BPM Conference Portugal 2013

The first edition of the conference was held last week on April 18th, and brought a blend of different viewpoints on the most advanced and innovative themes on BPM, as also, had practical approach rather than a conceptual only approach.

For the first time I was involved as a chair of the event. The main difference between being invited to participate or manage the conference regarding the sessions, the agenda, the themes, is that when you deliver your talk you strive to make your best and inspire the others, while when you are the chair, you are responsible for all the speakers that ultimately constitutes a very different kind of challenge. Again, I would like to thank to everyone that make this possible. The event organizers, the speakers, the attendees. I retain the idea the event equalizes with others around the world (taking into consideration the size of the market), much more forward thinking (I fight for that) and I hope that future editions will have more sessions around the HOW TO DO IT that is something that attendees expressed in a hand full of informal talks I had. They are not looking for workshops, but for sessions that explain how the result was achieved.

If you think you can make e difference in 2014 edition, send me an e-mail and I will be glad to enroll your presentation proposal.

The themes of the conference:
The topics of BPM Conference Portugal were: Cybernetics, or the ability to deal with diversity; Adaptation, how companies sense, innovate and change the way operations are performed and Socialization, how managers can change the way people get engaged out of the organization charts and use other approaches to achieve the intended results.

The goal of the event was to provide new perspectives on the challenges companies face; new methods to overcome challenges and see in practice, in real life, how to achieve competitive advantage.

I opened the conference with a very concentrated pitch around the conference themes summarized bellow:

The baseline of the conference is the fact that company environment has not changed. It continues to evolve, but faster.

• The pace of change in the economy has been increasingly accelerated, fueled by ubiquitous access to information and enterprise systems that are allowing to change the way work is done. Predict what will happen next is exponentially more difficult. Uncertainty has become an enduring variable, as companies have noticed lately. This implies constantly changing, or in other words adaptation.

To perceive is to understand patterns.

• Is a fact that today companies have immense analytical capabilities, but how managers understand a fundamental challenge for organizations that is to deal with all this interaction variety is necessary to understand patterns. Understanding patterns is not predict behavior, but infer trends, so people can think, act and adapt.
• Organizations that manage to be better aligned these three perspectives: social network, knowledge type and process design, are those that will be ahead in terms of execution capabilities, flexibility and adaptation to change.

The role of human resources development.

• Without retaining and nurture highly skilled workers, knowledge cannot be applied effectively.
• In the current context, organizations need all kinds of knowledge of all organizational units coming from all business units. Organizations need to use all styles, because organizations never know in advance which people they need to solve a problem, taking into account uncertainty times we are facing.
• People are deeply knowledgeable of the organization’s rules and apply them in the work they do because systems are imbued with logic and interoperability required for execution. Not only the type of technology has to be different, which often involves changes in technology architecture, but enabling people directly in the design and execution of business processes.

The conference sessions:

José Tribolet: Adding value to BPM by enforcing the fundamental principles of Enterprise Engineering

Professor Tribolet is a disciple of Dietz’s Enterprise Ontology method and he and his team is applying it in government agencies. The case presented was around handling judicial procedures where it was possible to identify that failures occur in the acts related with process execution, with an impact in delays, complains, superseded judicial decisions.

DEMO, (Dietz’s method) is somehow misunderstood around the community because is difficult to understand  (heavily based on computational science and three axioms: social agreements; content of communication; means of communication ) difficult to apply (it’s necessary to have a lot of conditions to be used like being able to trace process actions recorded by enterprise systems), but effective if you want to evaluate  consistency and completeness of your process models in run time mode.

Business transactions specify the pattern-based behavior that describes how actors collaborate in order to achieve business results. The method takes as input a process model that is converted to a transactional model. The transactional model is then analyzed and revised so that all transactions comply with the Ψ-theory axioms. Finally, the original BPMN process model is revised to become consistent with the transactional model and complete in the sense it expresses all transactional steps.

