, participants, and time helps tremendously in the entire process. And, just like the plane trip home, planning does not mean that there won’t be any turbulence or disruptions during the flight.

In fact, planning will help you be prepared for the turbulence.

The same way the airlines tell you to buckle up – there is some rough air ahead! – proper planning helps move you and your team members along your process modeling and improvement efforts, and helps you overcome and continue to move forward even if you do face turbulence.

So often we are having a pain in a particular area and just jump into buying, fixing, or even changing the business process and technology without properly planning or asking the important questions first. What solution do we need, and how will we use it? What solution best enables us to understand and improve our business processes and subsequently execute improved processes? How can we make use of our existing technologies, and does this solution aid us in doing so?

If you don’t take the time to plan properly, your team may initially be successful in spite of itself, which in turn creates a false sense that your success can be repeated again and again without “wasting time” to plan out your work. I have seen this attitude fail at the most inconvenient time – when things are the most critical to the business.

So, where do you start planning? This goes back to an acronym that I live by, and that is KISS, or Keep It Simple, Silly – or any other way that you have heard is stated. There are two simple questions that you need to answer:

1. Why are you starting the project? Without this simple, two line mantra you will wander all over the place never knowing whether or not you are headed toward the Promised Land.

2. What is the end objective? What I mean by that is – get an agreement or understanding from the project sponsors of what the definition of success is to them.

So, by now you will know where you are going, and how to recognize when you get there. But between Alpha and Omega, or the beginning and the end, there is something in between, and a time box that you should identify. Identifying key dates and milestones will help to ensure that the tasks are going according to plan. This allows for a redirection of resources if the milestones are not being met.

Finally, time box your entire effort. Analysis is integral, but make sure you avoid Analysis Paralysis by ensuring you keep it on a schedule, and that the project continues to move forward. Keeping things to a shorter time frame motivates the team to get things done – this prevents you from falling victim to the dreaded “never-ending project.”

To conclude I want to reiterate the high importance of planning your project out. Keeping things time boxed, and keeping your goals in mind will help to ensure a successful project. And don’t forget, keeping your sanity during the entire process should be one of your goals too.

Happy planning and Good Luck!

==========================

Brian Chaney is the Director of IT Strategy & Architecture at Copper River IT where he is responsible for Enterprise Architecture, BPM development, CMMI compliance and other process-centered areas. Brian has guided Six Sigma projects, more than 50 Enterprise Architecture initiatives, and successfully completed the life-cycle of Six Sigma and Enterprise Architecture into BPM.

Brian is a Six Sigma Black Belt with a proven track record of structuring and implementing projects that yield measurable results including reduced customer wait time, productivity gains through multiple change and improvement initiatives, and cost savings.

Related posts:

1. Process improvement projects- cut the fat to get lasting results Recently WSJ.com featured an article that examined why, like many...
2. Knowledge Management (and beyond!) with Metastorm Metastorm was recently named to KMWorld Magazine‘s “100 Companies that...
3. Metastorm recognized as leader in BPA, EA tools and IT planning In a January 2009 report titled “The Forrester Wave™: Business...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.