Same emperor, new clothes

It’s a grey gloomy Tuesday morning in October, and we are on our way to the Dutch bible belt. We are again invited to Cordys’s annual Cordial meeting at Kasteel Vanenburg in Putten; a day full of networking and lots of tech talk on the frontier where technology meets business. Location and catering are again impeccable, and though we can’t escape the feeling that there are less people each year, a good crowd has shown up for this year’s meeting. Last year was all about Service Oriented Architecture, this year the emphasis is on Business Process Management. A different take on essentially the same solution.

Cordys is a Dutch producer of Business Process Management software based on a Service Oriented Architecture. It’s headed by Jan Baan, former CEO of Baan, the ERP software producer that notoriously went bust in the late nineties. He is one of the keynote speakers this morning, and presents us with a history lesson. Baan is eager to show that history has some tough lessons to teach. His vision on business process management software, he confesses, was “naïve” (he uses the word four times) and has taught him lessons that have off course been incorporated in the Cordys solution. Monolithic systems are a thing of the past (take that, Oracle and SAP!), it is about flexibility and has to be human-centric. I will return to the human-centric demand! He seems remarkably open as he speaks of the mistakes of yesterday and the pain of today, he even mentions his time in prison.

It is interesting to see how content driven this guy is. He really sees, understands, and cares about the complexities of his models. Here is a salesman with a passion for the product he’s selling. It’s a rather unique combination, and it’s convincing. The Cordys Suite (an all in one SOA and BPM solution) wraps all of your existing data and applications. It is a solution to a stubborn and expensive problem; legacy software. The solution is flexible, modular, and can be used to design any uniquely structured process without having to give up on existing investments. It really puts the user in charge. Or does it?

After a number of other speakers and plenty of complex diagrams I am struck by a fairly obvious absence of the knowledge worker in all of this. The term ‘human-centric’ is used, but it is being used to refer to tasks that can be set before the user and managed using the system. Tasks are not people! That is what you get with a process oriented approach; a focus on tasks and activities, not on people. The only one addressing the fact that people are event driven and not process driven is Hans van Grieken of Capgemini. I am afraid though that nobody in the room got the difference. We are not driven by having a mobile communication service, we are driven by the phone ringing.

We share Cordys’ vision on the importance of reality driving the software design process, and not the other way around. ICT is a means to an end, and in the end business considerations are what counts. Flexibility is a crucial aspect of the applications of the future. The days when knowledge workers are forced to adapt their preferred way of doing things to the design limitations of their software tools are behind us (and we’re all much better off because of it). Technology should serve not dictate the work process.

Information and communication technology should be and in the future will be as flexible as the whims and desires of the knowledge worker. Our children, the next generation of knowledge workers, are growing up with the internet and mobile technology everywhere. They will have completely different and much higher expectations of the software tools they work with. These technologies will need to provide them with instant information on what they are working on, and instant access to friends, family and other knowledge workers (even those not working for your company). Their social lives will inevitably blend with their business activities. Get used to the idea! There is nothing you can do to stop it! Whether you block Skype, Facebook or MSN, or are open about it will become a reason not to work for you in the future. These new communication tools are how young people gain information and exchange experiences and they expect its myriad possibilities from their future workplace.

These kids will not only be your new workforce, but your customers as well. Most of the process and client knowledge resides in the heads of your current knowledge workers. In our view it is not necessary to make a great effort extracting this knowledge from the knowledge worker in order to feed it into some kind of system. The best thing to do is to facilitate and support the knowledge worker herself, empower her to be flexible about what the software can do so that she is in control of the customer experience and not the system. The system is not as flexible as a human being and will not be so in our lifetime. Help your employees by providing better insight in customer behaviour and the best products they can offer a specific customer, but let them decide based on their experience and customer contact. You are better off training your workforce to trust their instinct then to put them in process driven straight jackets that will make them lose interest, become indifferent to your customer’s needs and burn them out. You may win a couple of thousand euros a year on efficiency, but will loose millions in missed opportunities and reintegration costs for burned out employees.

The Cordys pitch very explicitly addresses issues of control, the main concerns of management, not the knowledge worker. In the end the main motivation behind using the Cordys suite is realizing a steady flow of real-time, up-to-date, reliable information, so that management can control and optimize processes. If you have had SAP experts over at your company, this must sound terribly familiar. Efficiency and management information are still the main selling points. The software primarily addresses and solves problems important to management. Even though the Cordys software has the potential to empower the individual knowledge worker, making them more effective in addition to being efficient, these needs are not addressed. It is a one dimensional approach and shows a top-down, efficiency driven, old school, industrialized perspective on organizations and processes. The globalised world can not be conquered with a one-dimensional approach. The best you can do is prolong your suffering while slowly dying out like the dinosaur you are.

We see the market catching on to a number of important work related trends. ICT systems need to be designed around existing realities and processes, and need to be based on a client focus. Flexibility is key, which is what mass customization means. But it is still wrapped in old-school values. Your knowledge workers need much more control over what the systems can do for them, not just for you as a manager. They are closest to your clients, they have the most valuable knowledge, and ICT solutions should really be planned around their needs. This requires a bottom-up approach next to the top-down approach Cordys promotes. Both are needed and management needs to bring focus to enabling and facilitating next to monitoring and controlling. We see the need for a fundamental change in how organizations are structured, how and where decisions are made, and what it means to be a global knowledge based service provider. Network organization 2.0 anyone?

The Cordys technology responds to some of these needs, yet it is also clear that the Cordys proposition is based on the old paradigm. Power and control in the top and little attention to the needs of people and how to get the most value out of them. There is a lot of work for us to do still…