As a result is possible:

Identify consistency issues:

• Activity sequencing (control flow) violates the transaction pattern.
• Data flow violates the transaction pattern.

Identify completeness issues:

• Behavior of an activity cannot be classified as a coordination or production act.
• Coordination or production acts cannot be mapped to any activity (i.e. the act is either implicit or missing on the process model).

Keith Swenson: Planning and Supporting Innovative Work Patterns

Keith split his presentation in two parts: the concept around anti-fragile systems and adaptive case management.

Most of the talk was around anti-fragility a concept rose by Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder. Without being repetitive you can find most of Keith’s key points in his own words on this post. I would add in a different perspective and revisiting Ashby’s law,  any system, any process must be able to handle the complexity of the elements that constitute in an active and adaptive way to survive and thrive. This implies that any attempt to limit the existing variety will lead to the system, the process, the organization, will lose the ability to adapt leading to implosion, in Keith’s words, turning into fragile. This idea was also presented by Vitor Santos when we was arguing in his talk around the concept of enterprise elasticity (that I will come back to it in the end of this post).

Without changing the objectives of Keith presentation, there is a concept that I think (but I might be wrong) managers don’t even understand yet when dealing with enterprise systems deployment. Most are worried with the function, with the features, with business support and forget system engineering concepts, I mean how the system was conceived (engineered) to evolve and adapt to changing conditions (probably to revisit  in next edition sessions). I do no mean that the system itself will have such kind of character (by the way those that say IT can behave like complex adaptive system are in science fiction mode because one thing is the system to behave like that, other are the patterns that emerge as humans act on systems), but hey should be engineered with that objective (that can be evolved taking into consideration enterprise ecosystem, rather substituted).

Regarding adaptive case management there where some key ideas I would like to stress: the future is more around  providing guidelines that show people where to go, but do not prevent deviations if they are necessary, rather than enforcement where people fight against process design. Still, the idea that knowledge workers know what to do, because they understand the business model, the business rules and apply their knowledge building solutions to business problems was refuted by Tribolet. On his words, sometimes knowledge workers do what the hell they want to do and enter into contraction with company objectives. Hence the idea that knowledge workers know best to achieve the goals, sometimes does not apply and business suffers. It’s a matter of human behavior.  This is something we should make a reflection about.

Denis Gagné: Business Process Simulation: How to get value out of it

For those that are familiar with Deni’s style, already know that his sessions are very practical oriented. Denis talked about the reappearance (some argue that never disappeared) and the importance of simulation.

In the past simulation was seen like an evil tool that did not deliver value because process models were incomplete,  data used in simulation was inappropriate (mostly because it not even close of reality). There are some seminal reflections on simulation of Process Mining godfather Will Van der Aalst  were it argues that any attempt to simulate will be an incomplete exercise and will lead managers to make the wrong decisions, but as I envisioned before (something that for sure Gartner and Forrester will bring to the intelligent BPM assessment reports) Process Mining and Simulation are poised to merge. This is because today most of what we do is recorded by enterprise systems and it’s possible to construct real world models and use real world data to hep to build scenarios and make decisions about future directions.

Back again to Denis’s presentation, one of the key points was bringing awareness about what is the difference about process improvement that can be done using a myriad of approaches and business process management the management philosophy (not project based; continuous improvement culture and process-based management).

Regarding simulation he stressed more on capacity simulation aspects of a process model, usually dynamic analysis (using discreet simulation methods). Finally he talked about BPSIM the standard that allows data interoperability embedded into process models providing for pre-execution and post-execution optimization. As I told in the conference closure session, simulation is sexy again and it’s a way to explore how to improve process redesign in an era where all the data you need to do it is available inside your enterprise systems, rather than some years ago where you took cumbersome effort making studies driving you into the wrong direction to make decisions.

