E-TEI TECHNOLOGY

I have just taken a further look at the BPMN 2.0 proposal to see if we could use some of its standard graphic modeling concepts for our process visualization in our Papyrus Platform. I was very disappointed. The enhanced and additional definitions create ambiguous models. An ‘Activity’ can still represent any number of different functions and the new event types are lacking in detail on how they interact with the flow. There is still no artefact method, attribute and state modelling and no business rules. The proposed UML-like data modeling seems non-existent. Thus, it will be impossible to use BPMN 2.0 for exchange as-is and it still has to be transcoded to an executable format (i.e. BPEL plus Java) using additional information that is not mapped into BPMN. Thus, no roundtrip and user empowerment! All inbound and outbound content and GUI artefacts will still have to be programmed. Hence, a lot of project management bureaucracy.

Obviously a lot can still change and maybe 2.0 will take a few more years to become a final spec. But I feel that all that is to no avail as it remains firmly footed in the flowcharting domain. But what are we trying to achieve with a process model? Gain an understanding to calculate how the systems will react given a certain situation? Simulate what will happen when certain actions are taken? Control the system so that it becomes more manageable? Achieve transparency of the processes en-route and completed?

A BPMN model has only the acting agents (users) as real world entities whose functions and decisions to perform these functions can’t be modeled unless substantial abstraction is performed. BPMN 2.0, as all flowchart models, is STILL functionally blind to the inner function of the major elements of a business process (content data and context) and therefore to its decision logic. Flowchart modelers see the world (a business) as a ‘complicated’ system that can be decomposed into a sequential causal chain of functions ‘to be executed’ and a limited set of states that causally control the execution. The relevant process knowledge is however hidden in a) functions performed by different agents who influence state changes on business entities and b) patterns of entity states and attributes that cause different agents to perform certain functions, and c) a variety of complex business events that can change entity states at any time. Flowcharts are unable to represent that even if one could extract and analyze all the information from the agents and the entities! As bad as that is, it is not the key problem.

A classical model of physics (i.e. a watch) is complicated, but the economy or a large business that consists of individually acting agents is complex (Anderson, Arrow, Pines – 1988). The flowchart fallacy is to see a business as complicated rather than complex. Holland et. al (1986) proposed a method of real-world modeling in which the world consists of various states S where a transition function F(S) changes a given state at time t into a new state a time t+1.  The caveat is that in a complex system the modeler using a modelling function can neither accurately describe the state space with all its entities nor can the function F – and its causality – performed by the agents be accurately known.

While the Law of Large Numbers allows us to build a statistical representation of real-world situations across a large number of entities and thus there seems to an emergent pattern, this does however not describe a causal law. The LOLN is an observation and cannot be decomposed into why the various agents came to a particular decision. The individual agents have only a certain probability to interact in a certain way and as much as that can be modelled, it does not allow the modeller to deduce a function to act causally correct on all entities in the same manner. The simplified ‘complicated’ model will therefore be quite wrong when people are involved. That explains why the reductionist approach works well for a robotic production plant but not for people.

The reductionist modeling hypothesis suggests the more a decomposition in smaller elements takes place the more accurate the model would be. Anderson proposed in 1972 that reductionist models are misleading for complex systems because they cannot map and predict emerging properties. Thus they cannot be used to construct the system from the decomposed bits and pieces. The model representation in such situations can only happen through destroying and redrawing the blueprint using the new functions or entities. The reductionist ‘complicated’ model cannot adapt to external influences or to changes in its agent functions.  Flowcharting is acccordingly abstraction based, top-down modeling of complicated functions that connects purely hypothetical snapshots in time with statistically inferred rules that are not causal in reality for a complex adaptive system, just as global warming theory.

Hereto I propose (as I have done for the last ten years) that BPMN 2.0 and flowchart models are still a failure for designing business processes, because a large business clearly is a complex adaptive system that consists of individual acting agents with its employees and customers. Trying to simplify a business into a ‘complicated’ system, forces the agents into non-individual actor-robots and makes the system unable to adapt to the customer agents or to other environmental changes, except if one goes back to the blueprint. That is exactly the situation why we have IT Governance and Centers of Execellence bureaucracy who have to redesign the blueprints. As this typically requires long and difficult projects to implement, BPM reduces the agility of a business rather than improve it.  If agents (such as customers would) refuse to be controlled, the model breaks not only down but produces wrong results.

