Knowledge Workers are the Emerging Heroes of the Digital World

Organizations will be asking much more of the knowledge worker as the 21^st century progresses. Routine work will be highly automated and optimized leaving the difficult work for knowledge workers to sort out. This work will consist of dealing with demanding interfacing with customers that are on their own journey with fickle loyalty, looking at emerging patterns, making wise decisions in context while predicting reactions to potential actions and taking efficient actions while satisfying customers at faster speeds than ever in a dynamic environment. This makes the knowledge worker at the operational, tactical and strategic levels the super heroes of the digital world. As we all know, super heroes are super heroes because of their character and special powers and assists. Our digital super heroes will have supreme interaction skills, incisive powers of great decisions and the wise actions of a sage appropriate for the intersections of many contexts. The new digital world will not only assist the knowledge workers like the utility belts and tools of super heroes, but guide knowledge workers to successful outcomes under a number of dynamic conditions at warp speed. 

The way work is managed today is that any one business event is taken through all the specialties it needs to achieve completion. In fact, today’s societies engender the creation of narrow skill bands so that workers can get better at achieving the same task using the same skills over and over until they reach perfection or dronish boredom. This leads to dissatisfaction of the worker and consequently dissatisfied customers having to deal with multiple uncoordinated stacks of specialized skills to get their desired outcomes. Nearly every great organization wants to be known for customer care, but companies are fundamentally organized in a way that defeats great customer care. Sure you can train your employees to treat people better. Sure you can enable technology to sense the mood of the customer. Sure you can have better mobile interfaces and feedback mechanisms to please customers. These are all great steps.  However, if you force clients to traverse your departments because of your division of labor, you are starting in a hole and working your way back out of it to neutral.  Divide and conquer is an old strategy that has spread beyond usefulness and its time. Yes, we need specialties, but let the technology do most of the specialty work. The industrial revolution ushered in the notion of specialties because people were more productive, if you only gave them a few tasks to get great at over time. Well when people were dependent on their own knowledge and skills, this made perfect sense. Over time people became smarter and the work splits stayed pretty much the same. This made sense back in the 1800s and the early 1900s, but we are way past that in our abilities as a collective society. No wonder labor unions emerged. Besides organizational abuse, we introduced boredom in the work place. I understand that only special people could be generalists back then, but there is no longer any excuse for keeping this old paradigm the dominant way to organize. It's time to start the incremental transformation to real digital assisted generalists. With digital assists knowledge workers will be able to do the following in better ways. The new digital world will assist knowledge workers:

With Connection Across Specialties:

Because digital connects knowledge workers easily customers and other workers along with communities, knowledge, content and automated assistants, knowledge workers are super connected with all the resources to delight customers and delver on goals.

With Impossible Work Streams:

Because digital encourages customer journey maps, behavior sensing and modeling and provides advocacy for customers and other constituents, the super high expectations of customers can be met or surpassed by the knowledge worker.

With Awareness to Omniscience:

Because digital equips knowledge workers with super visualization through in-flight work journey maps, goal improvement analysis, better practice patterns, finding patterns of interest and finding patterns of behavior in context with goal seeking guidance, they now have super awareness.

With Decision Making to Better Precision:

Because digital can help knowledge workers decide when to be proactive or reactive, can condense / clarify stimuli from multiple directions, consider history or in-flight progressions, and suggest operational, tactical or strategic alternatives,  they now have a super focus for potential actions.

With Supercharging Cognition & Knowledge for Results:

Because digital can add super cognition to knowledge workers that can help decide both simple and interconnected decisions, give advice on potential actions and take the action through resources, the knowledge worker can have a super thinking assist.

With Predictive Powers to Intercept the Future: 

Because digital can help with process / case design, help tune business operations in near real time, help recognize emerging pre-planned scenarios and suggest the tuning of business models, the knowledge worker can see into the future.

With Actions to Reach Desired Outcomes:

Because digital can apply all kinds of resources in near real time, it can arrange for things, bots, machines together with coordinated human resources to optimize actions and learn from the situations, it give the knowledge worker super powerful methods to adjust dynamically for shifting goals. 

Net; Net: 

The knowledge worker will be the key resources in the digital age, but the knowledge worker will be made to be a super hero with all sorts of assists from many swarming agents of recognition, knowledge extension, decisions assistance and action enablement. The utility belt in the digital world will be filled with many weapons of assistance to reach organizational outcomes that are consistent with dynamic changing goals.

Digital Process Insights at bpmNext 2016

There is a group of people and vendors that are shaping the direction and the health of digital processes with the support of BPM.  I would encourage anyone involved with the challenge of creating innovative processes or the technologies that support said processes attend this event. Below is the list of compelling topics that will be covered this year.  If you are moved, please register by clicking here  If that doesn't move you, come see Santa Barbara. If nothing moves you, maybe you might want to hear me speak :)

WHAT TOPICS ARE COVERED? 