Ivo Velitchkov – Reasoning with Taskless BPMN

For me this was the most innovative presentation of all, because it challenged the current state on BPMN process modeling. BPMN is difficult to learn (but once it’s learned believe me can produce rich process model models) it has an endless symbol pallet, modeling by itself can lead to highly capillary detail or to high level approaches does not tell the complete story, in order words produce incomplete models. Hence Ivo, presented a new approach, based on taking from the process map the tasks (tasksless).

He defended the idea that taksless model diagrams, based only on process state transitions, conditional events and process rules, can produce easily understandable process models. On his words, tasks try to restrict what should be done during run time with what is known during design time. I see great potential of his ideas, translating business models into high level IT requirements, substituting state transition diagrams.

Tom Graves – Serving the storyhow BPM and EA work together in the enterprise

In a time where Enterprise Architecture finally is being understood as something valuable, that goes beyond creating boxes like collecting trading cards or tokens,  because today when you carry a process improvement initiative you realize you cannot anymore “automate” something because the pace of process change is touching other processes, systems, people if you don’t have the broader picture, aligning business model, value chain, organization and  IT all together, the risk your transformation project will fail is high.

Tom, brought a different perspective of how to do EA right. Putting people talking to each other in order to provide each of enterprise architecture layers (business model, value chain, organization, IT) perspective to the project.

He somehow stressed that enterprise architecture is not about IT like TOGAF framework, letting no place to the people that make part of the enterprise that know what the enterprise is all about contrary to the silicon servers. On his words, let the people include the people-story otherwise EA will be incomplete.

Michael Poulin – Business Processes in a Service-Oriented Enterprise

Michael walked mostly around a set of principles on Service-Oriented Enterprise, but I will highlight the concept that Michael created around Purpose Case Management. Conceptually, Purpose Case Management makes the blend between ACM and BPM (in this context BPM is structured process not the management philosophy) at it can drive smoothing transitions between unstructured and structured actions across ACM/BPM independently of the approach.

Robert M. Shapiro – Visual Analytics and Smart Tools

Robert talk was also on simulation, focused  on using data on executing processes to get an understanding on what is happening, what problems are and where you should look where to make improvements.

He walked through on a a very practical perspective intended to combines the process model, simulation to add data to the model in order to capture the behavior of the process model, analyze the different dimensions of the simulation result (time, cost, resources) and optimize that makes comparisons regarding different improvement scenarios. He also presented a method on Return on Investment on thinks like spending money on training with people’s performing the task in the process vs IT task automation, calculating benefits that can be used on process deployment, helping managers to decide before the rubber hits the road. This was very new to me.

Vitor Santos: Organizational elasticity with BPM

Vitor tried to demystify the approaches to build IT systems. He talked about the engineering approach that tries to align the enterprise holistic approach, and pointed out the concept of IT adaptability (elasticity on his words) built on the concept of viable systems that prevent the hike of maintenance cost or replacing IT time to time rather than making a bigger investment upfront that will fulfill business for a larger period.

 

In the next couple of weeks, videos from the sessions will be available. If you are interested, take a peek at the conference website.

Interested in a different view about the conference? Here is Tom’s view.

A Social Platform definition

1. Introduction:

On a previous post called The three layers of social business I discussed the importance of understanding a social business as an ecosystem rather than focus only on the technology menu.

As the Social Business Community Group puts in the A CTO’s Guide to Social Business, a social business is:

A social business is an organization that applies social networking tools and culture to business roles, processes and outcomes. A social business enables people to engage productively in a business context through collaboration and interconnecting business activities with social content. The scope of a social business spans across internal organizational boundaries and can extend to partners and customers. A social business monitors and analyzes social data to discover new insights that, when acted on, can drive business advantage, for example faster problem solving, improved customer relations, predicting market opportunities, and improving processes both internal  and external. A social business recognizes that people do business with people and optimizes how people interact to accomplish organizational goals.

What is social business alignment?

