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Fools with tools, Taylorism and BPM
Wednesday, October 27, 2010 by Neil Ward-Dutton
Because one of the main themes of our research programs here at MWD this year has been the role of IT in improving customer experiences, I’ve been doing quite a lot of primary research work (including many case studies, some of which are published as reports) looking at how organisations are using BPM technology and practices to try to change the way their organisations work with customers – partly to better manage costs, of course, but also to improve customer satisfaction.
Then today I saw a lot of twitter traffic highlighting a post by Gartner’s Michael Maoz – one of the firm’s most respected analysts focused on customer relationships and CRM. I’ve seen Michael speak (at a Pegasystems event), and I thought he made a lot of sense. So I was really surprised to find all the tweets pointing to this post (“You failed at Customer Service, so now try Social Processes“), which seemed to be equating BPM with slavish application of Taylorism and an overly internal perspective that is acting as a malign force in organisations claiming they’re improving customer service.
The original point that the post was making, I think, was that BPM is all about efficiency, and so is a failure in driving customer service improvements; and that the new proclamations from some quarters about “social BPM” and “social processes” are a business value cul-de-sac at best – putting social lipstick on the BPM pig if you like. Far better to just empower customer service reps to connect more personally with customers.
Well actually, if you click on that link above, you won’t see the post that I just tried to summarise – the post has now been significantly edited, either by Michael or by one of his colleagues. Now the original references to BPM have been removed, and the resulting text is much less controversial (to me, at least).
Nevertheless, even assuming Michael has changed his mind on this point, I think it’s worth rebutting the original thesis – because I have seen it used by BPM sceptics elsewhere, and also because a number of the comments on the original post (some of those seem to have gone missing, too) seem to echo the same point.
Even though the post now looks a lot more sensible, I want to tackle the topic of BPM in customer service environments: because I see quite a few people who think that applying BPM will kill customer service – it’s these people who naturally think of BPM as being about Taylorism or a naive version of Lean thinking.
The truth is that BPM is a tool that can be applied in a number of ways. Yes, it can be applied to business processes to drive out waste, and this is often the focus. It’s not always done well. But I’ve also found BPM to be practiced very effectively in dealing with customer service improvement issues. Here efficiency can be one of the concerns, but it’s not the only one. And where BPM succeeds, a customer-first perspective is the overarching view taken.
Witness Irish Life’s transformation as one example (find the MWD case study here). Or Pinnacle People’s use of BPM technology to take customer service to a new level in an area where it’s not commonly considered to be very strong: providing back-to-work services for the unemployed (case study here). Or London Borough of Southwark council in the UK’s major shift in how it dealss with citizen requests, making a hugely positive impact on the amount of red tape involved in citizens getting access to services (case study here). Or Carphone Warehouse’s inspirational use of BPM practice to make a major shift in customer satisfaction (case study interview here). I could go on.
The point is, a fool with a tool is still a tool. BPM is a tool. A stupid know-nothing who is hell-bent on slavishly applying Taylorism in a customer service environment can cock things up royally using BPM practice, but that’s not BPM’s fault.
As for the side-swipe at social BPM and social processes, I’ll leave that for another post.
Posted in BPM
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Neil, I a in alignment with a number of points you make, especially that the tool in itself does turn the fool into a genius. But then you would leave a genius to work with no tools, ro would you? Technology must provide the empowerment to enable people to use their capabilities to the max. Yes, if all someone wants to do is to fully automate stuff then that’s what he will do. If someone now wants to enable his people to perform processes any way they want as long as they fulfil the goals, achieve SLAs and are compliant, he will be left very wanting with just your typical BPMS tools. A fairly substantial BPM governance bureucracy is requried to make sure that the six different skill layers who together create and improve processes work reasonably well towards processes that achieve customer outcomes. So it is BPMS functional problem that flowcharts aren’t any good for a business user and they just are at best 20% of process functionality. The rest is project work.
I have been very vocal about the Tayloristic aspect of BPM for the last ten years. While things have become slightly better, the majority of BPM projects are still efficiency and people reduction focused.
All the case studies are just anectodal evidence mostly created by vendors or by research firms paid by vendors. The studies measure whether SLA’s are achieved or how much cost is reduced but hardly ever the true customer perceived outcome. After 20 years of BPM use there are still no independent cross industry, long-term studies that prove that all out BPM is beneficial for a business. The problem is with the concept of a flowchart that can represent snippets of work and maybe some large overarching principle interaction, but it is impossible to put sensible day-to-day knowledge work, which is over 50% of business activity into flows.
BTW, I also used the lipstick on a pig metaphor for Social BPM … I heard to from an analyst at Forrester. I agree with that too. More here: http://isismjpucher.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/lipstick-on-a-pig/
Thanks for the interesting post: More on BPM flowcharts:
http://isismjpucher.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/the-problem-with-bpm-flowcharts/
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