Harmonizing Processes to evolving Operations: The Challenge of Change

Firstly, some terminological ground has to be cleared. What is an Operation and What is a Process ??

A Process is a pre-defined, already well designed set of actions and tasks that need to be completed for the fulfillment of a Goal or a part of the Goal. A process is predictable. Then what’s an Operation ? An Operation involves much more than the process and its already defined properties. An Operation also involves all indeterminate (and/or unprecedented) aspects of a process that will include Ideation and persistent evolution of insights. In totality therefore, the ‘Operation’ always has a larger ‘diameter’. It always need to address certain conditions and challenges that were hitherto not anticipated during the design of the process.

So I think it would be justified to more realistically abstract that Processes are steeped in Operations with blurred and evolving edges. Edges which are blurred today, show up with better definition tomorrow, as the Business evolves. And this invokes Process change.?

I could write all the above in more tangible terms- say, in a CRM, No two customers are alike, Yet the same processes manage the customer interactions. And even with a single customer, every interaction launches a new orbital of opportunity- You never step into the same river twice ! - And so a CRM process is important not just how well defined it is; but also, How evolvable it is !

In BPM (Business Process Management) parlance, this would sound as:? A process should NOT ONLY be Defined, Measurable, Monitorable. It should also be Evolvable !

The BPM paradigm is definitely the center stage and ground where maximum ideation has happened historically on how dynamic in practice can IT-Enablement be for small or big enterprises. There are obviously ample pointers to the potential impact of AI here, but maybe it can be a topic for different discussion.( I invite comments from avid readers on that aspect too).?

Summarizing all the above so as to clear the potential confusion on the Process : Operation dichotomy.

Process:

• Pre-defined and well-designed set of actions and tasks.
• Aimed at fulfilling a goal or a part of the goal (of One or more Operations).
• Predictable in nature.

Operation:

• Involves more than the process and its predefined properties.
• Addresses indeterminate or unprecedented aspects of a process.
• Involves ideation and evolution of insights.
• Deals with conditions and challenges not anticipated during process design.
• Concerned with the over-all Goal, rather than the method

Process enabling: the fundamental quest of Software

So Processes are about what We are sure about or at least what We believe to be sure about: Actors, Action Steps and consequent State changes comprise of what the Process is. The world demands process predictability in all grounds of life.

All software is about enabling Processes, such that repeatable actions and thereby Processes; with the correct & logical Information creation and updates ; provide Business / Social milieu / Governance, with frameworks of activities that can accomplish objectives including Profit, Growth or more squarely, bettering Happiness indices in all walks of Life.

Process Flux arising from Operational change:

Reverting back to my initial reference to Process : Operation dispensation; It’s also not really important on which is the Super-set. There is no harm in imagining a Process as a sequence of Operations at various stages;? But In totality, the ‘Operation’ always has a larger ‘diameter’. It always needs to address certain conditions and challenges that were hitherto not anticipated during the design of the process. OR contains elements which can never be made into a Process too.?This is the most recurring consulting challenge I face in almost every Journyz implementation.

The Operations:Process dichotomy may be exemplified as a few typical Use-Cases, each of which manifest an Operation that ‘envelopes’ a Process:

• How the school bus safely, ships and drops your child to & fro from Home (Operation) : How you can track the location of your child and be alerted in case of emergencies (Process)
• -How custom pizzas are ordered and delivered (Process) : How the Pizzas are tasty for various Age-groups (Operation/ Process)
• -How all citizens have an equal fair chance to exercise franchisee on Voting day (Operation): How Electoral Polls & Systems cannot be rigged (Process)
• ,How your monies are safe in bank and you can withdraw them with a fair queuing system (Process) : How Banks can survive without folding up in times of economic turbulence (Operation)??

Therefore, from a Process Design view-point (Read Software enabling point of View), Operations always exceed the process boundary because any environment needs change, sooner or later after it is process enabled - EITHER because there have been time-dictated changes in the environment itself OR because they are not anticipated upfront OR BOTH.

The BPM Paradigm?

Traditionally, One key challenge of Software project Ideation, was about how much of the Process/Operation can be anticipated up front, with no need for sudden or frequent change management. Because, Change management in software delivery is costly for a number of reasons including vendor dependence for correcting the Deltas, need for recurrent HR orientation through repeated Training, Re-Testing of the entire system even for incremental changes, etc.?

Without digressing too much into the history of the BPM Paradigm; a quick summary could read as follows:?

From the ‘80’s and more forcefully in the ‘90’s, the Industry responded to the ‘Change Risk or Change Challenge’ by?

1. Building ‘Adaptive’ products including off-the-shelf ready -to-use ERP software or solution frameworks; where there is an inherent latitude of change resilience provided within the software; by way of quick configuration changes needing no meddling with code OR?
2. More effective RAD (Rapid application Development) systems that help to respond and deliver to Process change requirements in shorter life-cycles. The second genre of solutions can be in retrospective largely grouped under the umbrella of BPM (Business Process Management) solutions.

Essentially, BPM frameworks represent the convergence of 3 architectural layers:?

1. The RAD layer that ensures fast adaptation to changes even if coding is required and

2. The Process Layer where Processes can be extended, change-managed with new properties.?

3. The change itself needs to be anticipated with a Process monitoring layer that provides foresight that the processes are choking with respect to objective fulfillment and thereby provoking responsive correction from various stakeholders. (As Number of passengers increase in an Airport, there have to be altered processes that manage the higher traffic, with respect to number of considerations including Passenger check-ins, Security check-ins etc.)