• Social activity is integrated in business processes across and is supported by social technology;
• Processes need to handle with social interaction at any point at any time, because the customer is driving the process, not the company. A Process that it’s designed on predefined manner will fail to cope with dynamics. Processes must be designed to spark others from the “middle of nowhere” rather than have predefined touch points. A customer maybe dealing with a complain and wants at the same time be informed about invoice settling. If you have difficulty to deal with this, one of the solutions for process design is a business rule based  approach where processes focus on what need to be done, describing the available activities that can be performed at a process stage and the rules sit on top not allowing the process to deviate;
• It’s an ecosystem;
• It must have the right social network configuration (process bandwidth should reflect the knowledge dimensions that should support the outcomes customers are willing to be achieved);
• It must have executive commitment and participation (not the sponsorship, actually is the executives putting their hands on the tools as I’ve been told).

2. The platform:

The idea of the platform bellow was developed based on a previous work done by the W3C’s Social Web Headlights  Task Force later adopted by the Social Business Community Group I belong , but it was kept in the closet for a while, because the target of these group is to foster standards development based on available technology.

There is no common definition for a social platform. Most of the community work around it focus too much on the technology the platform provides rather on the semantics or meaning of such platform is.

A social platform can be understood as the capability provided to an organization to deploy and manage onto an infrastructure artifacts into the layers that constitutes the platform.

The layers reflect the internal and external social interactions an organization executes regarding the organization environment it belongs and evolve over time. Those interactions that constitute the social practice are driven by technology that best supports the nature of work executed by the people.

The social platform is constituted by three main blocks as bellow illustration and it’s technically agnostic:

• About the Human: Who you are, how you identify yourself and what you pretend to be, the person’s social graph.
• Human Interactions: What you do. How do you express. How you engage. How do you react. Where you belong. What work you execute.
• Search and Analytics: Search for knowledge, gather feedback, get trends, spot patterns, sentiments, learn.

The Social Platform

About the human is constituted by:

• Identity: Unique identification attributes about the human.
• Profile: What attributes about the human are available to identify him. Presence status (on-line / off-line …).
• Social Graph: Social network type, network type and network connections around particular domains (may exist different networks for different domains). The communication flow and how people are connected with. People can be connected through some kind of relationship (work with, partner of), but the most importantly is the information flow between the people, i.e. the working practice, information sharing, because is here where action occurs.
• Addressing: Contact details (e-mail, instant messaging … ).
• Reputation: Perceived evaluation taken by members of the social graph.

Human interactions are constituted by:

• Messaging: Conversations can be synchronous or asynchronous around a topic.
• Group dynamics: Communities of interest or practice, interacting around a particular domain.
• Collaboration: Work being carried towards a goal that must be achieved. Work can be structured or unstructured.
• Sharing: Accepting an object to be shared in order others can take action if they want to.
• Reactions: Expressing a feeling about an object , making an opinion or making an evaluation.

Search and analytics is constituted by:

• Search : Find information necessary to gather data to reason, to judge and execute tasks.
• Business Intelligence: Getting and explore data, finding trends, correlation helping people to do better decisions (if they know how to interpret it)
• Mining: Extract data and display it process oriented for business process analysis and  improvement.

3. Technology is important but it’s not enough

The problem of focusing on the technology that makes social business happen is it creates a tunnel vision of making it a reality because technology alone does not provide the foundation of creating a full integrated into the organization value chain that includes all the stakeholders.

For example an airline can have a twitter account to broadcast announcements about events like strikes that do not allow the flights to operate properly and that is a plus, but it that twitter account it’s not able to catch important feedback about traveling issues and annoyances of the passengers and integrate that feedback into customer support what is the value of using twitter as a communication tool? By the way I will come back to this issue when I have time to seat and write about it, how UPS is mastering complain handling using social technologies. “Scooping” around it I will like to tell you that in the US, UPS is taking seriously how complains are handled unlike in Portugal where they don’t even let you make it until the next day I received a phone call regarding a complain I sent to the headquarters (strange, I thought I did a complain to the local office!). As you can see even inside of enterprises there is no common foundation what is a social business and most of the times managers are worried in choosing a proper tool to say they use it, is there, and it’s available but it’s not integrated on the value chain (this is a challenge to Enterprise Architects).

