IS 788
[Process] Change Management
 Wednesday, September 5
 Current event – Lisa Anderson
 Lecture
 How Process Enterprises Work
presentation and discussion
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From Functions to Processes
 Process orientation driven by the same
factors that earlier drove ‘information
integration’ in IT
 Faster development times
 Faster production times
 Greater customer and marketing input to
processes
 Lessen the dependence on IT
 Many of you folks are IT personnel. What is the
significance of ‘bypassing’ IT?
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Breaking down ‘silos’
 IT based information integration
overcame information silos
 Sneaker-net
 Over the wall reports w/ reentry into
isolated systems
 Process thinking is a means of
eliminating work product silos (interdepartmental or inter-organizational
bottlenecks)
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Drivers for process organizations
 Include most of the drivers for process
change or reengineering
 Competitiveness (better & cheaper)
 Agility (faster)
 Some initiatives of proven value demand
process focus
 Supply chain management
 Effective outsourcing
 Just being a player in the ‘new regime’ – when
all your customers and suppliers are process
organizations you have no choice but to be able
to “plug in”. (Resistance is futile – you will be
assimilated.)
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Some beneficial side effects of
process orientation
 Focus on cycle time (an end-to-end
measure which virtually requires a
process focus) uncovers many cost
and quality problems. The inverse is
not true.
 Identification of core processes (for
improvement) and non-core
processes (for outsourcing) and the
ability to seamlessly orchestrate them
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More process orientation benefits
 Core processes especially constitute a
valuable corporate asset. When
processes are identified, documented
and understood they become a
portfolio that may constitute the
primary value of the organization
 Documented, understood processes
are less vulnerable to personnel
changes
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Still more process orientation
benefits
 Processes always exist, but in a
functional environment calls for
improvement can be locally optimal,
globally suboptimal (anticipating
“Everything you know is wrong”?)
 Goals for processes are different from
and produce better results for the
organization than functional goals.
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And even more process orientation
benefits
 Explicitly identifying processes at the
business level ‘liberates’ them from IT
applications
 That is, frequently the only documentation
on cross-organizational processes is
embedded in legacy IT applications. For all
intents and purposes this is inaccessible
and resistant to improvement
 http://www.processdriven.org/process_driv
en_organization.html
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Cross-organization process
automation
 Once an organization has become processcentric internally it is in a position to link its
processes into the web-based ‘global
process marketplace’
 Even in the absence of commoditized
standard processes, language standards for
describing workflows and for process
‘choreographing’ between organizations
anywhere on the web them have emerged:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BPEL
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Back to the future
 Most of the benefits and problems
with “process” organizations were
explored years ago under the guise of
“matrix” organizational structure
 Much can be gained from looking at
the lessons learned from matrix
management
 But first, “How Process Enterprises
Really Work”
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The Matrix Reloaded
 Much of this information is from a
whitepaper from the consulting group
Boox, Allen, Hamilton entitled “The
Matrix Reloaded”
 http://www.boozallen.com/media/file
/The_Matrix_Reloaded.pdf
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DEC – sorely missed and one of the
first real matrix organizations
 In a matrix organization,
departmental groups are kept in place
– for training, morale (identity), HR
and the benefits of old-fashioned
traditional reporting relationships
 BUT – most work takes place on
“projects” (i.e. processes) which span
multiple functional groups
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Benefits
 All the skills necessary for large,
complex projects are brought
together without departmental
communications barriers
 IT people at DEC, for example, would
be assigned, frequently with
manufacturing and accounting
people, to a new system
development.
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Questions
 What is the incentive structure?
 Morale issues
 The ‘traditional’ supervisor has greatly lessened
authority
 The team knows from the outset that its life is
temporary
 Is it any surprise that 20%+ of an
organizations management quits during the
transition to a process based organization?
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Drawbacks - managment
 In the prior DEC example, every
project would have a manager to
which team members would report –
the de facto day to day “supervisor”
 BUT – everyone would still be a
member of their department and
would have a “traditional” supervisor
there, to whom they would revert
when the project ended.
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A quick comparison of significant
differences: matrix vs. functional
 Booz, Allen, Hamilton report, page 5
 http://www.boozallen.com/media/file
/The_Matrix_Reloaded.pdf
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