• BPM 2016-2020: Outlook for the Next Five Years
• A Business Process Application with No Process
• BPM and Enterprise Social Networks for Flexible Case Management
• Building Advanced CaseDriven Applications
• Business Process Management in the Cloud: Changing the Playing Field
• Cloud Architecture Accelerating Innovation in Application Development
• Combining DMN with BPMN and CMMN - The Open Source Way
• Dealing with Digital Disruption
• Decision Modeling Service
• Dynamic Decision Models: Activation/ Deactivation of Business Rules in Real Time
• Dynamic Validation of Integrated BPMN, CMMN and DMN
• Goal-oriented BPM Enabling IoT and Smart Agents
• How to Connect your Decisions to your Information Sources
• Intent-Driven, Future-Proof User Experiences
• Model, Generate, Compile in the Cloud and Deploy Ready-to-Use Mobile Process Apps
• One Model, Three Dimensions: Combining Flow, Case, and Time Into a Unified Development Paradigm
• Process Design and Automation for a New Economy
• Process Intelligence
• Process Intelligence for the Digital Age: Combining Intelligent Insights with Process Mining
• The Business of BPM
• When ‘Customer-Centric’ Means ‘UserFriendly’: Building Customized, Engaging Interfaces for BPM Applications
• You Can Handle the Truth: BPM Veracity

Jim Sinur is Joining Aragon Research

I want to thank my blog readers for the great loyalty and feed back on my stream of blog posts over the last three years. There will still be plenty of posts coming in the future as Aragon has graciously allowed me to continue my social presence and believes that your readership is important for keeping the focus on digital and BPM issues sharp. Please refer to the press release from Aragon by clicking here.

I am excited about joining Aragon and pursuing my passions in Digital Business and BPM's role in the future. It doesn't hurt that I get to play in the Industry 4.0 plus IoT and the Intelligent Workplace as well. Speaking of new things, here is my latest 3D Fractal called "Molten Planet" for your enjoyment. Art will still be a thread going forward.

Net; Net:

I want to thank Aragon for customizing a position that allows me to channel a great deal of my creativity while helping them grow.

Smart Process/Case Applications Jump Start Business Benefits

Smart Process/Case Applications (SPA) and Case Management Frameworks are new categories of applications software that are combinations of people and machine interactions that are highly adaptable and loosely structured to handle dynamic change happening in near real time. I will combine these into one category called smart process applications(SPAs) as they are aimed at the same jump start approach with a dynamic technology engine under the covers. They are just a little different in how they handle the adaptability and dynamism in their core event action engines, but they are both usually goal directed,and they both can contain flow directed portions of logic as well. The question is which approach is most prevalent in the end to end process.

They both deliver quick benefits because don’t start out with a blank page, but deliver configurable pre-built process and case structures plus configurable pre-built business actions. Consequently, there is reduction of specialty logic and custom code for the core business functionality provided by these smart process/case applications. There is generally a core life cycle that is common and foundational base business capability representing current best practice starting points (either horizontal or vertical). The beauty of SPAs is that you can adapt the best practices to better practices along the way.  The greatest reason for SPAs is that they help manage heterogeneous work streams well.

The Core Life Cycle; Seven Steps to Success:

Create a Goal / Milestone Models

Create a Process Instance / Case

Prepare the Instance / Case

Instance / Case Sharing or Routing

Instance / Case Approval

Instance / Case Actions

Measure, Monitor and Improve Instance / Case

Horizontal Business Function:

There is business function that spans different industries that adds value to an organization and can glean benefits quickly if pre-written, configured and customized with local / customer variations. Typically these things have a common core across many organization types. Examples would be customer relationships, human capital management, infrastructure management and facilities management. Prebuilt models, templates and accelerators can help organizations save money and time by starting with these jump start components on top of a very adaptable engine that can change in near real time.

Vertical Business Function:

There is business function that is unique within in an industry or specialty that has very specific business models implied in their behavior. Variations are sometimes baked in ahead of time, but in other cases the variation can be made at the time of process instance or case execution.  Examples would be Government, Healthcare, Insurance, banking and lending.  There is probably something for every industry out there, but make sure you have a good look at the underlying approach to adaptability and customization.

Net; Net:

Prebuilt models, templates and accelerators can help organizations save money and time by starting with these jump start components on top of a very adaptable engine that can change in near real time. Smart process applications have these and more for delivering results quickly for a lower cost than custom code, but still offer adaptability because of the underlying BPM / Case Engines. Some BPM engines are not adept at handling dynamic change that is not pre-planned, so the devil is in the detail.

My top ten key players in Smart Process Applications are Newgen, Pegasystems, IBM, Appian, Lexmark, Tibco, SAG, DST, OpenText and PNMSoft, but this is an emerging area.

Blog Activity for 1Q 2016

I thought you might find it interesting what folks are reading about digital & process related topics on my blog. The hot topics were Digital Business Models, Business Rules, Digital Process, Digital Business Transformation and Digital Competencies / Skills. I'm now really close to 250,000 hits to date since I semi-retired from Gartner. I would sure like to hear what topics you would be interested in, so I can meet your needs. Please post a comment, if you think there is a need for a particular topic. 

                                                         Top Blog Hits to Date

                                                      Top Hits for the Last 30 Days

                                                Where in the Rest of the World

Art for the 1st Quarter 2016

I concentrated on digital art this quarter, but created one painting.  I managed to be shown in Art Scope Miami and one my pieces was highlighted for the archive, so that was exciting.  I hope you enjoy these and let me know if any appeal to you :) You can check out my web sites for older pieces.

Web Presence: http://www.james-sinur.com/  & http://www.jamessinur.com/


                                                                        RISEN

MANTA

MORNING DOVE

JEDI ORIGAMI

For Those Who Celebrate Easter

Peace be to all. If you don't celebrate Good Friday and Easter, please pass by this one. For those who do, Easter is the celebration of our freedom and peace. Happy Easter !!!!  I created a new painting based on my past visits to Israel to see Golgotha and the Garden Tomb. I hope you enjoy seeing it as much as I enjoyed painting it. I have also included past years paintings celebrating the wonderful Gospel and our forgiveness.