BPM – a year in review – 2012

 

As usual, here is a retrospective of this year’s activity around BPM. The choice of the themes is mine and the order its presented is random, and do not mean any raking scheme.

Enterprise Architecture: for me it was clear that this was the year where this particular domain expertise got lost. Enterprise architecture suffers from two pains. The first is the concept division between the American School and the European School. The American divide what is business architecture and IT architecture, while the Europeans do not. Envisioning an enterprise system without seeing the whole is an. The second is enterprise architecture relies for a year in static, cumbersome, time-consuming methods to “draw” the architecture and this is not a problem of the framework used. Unfortunately, EA frameworks are not adapting to the needs of the enterprises that need to shift gears quicker. This year I did not have any answers from distinguished enterprise architects how to fix this. Unless there is someone that invents “agile EA”, looks like companies will deal with some outdated skeletons in the enterprise content systems.

Social: One of the hottest themes. But the discussion that is being taken is not the most important. I mean there is lot of hype around building a social practice, use the right tools to collaborate, the bring your own device (actually this is making a huge breach in enterprise architecture) engaging with the customers, etc. But the most important aspects are being forgotten: understand how people are engaged and how it should relate. In other words look to the social dimension of a process. This year, many books about social business were published. I put my hand on two from prominent experts and the ease it took to read the books, seems this area is being treated superficially (probably because is new and there is a need to understand the basics). I measure a domain maturity for the difficulty it is to understand (the more difficult is to jump into the concepts, the more mature it is). Hence, is critical to understand how social patterns look alike (the aesthetics). Does your company have lions or lemurs? Are they working together in a way that is aligned with the knowledge type required to play the process or are you creating variability when you need standardization or vice versa? In other words, how do you put people evolving and gaining new competences to handle the exponential complexity we are facing? How do you put people learning with the others?

It is a commonplace that the world is getting more complex and that organizations are struggling to cope with it with their operations. This is difficult, because complexity is hard to describe. The language of networks patterns can bring visibility how complexity can be handled properly. A good reflexion can be found <here> .

Intelligence. This category includes many scattered sub categories all of them important. They are: big data, mining and prediction.

Before jumping into each knowledge domain, it’s important to make a reflection about why humans are so fascinated with it. We like to predict events but we miserably fail to do it. We like to be sure we do not get wrong in our assumptions. But due changing conditions that we rely to make our wizardry it’s getting more difficult to do it. Sometimes we do not realize that the facts we use to predict changed when the event occurs. That happens because the world is a complex system and there is no linearity in how each variable is related. Thus, we are looking for new predictions models and technology that can help us with one of the major human limitations: being capable to be correct about the future.

Technology can help us, broadly speaking, to make better decisions, but being able to “be sure” is a step that probably is still too far to be a reality. Why? Because intelligent systems do not have the capacity to learn. In a previous experience with IBM’s Watson super computer when asked about what is the capital of North Korea it replied “this country does not have diplomatic relationship with the USA”. The machine was not able to find other way of search and get an answer (actually it did not realize it was wrong). In addition, because machines suffer from what is called cognitive illusion (to understand better the concept read this article how out of context, a system – it can be a human as system we are – makes the wrong decisions).

Talking about predictions, this could take us to a long discussion dedicated only to the subject, nevertheless, strictly speaking within the human dimension, it’s interesting to distinguish two types of person:

•    More P or M individual in Gordon Pask’s words;
•    More power of Ideas or power of Politics in Rick Brandon’s and Marty Seldman’s words, or;
•    More Fox or Hedgehogs in Philip Tetlock’s words.

The former are humans who like to question, evaluate options and engage with others, like to share knowledge and evolve concepts and like to learn with failure.
The last are humans that believe in formal authority, governance, centrality, control, and their ideas cannot be questioned, are somewhat like dogmas.

