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From the early 90s to the late 90s, in parallel to my studies in Computer Science and Business at the university, I developed client-server software for the Windows platform for a network of BPO and TQM consultants. It gave me a solid understanding the core components of an enterprise and how these components relate, but it also opened my eyes to how hard it is to make people collaborate across business functions even in quite small organizations. 

 

My job was essentially to design and develop software tools that allowed organizations go describe a “process view” of their organizations and that could explain to every employee what role they were to play, in what process, who was their customer, what they were supposed to deliver, and what information, resources, tools, risks, responsibilities were related to their involvement in these processes. During this period, I was confronted with the ideas and works of business gurus like Deming, Porter and Hammer, which greatly influenced my view on business at the time - and in some way I guess they still do. 

 

I learned from the consultants that an efficient way to improve business processes was to get everybody who was involved in a process in the same room (if possible).Facilitated by the process leader, or external consultants, they had a workshop with the purpose to find pains and ideas on how to improve the process. These workshops were often effective, as they helped each person involved in a process to better understand the activities, needs and challenges of the other people who were involved in the same process. It helped them understand how they could help each other, and thereby how they could contribute to improving other parts of the process, and not just their own. During these workshops, they were inspired to spawn new ideas and share them across with their coworkers. With the process leader in the workshop, they could collaboratively redesign the process and make most of the decisions needed to implement the changes to the process during the actual workshop.

 

Most of the organizations I observed and worked with in the 90s were quite small, rarely more than a couple of hundred employees. I personally didn't get to work with really large organizations until the late 90s. But when I did, I quickly came to realize how hard it is to scale an agile and collaborative way to do business process improvements so that it can be executed in a large and distributed organization. In large and distributed organizations, the same business process is typically implemented and executed on multiple locations by many teams. The process is also heavily dependent on a common infrastructure which cannot be changed locally. In such a complex environment, how do you get the ideas for how to improve the process from one team to be shared across to the other teams? How do you get aware of potential problems that might occur in your own process instance and which might already have occurred elsewhere in the organization? How do you, from your local team, influence decisions about what changes to be made to the shared and centrally managed infrastructure (such as an ERP)? How do you get aware of what changes other teams wish to do, and how do you join forces with them to make sure that your ideas, or even better ideas which they might have, get embraced?

 

The main reason why I am interested in social software is that I believe we can use the reach, immediacy, richness and interactivity that these technologies bring to shrink large organizations and make them more agile and collaborative.

 

If someone asks me how social software-powered communication and collaboration ties into business processes (without being specific about their processes), I can give them quite distinct answers:

Can you do these things easily, or even at all, with the practices and tools you have available today? If not, you might want to consider socializing your business processes with social practices and technologies. 

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