Ideally, the change iteration cycle would first leverage the Process layer for changes in the business Process Model, and if the exact complete change (changes in access, business logic, and data connections between various processes) cannot be completely delivered by the Process layer; the more-foundational code environment is tapped for core changes in real code- a.k.a., Data structures, Algorithms and Database design

Such maturation of Enterprise software meant that successful solution consulting & delivery was all about how efficiently Processes could be envisaged, delivered, and persistently change-managed with minimal overheads and monitored for ruptures/ fulfillment.?

No-Code & Low Code : The New Genre?

The proliferation of the ubiquitous Web 2.0 around 2010, heralded disruptions in all prevailing paradigms in a manner that cannot be detailed easily. But Global economy, Post (or Parallel to) Web 2.0 has undergone a sea change characterized by:

• Many time multiplied Economic activity and opening up complete new vistas of businesses?
• Manifold expansion of the Supply chain; especially in the Services Sector
• New Marketing Pipelines through Social Media
• Eco-Systems and Communities where Information cross-flows create Opportunity sets which are fluid and dynamic
• Need for unprecedented Speed & Innovation to react to the new turbulence of Opportunities as well as Threats

In such an overwhelmingly transformed global milieu & socio-economic landscape, there is one exciting genre of? IT Solutions who drew inspiration from the long evolution of BPM and started to trod a Daring trail !

No Code & Low Code Solutions like Journyz (which is incidentally a No-Code Solution framework) emerged and established continuity with the vastly evolved Engineering strengths within BPM architecture: i.e., matured strengths like:

• Inter system connectivity for separate Systems to work successfully as Business Eco-Systems vis-a-vis Web Services which had also rapidly matured with the earth shaking Web 2.0 wave [ The new adventurers could now build niche & domain restricted No-Code products addressing a specific domain and co-exist with non-competing similar vendors who are also No-Code or Low-Code ] . Jira, the Project Management tool, is a wonderful example in this regard.
• Highly Resilient & Flexible Process Layer for fast change management -The Holy Grail promise of BPM that You could practically ‘draw’ a Process Visually and the system would render all interfaces with the envisaged data connections & work-flows [ No-Code genre products are yet to come sufficiently near to fulfilling the Holy Grail promise (even premium BPM products do not deliver perfectly on this promise); but they address this value proposition in a different manner].

SAAS based No-Code Application Builder solutions like Journyz, ship with Ready-to-Use Process Templates for CRM, Accounts Management, Product Life-Cycle Management, Domain Specific Operations Management, etc. The End-User could launch these processes to enable Operations and thereafter fine-tune and change-manage them in Self-Service Mode.

And while shipping with ready-to-use & quick-start templates, Journyz is NOT Domain/Template restricted either. The End-user with sufficient subscription rights can build an entire application ad-hoc from scratch too.???

Change Management could be as minor as adding an additional Text field or perhaps an Auto-Numbering Field to an existing record structure to meet data integrity demands as and when they arise. Or It could be a more major change like adding a more complex Task-List Object (A reusable object in the Journyz library) which can transform the process property drastically by enabling WBS (Work Break-Down Structure) within a single Task record.

• Advanced resilience for the Process Layer involving rapid re-definition of Process sequences and Inter-Process dependencies/work-flows with Rules & Conditions
• Within the Process Layer, a further sub-classified Layer for managing Access control for whole Teams & Individual Users. (An essential challenge for rapid change management, where most systems can fail, despite the perfect strengths in the aspects earlier mentioned)

No-Code Solutions : Promises & Challenges

Whether No-Code & Low-Code Solutions will drastically redefine the Time & Cost chemistries in Software Consulting is one of the hottest topics in the Industry. Will the traditional revenue models of Large Teams billing Long Hours, Days, Weeks & Months for large Enterprise solution delivery, be swamped out with sleeker & more cost-effective delivery Options?

From a closer look at emerging patterns of productization in various solution frameworks, I think We are poised in an exciting transition stage of definable paradigm change in the following fronts:

• Any Software framework will need to be Low Code (Open Source ERP frameworks like ODOO are already so; yet providing leverage for bottoms-up revision in the Internal Code architecture)
• Closed/Open Low-Code & No-Code solutions will need to consistently measure up to deliver on the same challenges that Code-Full solutions offer, Like Data Integrity, Access Control, Complex work-flows, etc.
• Both the New Genre Low-Code & No-Code solutions AND existing dominant Code-full frameworks will have to be scalable in the Cloud; so that the advantages of Inter-Operability offered by the Cloud Eco-system can be adequately leveraged.?
• Scalability will also mean ability to handle both NoSQL & SQL Data especially in the Big-Data league.
• Option for the End-User to manage User Access control & Isolation; should work Fool-Proof in No-Code or Low-Code solutions; without which the entire stack of value propositions built on the Self-Service promise will crumble down; when it has to address bigger process scopes and thereby larger Operational landscapes.
• AI Technologies may be leveraged for making the Process evolution more rapid- Processes can ‘morph themselves’ with minimal intervention of human Process monitoring.

As a Code-Less Application Builder Framework that also enables Industry ahead collaboration features to bolster better alignment of Processes to Operations & Business Goals, Journyz aspires to swim the challenging waters of all the above streams of challenges.

We look forward to leverage all the emerging exciting AI paradigms as well; to ensure that Processes & thereby Operations can evolve and respond better, to the high velocity of emerging challenges that are typical of contemporary Business.?