Foxes, power of Ideas or P Individuals, like o spend time to construct models to understand reality, than unfortunately changes and the models are useless or return wrong answers.
Hedgehogs, politics and M individuals like to blame the errors due to bad luck. This type of human predicts what is called under “smelling felling” approach.

Coping only with this human type variability, should make us wonder why is so difficult to predict.

Talking a about big data, the challenge is real and is here, and without a question is important to get important information about organizations, operations, but 99,99% is noise. In other words, is not relevant. The challenge for big data is to process photos, video, documents where there are data chunks that can be important to understand how good you perform, or to execute sentiment analysis for example.

Scepticism is around process mining. People do not like to believe that it is possible to discover process models and analyse a process from different points of views because they tend to think that there is no data for that. Also, because we know that when exceptions occur, process participants jump off the systems and start collaborating using e-mail. Fortunately, process mining is much more powerful and quick to analyse a process and it has out of the box a huge palette of techniques even in the case where the is no event log.

Self-organization: I will dedicate in the future a post only to this matter, but for know, I sense a shift in the way that companies are embracing change projects. Somehow we were used to implement governance models, to help others to make the change, to design and implement business processes, in other words to sell professional services (from the provider point of view). One of the shifts I talked about at the BPM conference in London this year, the social factor, as I put it: “On the social factor, [...] we are facing a displacement of “assembly line” people [...] will have to adapt and start pushing their capabilities to new boundaries. This shift has also a profound implication on the type of people companies are sourcing in the labour market. As leading companies expand and operations are outsourced or transferred to low wages economies, the future workers profile will be aimed at highly skilled persons capable of embracing business dynamics”.

People will also question the existing order, like the pianist Glenn Gould, that opposed the way Bach composed. He said that Bach made some errors and some notes should be changed [1].

The social factor is changing the profile of the people that work at the companies. It’s time to teach these different type of people how to get most of the systems and how to design business processes, because they do not need you anymore, as a provider, as a mentor, as a manager, to do their job, them they will auto organize to deliver it internally. Not only the type of technology will change dramatically and will put people controlling directly process composition, letting IT embedding business logic and system interoperability, as also governance models as we know it, tend to disappear our will be less formal, it will define at maximum the rules of the game people must comply.

Self-organization must not be confused with anarchy, but it will a key human component as finally organizations are seen like organisms, living things that must fight for survival like any other animal. It must adapt or die. Cybernetic management will emerge.

Interested in 2011 list? Click <here>.

[1] References: Booklet – Bach: The Goldberg Variations.

BPM Blogs worth reading 2012

As usual, this is my 2012 list of BPM blogs I think work reading.

• Adam Dean: use your BPM illusion. Adam is a true story teller.
• Blogging internet of things – It’s all about … internet of things.
• Bp-3: Scott Francis’s blog brings the most balanced views.
• BPM redux – Theo Priestley’s posts are like Salvador Dali’s paintings.
• BPM for real – this is a true BPM supermarket.
• Bouncing thoughts – Jaisundar’s writes about BPM.
• Column 2: For me the best analyst blog. Great insights from BPMS systems and event coverage brought by Sandy Kemsley.
• Flux Capacitor – The place to look for process mining, from Fluxicon.
• Ground-Floor BPM – E. Scott Menter deconstructs the myths of BPM and BPMS.
• Improving Enterprise BPMS – A great blog to look for frameworks by Alexander Samarin.
• Interactive Value Creation – Esko Kilpi provides amazing insights about complexity and new working patterns.
• Jim Sinur: Some intelligent thoughts about BPM future trends.
• On collaborative planning: Keith Sewson brings insights around social collaboration.
• On Web Strategy – Dion Hinchcliffe writes about social platforms and social business.
• Paul Mathiesen’s – Paul Mathiesen writes about social business.
• Product Four – Deb Lavoy writes about enterprise 2.0, social and collaboration.
• Social Enterprise – Emanuele Quintarelli writes about social software and collaboration.
• Sonnez en can d’absence – Adaptation, complexity, chaos, brought to you from Thierry de Baillon.
• Team cognition – Exploring new ways of learning.
• The Smart Work Company – Anne Marie’s writes about the future of work, business processes and social collaboration.
• Tetradian – Tom Grave´s writes about enterprise architecture.
• Welcome to the real It world: Max Pucher writes about what is going to be a reality in the next 5 years (but it was not yet invented).

