As organizations hurtle through the accelerating pace of change and try to find their place on the table, it is refreshing to go back to basics and find clarity and direction. The changes in technology broadly referred to as ‘Web 2.0′ are here to stay and have caused stodgy enterprises to take notice – to reinvent themselves as ‘Enterprise 2.0′. Lost in the technology or people focused debate are the basic time-tested management principles best articulated by Peter Drucker.

According to Drucker, the purpose of an organization is to enable ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things. Also, organizations need to give ‘knowledge workers’ control over their work and environment, allowing teams to work towards broad business objectives instead of prescriptive plans.

If you think about it organizations conforming to Drucker’s vision will by definition be ‘Enterprise 2.0′. Technology, processes and organization structures are all components for the roadmap to get to that milestone.

Greg Lloyd (@roundtrip) has a terrific take on this debate. He declares himself a Strict Druckerian as opposed to the Technarian and the Proletarian.

I think we are all Druckerians if we stop and think about it.

This approach may be adequate for incremental workflow improvement but does not address good design for a business process.

The reason a process exists is because it adds value to the customer. Otherwise the process shouldn’t exist. This is the golden rule for good Business Process Design.

James Martin and Michael Porter have been expounding on the central principle of value creation for the past few years with the Value Steam approaches.  Recently Ralph Whittle reviewed the background and presented Enterprise Business Architecture as the overarching concept to capture the value-driven approach.

Given that (value-driven) process design is the core of any successful organization, I am a little concerned to find Graham Hill bidding good-bye to Process Thinking and welcoming Design Thinking as a replacement.

It may be that his use of the word ‘design’ in this fashion is too generic. A good DESIGN will bring user-centric interface design, user-friendly information architecture and customer-value-driven business processes together into a rewarding experience for the customer – and a profitable transaction for the business. Process thinking (from a customer’s  viewpoint) is key.

Incremental workflow improvements in the guise of process management are ineffective unless they rest on solid business processes built after asking, “Does this add value to the customer?”

Thinking ‘outside the box’ is the romantic ideal of creativity, but the brutal truth is that there ALWAYS is a ‘box’ that defines at the very least the goal of creative thought – and in most cases – a variety of constraints that need to be respected on the way to creative nirvana. Asking people to think and to begin with a blank sheet of paper will cause a ‘thinker’s block’ in most cases while the ‘thinker’ works through the goals, constraints and assumptions in his mind. Mark McGuinness has a very interesting experiment on thinking ‘inside the box’. He concludes that

‘Creative freedom’ is usually spoken of as a positive thing – but in this case, having total freedom to write any kind of story they like tends to paralyse people.

So, a successful brainstorming begins with something already on the board. There HAS to be a workshop owner (not just a ‘facilitator’) who brings the framework to the table and has a vested interest in the end-product. All participants should be there for their skills, experience or a ‘stakeholder-pass’ – not just to have more ‘heads’ to get to bear on the problem.

The workshop ‘owner’ taps into the entire group – gets them to add more flesh to the framework, validate or repudiate assumptions, extend the concept into the practical execution challenges, push and poke at imagined or defined boundaries and iterate through various cycles of conception to execution to fine tune the solution.

On tools, I prefer mindmaps and structured (lateral) thinking as the two most valuable accelerators for brainstorming.

At the individual level, laying out your ideas on a mindmap is a powerful idea management technique that I can personally attest to as my implementations evolve. It can be scaled up to manage group brainstorming sessions as well  – with similar powerful outputs as Michael Deutch insists.

From a structured thinking perspective, we need to make sure that the discussion has adequate representation of the six color ‘thinking hats’ from Edward de Bono – (Facts, Emotions, Critical-Judgment, Positive-Judgment, Creativity and Big-Picture). I am still trying to digest Jeffrey Phillip’s refreshing new term ‘Elastic Thinking’. More on that later.

Group Brainstorming in itself does not ‘generate ideas’. It helps amplify and sharpen individual thoughts – that need a vehicle for validation and improvement – and an organization framework for implementation.

Business users don’t want to “maintain rules” any more than they want to “write code”

What they want to do is run their business better……

…..They can’t and don’t want to use the same technology IT does but they can and should be brought into the process. To deliver this requires thought and effort but it will pay off in increased agility, decreased costs and improved precision in decision-making.

I agree with James’ prescriptions on what IT needs to do to make it easier for business users to define business rules that ‘run the business’. The Business Rules Engine interface needs to be intuitive and  familiar;  presented in a business metrics context; allow ‘what-if’ scenario building; and provide audit and governance ‘under the covers’.

The underlying assumption here is that business users do have a reasonably well-defined and agreed-upon decision-making criteria. So when ‘business rules’ need to be built into the ‘business logic’ of a system, the IT team should be able to pick up the binder listing all the rules and start implementing the system. In an Orwellian parallel universe maybe. Not in the real world.

Too frequently the business needs to think through the business processes, objectives, decisions and rules first before any system can be implemented. These rules are again subject to change depending on business direction and market conditions. So IT is increasingly abstracting the business-rules-engine component out of the underlying implementation.

IT can develop and procure Web Services that enable individual business processes – and provide ‘switches’ to configure the process and its interaction with other processes. The Business Rules Engine that brings the full value chain together is then the ultimate responsibility for business domain experts within the business.

No matter how dirty, techie, complex or ridiculous the Business Rules Engine is, the business needs to know where the switches are and how to drive. Can the business visualize a Ferrari dashboard or is a Model-T ‘dashboard’ sufficient?

