Measuring the Social Intelligence of Your Processes

As processes become more intelligent, we will likely like to measure the level of intelligence http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/05/how-smart-is-your-business-only-as_9.html This will give organizations an idea where they are in a continuum in trying to becoming a smarter business over time. This posting will cover the "S" portion "ISAA" http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/05/should-we-measure-how-smart-processes.html

I propose the following five levels of social intelligence that build on each other:

Basic Collaboration:

Leveraging the leverage of multiple knowledge workers on difficult cases/process instances is quite necessary when there a specialized skills, high levels knowledge gaps and complex decisions that require a team effort. Quite often there is shared content such as forms, images and video to work with and collaborate and comment on in completing such a case/process instance.

Skills Driven Collaboration:

Collaboration can become smarter when the best available resources are assigned dynamically to cases at certain milestones/steps. This approach generally leverages a skills / knowledge inventory and analytics that can measure the work load of a resource for the best outcome of a case. This means that there is a fine balance between skills and availability that needs to be sorted out in the context of an overall existing or anticipated workload.

Crowd Sourcing:

When all of the resources may not be under the command of the process manager, then the notion of dynamically finding and putting activities up for bid is an intelligent way of managing dynamic and difficult work streams. This may mean some of the resources may even work outside of your organization in organizations that may be in your value/supply chain, but can contribute. This may require certain levels of certification over time, but in a pinch crowd sourcing allows for better results in terms of timing and quality. This requires more intelligence to measure and manage.

Social Network Analysis:

When social interactions are wide a varied, analysis of these interactions are invaluable especially when tied to goals and outcomes. Interactions can be analyzed for compliance, efficiency, customer satisfaction and various other desired business outcomes. These can be analyzed in-flight or after the fact.

Ranked Better Practices:

When social interactions are analyzed for best airings and sequencing, additional intelligence can be applied to ranking best collaboration/interaction patterns. This way in flight case/process instances can be guided through choices between multiple successful best practices. This way participants can pick from successful patterns and even evolve new approaches. This is a great paring of machine and human intelligence to maintaining excellent outcomes is a rapidly changing environment.

Net; Net:

There are definite levels of social intelligence that processes can enable. We will need learn to utilize various levels of social interactions over the coming years.