Managing by Clicking Around
Managing by Walking Around (MBWA) has been a well known style of management for years, probably decades (possibly centuries!), and I am sure the “managers” who are reading this post would have definitely practiced or read about it somewhere. The essence of this approach is to go to the shop-floor or the work-area to directly see things the way they are - the processes, the people, the problems, as well as the potential and as a result have a better grasp of the way the business is running and therefore manage it better. Today, the more I understand the drivers behind our clients starting BPM (Business Process Management) projects, the more I feel that what they really want to achieve has some strong similarities with the objectives of MBWA i.e. get a strong hold of the processes and events, as they happen, and just the way they happen. Walking around to do that, is of course, out of question. How about Managing by Clicking Around!? That is what BPM projects need to deliver in the end, but are they doing that?
You can’t manage what you can’t see, you can’t manage what you can’t measure and you can’t manage what you can’t change. A BPM solution helps you ‘look’ at and understand your business process almost exactly the way it actually is, and not as a set of disjointed actions, documents and numbers which is the traditional way that IT interprets Business. It also helps you measure the right attributes of your business process, providing you the ability to monitor the right indicators of the health of the process. It even makes it easy for you make and implement changes thus enabling you to respond to the market and internal needs much faster. A key element in all this, however, which I believe is what makes the difference between an efficient business and an effective business, is the power of decision making and predictive analysis. That is one of the two reasons why I love BRMS (the other reason being that it is not a 3-letter acronym again!). BRMS (Business Rules Management System) and CEP (Complex Event Processing) top up BPM with the strong decision-making and prediction abilities which can make managers look really smart by taking right actions at the right time.
BRMS is software that helps define and maintain the rules or policies that run the business and executes the decision logic required to identify the right action. Let me give a simple example. If movie rating is 5, and if movie has received Golden Globe, then movie is good – this is a Rule. Going and watching Slumdog Millionaire is the execution of that logic to take an action.
CEP on the other hand helps make sense of multiple different events, combines and correlates them to identify a pattern and detects situations that need to be responded to. For example, traffic on a road has slowed down, you can hear police siren, you can see ambulance lights flashing ahead – these are 3 different events which in isolation may not necessarily indicate the situation that an accident has happened. In business, early detection of a situation through the occurrence of separate events helps, it provides greater agility.
If I were to try to find an analogy to the value that BRMS and CEP provide, along with BPM, I would say that BPM provides a good detailed map accurately showing all the routes, locations and distances but you still need to figure out how to go from one point to another. BRMS, like Mapquest or Google Maps, gives you the ability to automatically find the route(s) by adding decisioning logic on top of the map data. CEP adds features of a modern GPS navigation system, which not only tells you the best route but also has the ability to tell you in real-time whether there is traffic or construction ahead and suggests alternate routes. Success in managing a business has always required good processes, powerful decision-making and sharp foresight. BPM+BRMS+CEP just provides the tools to do all that a little better.
