Re Why Some Business Innovations Can’t Get Off The Ground
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Somebody once said that if you formulate clear and meaningful question, you have 80% of the answer. I don’t remember who said it and will not argue the accuracy of the estimate, but the critical importance of posing the right question is beyond any doubt for me.
Some years ago I came to appreciate W5 methodology for business applications analysis which was inspired by Kipling’s poem.
I keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
I send them over land and sea,
I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me,
I give them all a rest.
you can find the rest of the poem at this site.
Reading Andrew McAfee’s blog post aptly named “Why Some Business Innovations Can’t Get Off The Ground” reminded me about W5 and holistic approach to BPR.
It struck me at some point over the past month that I was witnessing an excellent example of why so many business improvement efforts fail: it’s not that they’re not good ideas, it’s that their not easy enough to enforce. American’s PriorityAAccess boarding procedure is a straightforward case of what used to be called ‘business process reengineering,’ and it’s also a microcosm of why reengineering so often failed. It’s one thing for a small group of smart people to study an existing process and figure out a way to execute it better. It’s quite another to then deploy that new-and-improved process broadly – across many business units, geographies, and/or interdependent groups.
(Bold and underscore is mine).
The use of word “enforce” illustrates the failure of business process designers to ask the question which is at the root of holistic BPR methodology - “Why would people want to use/follow this process?”. Ignoring human aspects of business process imply enforcement that rarely works in post-modern enterprise. Examples of this wasteful approach are abandon, particularly in the CRM arena. It is time to integrate creativity of application thought leadership and human (talent) incentive management into BPR methodology.
There are many excellent blogs and other resources on the Internet which explore methodologies and Best Practices for business process re-engineering, project management, systems implementation, software engineering, and change management. However I could not find much help with unlocking value of integrated utilization of these disciplines to facilitate Organizational Transformation. In this blog I would like to focus on this subject. I would like to stress that this is not an academic inquiry, but a practitioner's desire to discuss and share practical business knowledge and Best Practices. Let's see how it evolves - "Every brilliant idea quickly degenerates into a lot of hard work" - Peter Drucker.