S03E06 Book Review: Digital Transformation Success by Michael Schank

A little while ago I had the pleasure of meeting with Michael Schank , who’s a very seasoned transformation specialist with an impressive professional career. We connected because of the fact that the both of us are very passionate about business process management and the enormous unlocked potential this management philosophy contains. Michael had recently published a book that evolves around a framework he developed himself called the ‘Process Inventory Framework’. After reading this book, I would like to provide you with a review, including my own thoughts of course.?

Michael divides the book in 3 major parts: part I deals with the Foundation for success, part II describes applying the process inventory to transform the way of working and finally part III explains how you can implement the Process Inventory Framework. Now, I’m not going to discuss every concept in this book, because

(1) there are simply too many interesting concepts in this book and

(2) you should buy the book if you really want to know.?

Let’s start with an overview of part I: the foundation for success. It is in this part where Michael takes you on a journey along a number of different perspectives that you can take on how to describe / document an organisation. Think about things like an organisation ontology, the process inventory framework and a process ownership model. The beauty of this book is that Michael effortlessly lines up all of these fundamental views on an organisation and this gives the reader a better helicopter view which is vital to any business process management professional.?I do feel compelled to point out one little oversight in part I. At a certain moment Michael states that the first commercial application of process mining was launched in 2011, where in fact this was 2001 (by IDS Sheer), but that is just nitpicking to be honest.

In the second part of the book (part II) Michael dives deeper into the various ways of how his Process Inventory Framework supports transformational activities within an organisation. The very interesting link that is being laid out in this part of the book is between the operational excellence side of a company (very often portrayed via concepts such as Lean, Six Sigma, the Toyota way and others) and the process excellence or process management side of the company. Next, he dives into the change process, which is a very critical element of any transformation initiative. Interestingly, the various topics that are covered span a very wide range of best practices, concepts and real life examples around mastering transformative change in large organisations. One of the sub-topics that Michael touches is the role of Enterprise Architecture in relation to digital transformation success and this is of course a topic you can write a whole book about, or better yet, an entire library.?

This is something that we (meaning Dr. Russell Gomersall and myself) might want to talk to Michael about in an episode of our BPM360Podcast .

In Part III (the implementation side of the Process Inventory Framework) Michael puts the rubber to the road and takes you on a journey through various elements that play critical roles in the ensuring success of your digital transformation. Think about a Process Center of Excellence (something I’ve talked about frequently, even in my own podcast), an operating model for the process inventory and much more.?

In short, if you are active in the transformation or process management space, then this book provides a wealth of valuable and practical information on how many of the individual elements that make up an organisation are connected and how they can be managed and governed.

Well recommended, I would say...