Leaping off the Ivory Tower: Biographical Process Management

You’ll often see the phrase Order Received given as an example of a triggering event for a process. Car Wrecked is probably less typical but the real world possibilities are certainly interesting. I’ll let the automaker engineers assay that one.

What I found even more intriguing about George Van Antwerp’s BPM for Smart Devices is how he (perhaps inadvertently) manages to kick business process management off its usually snooze-inducing Ivory Tower for a moment and recast it in terms that a typical person (as opposed to a BPM vendor or operations executive) might actually care about:

…a process architecture that connects human centric tasks and embedded system tasks…can extend into our personal lives and connect our various activities such that logical coordination can happen.

Replace the phrase embedded system there with a more general word like technology and you’ve quite possibly summarized what it would take to finally provide some BPM for the masses.

We, the masses of the developed world, crave “logical coordination” in our lives whether we know it or not, and are more conditioned if not inclined to adopt process-based approaches in our careers and basic lifestyles than the generations before us. A lot of us are using the Web to search for tools and methodologies that can help us reduce risk, filter through information overload, save time, discover new opportunities, you name it. For better or worse as society becomes more technologized, we become more inclined to behave like designers of or actors inside processes. del.icio.us contains over 2800 links for the tag personal+productivity and both in their titles and their descriptions you’ll frequently encounter the words time and information in front of the word management.

Imagine if BPM vendors shifted some resources away from landing large projects with deep-pocketed corporations and devoted them instead toward demonstrating to the individual person how process management can help them improve their quality of work and quality of life in the context of the larger processes in which they exist. If nothing else, some of the serial yawning and eyes glazing over that typically go hand-in-hand with talks on BPM might be replaced with attentive listening, furious note taking, and perhaps even some enthusastic interest in relevant products and services. Then again, provided there is a market out there receptive to this sort of pitch, perhaps it takes a company with a different business model than your typical BPM vendor…who knows, maybe Coghead will eventually drift in this direction.

In any case one common definition for biography is “an account of the series of events making up a person’s life” and one common definition for business is “a person, partnership, or corporation engaged in commerce, manufacturing, or a service”. Expand the perspective of BPM a bit to consider the modern middle-class lifestyle and suddenly the tenets of process management start to apply to a person’s life in ways similar to how we’ve traditionally viewed them applying to a corporation.