EVOLUTION OF BPR

Can "Conversation" Support Business Process?

Posted on the February 28th, 2008 under Change Management, Organizational Transformation by Gregory Yankelovich

I am very intrigued by a concept of Enterprise information flow based on knowledge workers’ conversations as opposed to "snap shots" of data, stored and based in contemporary databases.

"So we’re going to see some things change in the enterprise. Conversation is going to be captured and archived and retrieved and enhanced and allowed to flow. We’re going to use blogs and wikis and twitter and IM and audio and video, we may even have tiny pockets of e-mail and fax and (dare I mention it) telex. Every conversational action will hit an enterprise ping server, populate search engines, aggregators, data miners and online media and even text scrapers."

"Musing about enterprise information and flow"   J.P. Rangaswami

This appears to be an attempt to deal with the perennial adoption problem - people like to communicate using unformalized data supported by conversations, chat, email and wiki technologies, while Enterprise software applications need normalized data to process into meaningful information in order to support business processes. The root of this problem can be exemplified by the desire to gain great value of 360-degree visibility of Customer at a minimum of user keystrokes, which in my opinion is not a technological issue, but a change management one. It requires substantial intellectual effort to transform contextual data of tribal knowledge into Enterprise grade information, and even more so, if we consider a model of extended Enterprise, as it is proposed:

"We will be able to manage vendors at least as well as they manage us. We are calling this VRM, Vendor Relationship Management. The project is being launched within the Harvard’s Berkman Center. The core concept is that the individual should be able to manage their relationships with their vendors and suppliers, based on the idea that they actually know more about specific preferences, updated data, etc. And, further, that most CRM systems oversimplify customer data in order to segment, and to effectively manage the info; ultimately they are just a sales system, not a relationship system."

Doc Searls

"The need for change bulldozed a road down the center of my mind. - Maya Angelou (-1928)

Perhaps a better question to ask would be "How can we "mine" conversations to support a Business Process? - There is a lot to learn.

In the words of Robert Heinlein - "I am only an egg".