Proposals for a new hybrid organisational model present exciting possibilities to reduce costs and increase productivity in many businesses. This model is just as applicable now, in a recessionary economy as it may be in the future. But to make it work, it needs another ingredient: a redefinition of BPM.

In a recent Institute of Directors (IoD) publication, entitled ‘The Big Picture’, Microsoft’s UK General Manager of Marketing & Operations, Scott Dodds proposes a model for the business of tomorrow.

In it he states:

‘Successful organisations would be those that freed their people to work in the way they would be most productive, measured them by outputs not inputs, empowered them through innovative and flexible workplace design and supported them via a range of technologies and tools that helped them do their jobs more effectively. Forget business as usual….’

We would argue that the best organisations are already developing along these lines. For them, the concept of workplace is more fluid and both workplace operational management and interaction with people take on an entirely different form. It is this that we wish to explore in this blog.

The impact of cost on ‘the workplace’

In a recessionary and post-recessionary economy, every organisation will have to look closely at its costs. In particular very few organisations will be able to afford the luxury of large, inflexible office space which in many cases serves as little more than a centralised log-on point to a computer network that with the right management, could just as easily be accessed from an employee’s home. But what about the social aspect, I hear you say? Surely there is more to work than just logging on? Well, maybe, but certainly not in every organisation. The sad fact is that in many offices, employees turn up, head for their cubicle and for the large part, stay there for the majority of the day. Not only is that an ineffective use of the office space but it is also an inefficient use of the employee’s time and many are asking why, given the prevalence of new technology, they should spend many hours and much of their hard-earned cash commuting for that.

Similarly, businesses are asking why and when their sales or purchasing staff need to spend hours on the road visiting customers or suppliers when again, a raft of good, new technology is available to avoid that. Sure, you can’t avoid some physical meetings but in many cases a web conference is easier, quicker, more efficient and often more effective. Employees arrive at the meeting less stressed and the technology is in place and integrated with the meeting organisation. There is no excuse now for a sales person to arrive at a client site and find they cannot log on to the client internet or that a data projector has failed. Online is not just cheaper but it can now also be better.

A third aspect of workplace cost is that of employment itself. As the economic outlook becomes more uncertain for many businesses (49% according to an IoD poll last week), some will look to build an element of flexibility into their labour force by replacing employees with contractors. Whilst contractors still require a place to work, the nature of their workspace can often be more fluid than that for a permanent employee with a concomitant reduction in facilities costs.

So with these cost-drivers to consider – and they are by no means exhaustive – what should today’s business of tomorrow look like?

An alternative workplace model

Dodds proposes that a hybrid organisation is the model of the future. He defines this as an organisation characterised by fluidity of both structure and process and notes that with the introduction of flexible working policies, virtual teams and the dissolution of compartmentalised office space, this is already happening.

Cisco propose something similar and has created a number of office configuration scenarios that revolve around plug-in hardware, integrated furniture and clever document and data management software. The recent raft of on-line meeting technologies such as Webex and GoTo Meeting support all of this by providing communications channels which enable a large number of physical meetings to be replaced by practicable and effective on-line discussions.

At the centre of this models is an assumption that with the latest technology, employees should be able to work anywhere and would be much more productive if they were provided with that flexibility. It assumes that working at home, office or on the road are interchangeable and that employees choose the venue based on the task at hand.

The big question is how to manage that. As Dodds quite rightly states, whilst technology is the key enabler, the real challenges are not (just) technological, but cultural and social. How should that technology be best used as a force for empowerment, innovation, creativity and productivity as opposed to being seen as Big Brother breathing down people’s necks?

In the early days of home working, the focus was on control: ensuring that Jo, Fred or Johnny were working hard at their desk for the prescribed hours, instead of shirking off to play with their children. Unsurprisingly that approach failed. No none likes to be that closely monitored and the raft of time-management software that was rolled out to cater for this did very little to enhance productivity, let alone build employee/employer harmony.

Thankfully now the focus has switched to the enablement of desired outputs with the aim that empowerment, innovation, creativity and productivity are genuinely supported. But that too, comes with its own raft of challenges. Not least of these is a real confluence of the technological, cultural and social challenges that Dodds mentions, but also some which he does not: particularly those relating to approach and appropriate methodology. The result is that we need to redefine the system we use to manage this.

BPM redefined

At work people interact with each other. Some of that interaction is purely social; some is to gain information and exchange ideas. In fact, people obtain 50% to 75% of the information they need by talking to others and as the diagram below shows, the vast majority of that information is in people’s heads. Only 4% is structured.

So the challenge for any management team looking to create a hybrid organisation, is to replace that valuable face to face discourse with equally valuable structured knowledge: knowledge that is available on-tap to any employee, wherever and however they work. This is much more than creating the online operational manual, which is fine for rigid, compliance-driven organisations but fails where the aim is to promote best practice.

In order to manage responsibility and facilitate innovation, a much more flexible and adaptive system is required.

We would suggest the components of such a system are as follows.

• Visibility and accessibility. It should enable knowledge to be presented visually and made easily accessible to any employee via any device or platform.

• Clarity and comprehensibility. Information and best practice should be easily understandable by everyone, regardless of their technical or specialist skills. It needs to be presented clearly with levels of increasing detail being made available on request. In that way, each employee can drill down to that which is most relevant to them, without having to spend hours searching around.

• It should be socially derived and peer reviewed. No one has a monopoly on the best ideas and it is critical that any best practice management system must enable ideas to be submitted from any quarter and peer reviewed by all.

• It should foster and promote self sufficiency: a key trait for all employees of the future.

In short this is about adaptive best practice and the practical enablement of that for all. It is not about rigid process control.

The underlying technological platform needs to be able to provide value in an entirely different way to that provided by current systems and much more directly to the end user. Current BPM drives tasks. The requirement for the hybrid organisation is to drive knowledge dissemination so that the organisation as a whole can learn and be able to apply that learning easily and practically. Some of that learning may feed back into process but most – especially given the nature of the user – would be delivered in the form of best practice.

Business Process Management doesn’t do this: it provides rigid control. Knowledge Management Systems don’t do this: they fail to sufficiently capture the required intricacies of best practice though a commonly comprehensible visualisation mechanism.

A new type of system is required: a combination of methodology and a different form of knowledge capture/dissemination mechanism to that which exists today. It is related to knowledge management in a much stronger way than it is related to process management, but nonetheless needs to contain elements of both.

If we wish to give it a name and stay with a similar acronym, a Best Practice Management system would be much more applicable than a Business Process Management system.

Summary

The business of tomorrow is for many, the required model to succeed today. The inherent flexibility, efficiency and nimbleness of the model described by Microsoft and Cisco is equally valid at equipping a business to weather a recessionary storm as it is the demographic and work trends around the corner. Whilst clearly it cannot apply to all business functions, it can apply to those which are heavily office based or peripatetic such as sales and purchasing.

Just as Lean has been successfully applied to manufacturing operations a move towards a more flexible workplace must make sense as part of a larger plan for an organisation looking to improve its productivity whilst keeping an eye on costs. In these recessionary times, there cannot be many businesses to which that does not apply.

The missing ingredient is a new type of system that can adapt to the social and cultural requirements of the hybrid organisation. Only when that is in place will managers be able to make such an organisation work effectively.

Posted in BPM Business Improvement Business Process Management Operational Excellence
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