I propose that a bottom-up approach of real-world objects that can map state-changes and identify causal patterns from unimpeded user activity creates a much more realistic and adaptible model of business activity. Rather than to enforce the agents to perform in a certain way, the system simply enforces basic rules of the game and creates substantial transparency and therefore flexibility and adaptability. Process management has to offer complex real world models of people acting as a social group on business entities. Flowcharts are at most usable at a very high level, for example to show the dependencies between process owners and their goals.

As for BPMN 2.0 or any other flowcharting BPM approach, why would you want to reduce your business agility?

Britain’s industrial revolution, which took place over 200 years ago, transformed us from a local to a national economy, a rural to an urban society and a small-scale producer to a mass producer. The internet revolution has similar transformational potential, allowing, as it does, both large and small businesses to reach new customers and markets across the globe.

Around one billion people are now connected to the internet, representing 89% of global GDP, and internet companies like Google, Amazon, eBay, Expedia and Wikipedia have exploited the global reach of the worldwide web to turn established business models on their head. These companies came out of nowhere and have achieved massive success, but, says Nikesh Arora, Vice-President of European Operations at Google, there is no reason why existing bricks and mortar players in those markets couldn’t have seized the online opportunity first.

“What the internet has demonstrated very powerfully is that no industry or business can afford to believe it is established any more, because small players will come from left field and steal its market,” says Arora. “Even the smallest company, operating out of a garage in the middle of nowhere, can tap into the global economy in a way they could never have done in the past, provided they have a good website and a good product or service.”

He cites the example of Glasses Direct, which was set up in 2004 by a 23-year-old horrified by the margin traditional opticians were making on sales of prescription spectacles. The company now has over 100,000 customers.

Some wise and more established physical organisations have sought to emulate the online pioneers, who have raised the bar in terms of customer service and expectations. But many more companies persist in treating the internet as a sort of ‘bolt-on’ to their operations, an approach that turns away customers who try to do business with them. “They may still be under the illusion that the internet is a passing fancy, but the combined market value of the top five internet companies in the world now exceeds the entire value of the internet market in 1999 before the dotcom crash that many believed – even hoped – would mark the return to the status quo,” says Arora.

The internet is not going to go away. “Around 250 million people now access the internet through broadband, and that number is expected to reach 413 million by the end of the decade. In the UK we are likely reach the critical 70% broadband penetration much faster than the rest of the world. The swift access afforded by a broadband connection means that a company’s website is increasingly customers’ first port of call when seeking information on that business or one of its products, even if they don’t actually purchase online.”

But many organisations seem to find it very difficult to design websites that customers find both easy to use and useful, says Arora. This is unhelpful and frustrating for customers, and explains why 60% of online shopping trolleys are abandoned before the consumer reaches the checkout, as recent research claims. In the real world even one abandoned trolley would trigger alarm bells. But poor websites also have a negative effect on the brand equity of the businesses concerned, because people believe, quite rightly, that those firms just don’t ‘get’ the internet.

It is also marked that in the last few years, graph of IT Outsourcing is on the rising way. Now IT Companies are sending work overseas to the countries like India and China to develop even smaller business applications. These countries possess most of the share for Software Outsourcing services. Along with these two countries other destinations like Russia, Philippines and many more are also emerging as a service provider for Offshore Development.

Software Outsourcing is concerned

Software Outsourcing to these destinations take place because the labor cost in such destinations is very low. IT Companies from the house of America and Australia are finding these destinations the most suitable for the development purposes. Though, Offshore Software Development might create some threats in the mind of the localized people from these countries. But at the end of the day IT Companies are finding this way of business the most convenient for many reasons apart from the cost benefit. As far as Software Outsourcing is concerned, fear is a reasonable enough response in the mind of these people, but not an effective survival tactic as the companies are now more and more evolving for such IT Outsourcing services. Though, these people thing that IT must take some different route than moving beyond the territory.

Keeping IT services inside the territory for these countries has been impossible as they are finding lots of benefits by shifting the jobs to the lower cost destinations with compared to their local development teams and companies. Along with Software Services, BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) in telecommunication sector and other sector is also on the boom in the current market scenario. By these processes IT companies can expand their business beyond the local territory without real investment. Flexibility and cost are the two most important factors that lead the IT Companies to move their jobs to the overseas destinations. You don’t have to put real efforts to expand your market by this way of the business process.