Patterns in collaboration

Light is waves and particles. Work is process and collaboration.

Until recently, the main focus of businesses was process. Efficient process execution, quality processes, process re-engineering, process management systems. Even BPR followed a process.

With the accelerating adoption of collaboration tools, like wikis, there are effective ways for groups to break out of processes when required. We are also starting to see process tools offer free-form collaboration for exception management (where the process is not defined).

Even defined processes evolve - as requirements or regulation change, as better ways are discovered or as technology opens up new opportunities. From process ABCD to AXD to AZ over a number of process generations. Accelerating process improvement in this way means connecting the people in the process with the end customer and stakeholders. Here, collaborative tools play an important role as a parallel tool where existing processes are evaluated and feedback is allowed to loop. Process innovation becomes a continuous process instead of (ir)regular process reviews or an approach of only fixing-it-when-it-is-broken.

Other organisations adopt collaborative platforms across the board because few or no processes are defined. (This is the case for many fast-growing small or medium size companies.) It is great for supporting innovation and they find that processes do evolve and are adhered to as conventions. Loose collaborative tools become the organisation's process and innovation platform in one.

As collaborative platforms become more powerful, they are evolving to embrace processes. Wiki software company Atlassian also sell JIRA, a project management / issue tracker software package that users are also deploying to manage business processes such as task management or CRM.

I expect to see future systems take the integration between process and collaboration further. At one end of the scale we want free-form collaboration to support our innovation efforts, at the other end we want repeatable processes to ensure consistent results and keep costs down. Emerging patterns could be discovered by the software and codified as processes. Sort of the equivalent of the infamous Microsoft Windows paper clip popping up announcing "It looks like a business process has emerged for this task. Would you like to (1) follow it, (2) edit it, (3) do it your way?"

Tags: wiki collaboration process business process process improvement exception handling innovation BPR Atlassian JIRA

Comments

[Jade Wood]

Collaboration is the future of creartion and innovation. We're creating the world's first 'open-source' or wiki-musical.

Jade
www.opensourcemusical.com