Daryl Plummer of Gartner gave the opening keynote at Appian World 2012 stressing an “extreme” approach for achieving breakthroughs rather than just the incremental improvement that we’re seeing through current best practices. The forces to achieve this approach are social, mobile, cloud and information, combining to create a key emerging pattern of extreme collaboration. He presented 7 key aspects of extreme collaboration: mobile, ad hoc relationships, dynamic communities, proactive notification, free flow of information, people-centric, and multiple media. He spoke about using extreme collaboration to improve outcomes, not just optimize processes.
Much of this is about what mobile technology enables: empowering the workers at the edges of an organization as well as customers by allowing access to core business processes anywhere, anytime, on any device. He sees BPM’s greatest contribution as changing behavior through extreme collaboration, not process improvement. Traditional BPM creates barriers, but extreme collaboration can leverage natural relationships. Engagement methods are changing to include gamification, crowdsourcing and dynamic communities.
Gartner predicts that through 2016, organizational politics will prevent at least one-third of BPM efforts from moving beyond one-off projects to enterprise-wide adoption, based on 53% of BPM survey respondents stating that organizational politics is the #1 barrier to BPM adoption. This is not a big surprise to me; my keynote this afternoon is about how social technologies are going to change the way that you run your business, which will echo some of the themes in Plummer’s presentation.
“organizational politics will prevent at least one-third of BPM efforts from moving beyond one-off projects to enterprise-wide adoption,”
That is no small number! Internal red tape is the death of many enterprise projects. There are so many channels to bridge that it’s nearly impossible to get 100% green lighted.