If you are interested in 2011 list click here. Till next year!

Process Mining must embrace complex adaptive systems

On April this year I wrote a post about one of the challenges that Process Mining is not addressing properly: Big data. In the last process mining task force meeting, resulted that one the biggest concerns was about the effort of making XES a “de facto” standard in order event logs used in process mining could be system interoperable.

Despite the fact is important to assure that data can be exchanged across multiple systems and they can be interpreted the same manner (contrary what happens with bpmn diagrams), I tend to think that process mining is loosing ground regarding the near future reality:

• Technology will be like electricity or if you prefer a commodity;
• Cybernetics principles will emerge (finally) because society and technology is backing humans able to observe, sense, act, learn and adapt. Once organizations are made from humans, and despite humans belong to some kind of organizational unit, they are not anymore animals on a tree branch and are part of social networks that constitute the enterprise where everything happens.
• Technology no longer shapes the way human perform. People do it. Change and adaptation encompasses clearly to think and find new business models. To think about innovation. If companies do not have humans capable to find access, understand and process information, how can companies evolve and survive?

Again what is the challenge of process mining?

Organizations live in a world where interdependence, self-organization and emergence are factors for agility, adaptability and flexibility plunged into networks. Software-based information systems go into a service oriented architecture direction and the same goes to Infrastructures where services are become structures available in networks. inspired into empirical studies of networked systems such as Internet, social networks, and biological networks, researchers have in recent years developed a variety of techniques and models to help us structurally understand or predict the behavior of these systems. Those findings are characterized by been supported on the “complex networks” concepts [1].

Last week I stumbled into a great find based on a conversation about creating an Adaptive Enterprise Architecture framework to support business processes  that Process Sphere is sponsoring, in order to apply in real world implementations. Universidade do Minho is leading research in the field of understanding existing information systems can be characterized adopting the complex adaptive systems principles.

The approach is quite obvious (and at the same time so simple). Is about a black box (supplied by Palo Alto networks) connected to the enterprise network (the pipes where information flow, where today everything flows) and literally sucks all the information from the pipe to be analyzed and interpreted.  With this approach its possible to understand Who interacts an with Whom interacts, What information is accessed and processed, What and When, interaction occurs, What are the information services requested and (in my point of view) particularly important evaluating how information systems can cope with social iteration and can keep the pace of adaptability inside of organizations (something I’m keen regarding other project about requirements engineering using process mining).

The innovation of the approach is based into:

• Analysis is carried based on complex network principles;
• Contrary of one of process mining principles, that the staring point is to select data to make the analysis in order to prevent “data collection paranoia”, this project collects and analyses ALL the available data and digs into the networks that were formed (each network have a different analysis dimension depending on the field of analysis). Layered.

On one hand the method approach to interpret data it’s arguable among the scientific community that the one here presented is inferior of others used by other researchers that develop process mining methods available in tools (researchers tend to think they are above God), thus I’m not going to involve in that kind of discussion (by the way this one comes from physics), on the other hand, what I like most is the design approach. Putting a box so suck all the data to be explored (into the company veins) what could be called inline real time process mining to deal with complexity and adaptability.

References: [1] Modeling Organizational Information System Architecture Using “Complex Networks” Concepts, José L.R. Sousa, Ricardo J. Machado, J.F.F. Mendes, 2012 Eighth International Conference on the Quality of Information and Communications Technology