.. if you want to avoid fixes that fail and move towards sustainability in today’s complex operating environment, I invite you to resist the instinct to resort to scenario exercises, or only do so in conjunction with systems thinking approaches.

I can see her point, but the elaborate systems thinking approach she is referring to does exist already – generally embedded deep into the fabric of any successful organization. The organizational processes and systems are designed and maintained to weather the ‘normal’ levels of complexity. Scenario Planning, on the other hand, tries to peer into the future in order to develop some decision making criteria as and when needed.

Complexity in business and its operating environment is a given constraint in management. Management challenges exist along two completely opposite paradigms.

At one end we need to delve deep into existing complexity – define it and automate the processes and decisions there – so that we are ‘shielded’ from the known complexity or the static view. The system or the model works just fine within the frame of its original assumptions. Taken to an extreme, all possible complexity can be modeled given enough time and data.

On the other end is the unknown complexity introduced as soon as we recognize that we live in a real world of dynamic, moving components that can interact with each other in unpredictable ways to create new scenarios. This is where we need to abstract the complexity into simple models like the famous (or infamous) 2×2 matrices. We need to make empirical decisions quickly because the environment is changing at the same time. Decision models need to be simple and adequate – a criteria difficult to achieve, but still better than trying to stop the world while we analyze our way into paralysis.

Good management needs to manage complexity by instituting structure – enough to be affordable – and by developing abstracted, simple decision models – enough to be useful.

Too often CRM is a disjointed mishmash of departmental or divisional activities. CRM touches a number of enterprise systems, including operations, accounting and e-commerce, so companies must make a better effort to integrate their CRM data with these other systems….

Business processes across the enterprise are either directly or tangentially concerned with customer interactions. Since a 360 degree view of the customer is key for managing the relationship, it follows that all processes need to be considered and relevant customer data lined up for the CRM system to be effective.

For organizations used to working with enterprise-class systems like SAP, an integrated process-based approach is easier to visualize and execute. It is the organization with departmental silos that gets attracted to ‘partial’ solutions that address the contact management functions of CRM. Despite the customer being so central to the modern enterprise, customer relationship management questions quickly devolve into the basic question of, “who owns the customer?” Very rarely do all business departments sit together and design a common integrated process focused on the common customer.

A true customer focused organization will need to take an enterprise-wide process view in implementing CRM.

Seeing the art of visual thinking framed in a ‘scientific’ context is a relief. This is the second big validation I have come across – the first (for me) was Bill Buxton’s book on ‘Sketching User Experiences’. I am a white board junkie and have been known to start arranging paper-clips, coffee-cups and pens in a drawing representation if paper and pen are not handy. I have written about my awe of sketching…and look for ways in which this individual tool can be scaled up beyond a small team into corporate settings. How do you take sketches enterprise wide? Not just as pictures of the whiteboard or screenshots of your doodling on a TabletPC…..but as business documents similar to ones created in  Microsoft Word, Excel, etc…or even Google Documents..where dispersed teams can review, comment and collaborate.

My experiments with Microsoft OneNote, Mindjet MindManager, Google Sketchup and Evernote’s Evernote have been great personal tools and I continue to use them in varying degrees depending on the problem at hand. Some of these tools do allow collaboration and team review….but they are not mainstream yet. I have not been able to scale up the experiments to a point where I can say with confidence that the tool itself will not distract from the goal of visual collaboration.

So, all of my electronic sketches get distributed via PDF to the team…who can mark up a paper-copy and we sit down in a conference room with my electronic sketch displayed on the wall and make changes for everyone. While we are making do with this level of tool sophistication, I am focused now on getting to animated sketches so that a story can be told with higher fidelity….cutting down on misunderstandings and sharpening the follow-up questions that can actually take the analysis or the solution or the execution further along. Animating pictures is now taking me to our Graphic Designers and their Adobe Flash tools, etc. Fun stuff and I like messing around with that when I have time.

But the nagging doubt remains – how do I get visual thinking and sketching into the mainstream?

Microsoft will deliver the ads based on data obtained from ShopRite’s customer loyalty cards, according to the companies. When shoppers scan their cards on the computerized shopping carts, they will see ads and promotional offers on the screen based on their purchasing histories.. 

Most retail stores track customers’ path through the store to gauge effectiveness of various displays and product placements – mostly as passive observation to help with merchandising and advertising – and not for personalized sales and advertising. So, this is a proactive move at influencing customer behavior while shopping and not the usual attempt made with discount coupons spewing out of the printer at the checkout lane.

This story reminded me of the sophistication that some Casinos had put into place almost two years ago. At Harrah’s

Gamblers don’t just win money when they play at one of Harrah’s 26 casinos. When they swipe their loyalty cards, they’re also eligible to win a variety of perks, from appetizers to Swedish massages, depending on their level of spending and the information Harrah’s has collected about them. …..Data from low-rollers also convinced Harrah’s to redesign its casino floors to include, for example, a higher percentage of lower denomination slot machines and video poker games—for a 12 percent hike in slot revenues.

Loyalty programs of various kinds need not be just a mechanism to track and reward repeat customers. If technology is used appropriately, a loyal customer can now be tracked through the shopping experience and also through the service delivery experience. A very comprehensive set of data can then be collected at that micro-level of interaction – analyzed at an aggregate – allowing new products, services, marketing and attention to be delivered seamlessly back to the customer at the individual level.

Customer and Seller can now be engaged in a longer relationship, learning from each other and helping each other be more efficient, effective and profitable.