I'm supposed to be preparing a one hour lecture for some college new-hires on: "Basic and Advanced BPM Concepts"... but yet I blog instead ;-)
For those of you who know me well, you'll probably think that my biggest concern is that I only have an hour. I tend to go on and on (and on) about topics that I am passionate about, leading a former co-worker to coin the term "johntification" in my honor.
Explaining BPM is what I do - focussing pretty much on what's now being called BPM-tech more than BPM-bus. When I first encountered BPM I felt like I had found the missing link... a paradigm and technology that closed the gaps between what I knew how to do and what my business colleagues really needed.
I was blown-away by BPM because I had experienced the pain of the problems that BPM addresses. This stuff fixed something that I knew needed fixing.
My worry about introducing BPM to college new-hires is that they probably haven't experienced "Process Pains"... at least not from the perspective of one who writes or maintains software, or from the perspective of someone who tries to get the "right" software written.
When I describe the problems that BPM tackles they may say "So what?". They may scoff at the magnitude of the problems - and they probably assume that the solutions that BPM provides have always been around.
With my standard BPM audience I'm fairly assured that heads will begin to nod in recognition of shared pain in thirty seconds or less...
Most in my audience have experienced meetings where a dozen people had to be present to figure out how that incoming *application* finally ended up as an outgoing *disbursement* (*substitute the inputs and outputs of your own business).
Most in my audience have also experienced "Office Heroes" - those harried individual who on a daily basis keep a company running through shear force of will. Whenever anything falls through the cracks... Whenever anything gets lost or derailed... Whenever any critical deadline is in danger of being missed... Office Heroes jump in and save the day. If a truck hits an Office Hero your business will really have to scramble to recover.
BPM helps business people understand how their company really runs, and it helps reduce their company's reliance on Office Heroes. BPM helps IT people provide tools that make it easier to run the company, easing the burden of the Office Heroes.
My college new-hire audience will certainly understand what I tell them about BPM - but will they relate? Can I make BPM relevent to their own experiences, or will I just sound like an old guy droning on about the old days: "When I was your age, computers only had 4K of memory....."
These "kids" are smart... they just haven't had as much experience. Instead of relying on shared experience to grok BPM I'll have to find another approach... When (or if) I figure it out I'll let you know.
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
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3 comments:
Hi, John!
Having spent the last six months hanging around with Masters students who are 20+ years younger than I am, I can tell you, your new hires will not be able to relate. And really, how could they? As you say, the "relating" part is built on experience they don't have yet. Yes, you will sound like an old guy droning on, just accept that part. You should have heard me trying to explain overlays to someone recently!
These "kids" in my program are smart, too, they're freakin' brilliant. But as soon as you move from theory into reality, they collapse into a steaming pile of idealism. The thing they have going for them is they realize it. One told me just the other day, after I had recounted one of my war stories from "the real world," that he understood what I was saying but knew it would be 10 years before he really got it. I just liked that he got that it was something to get.
Just convince them that there's something there to get. You don't need to convert them today, just open their eyes. Maybe you can tell some war stories of the kinds of problems that happen when BPM isn't there to solve them for you. Your passion is what will make them pay attention even if they don't really get it.
-king
Depending on where they went to school, talk to them about course registration. At some schools this is still manual, with people standing in line to get into classes. or it may be automated, but badly so (back in the dark ages when i was in college, it was on a mainframe but you were only allowed to register between 8 and 10pm and 6am and 9am because those were the "mainframe windows" the course registration program was allowed!! seemed silly when we could have run the whole thing on a small pc or mac.
And if it isn't the course registration itself - perhaps the procedures around getting course advice from counselors or students, or the add/change/drop process... and how about applying for financial aid :)
In my experience, educational institutions have a lot of under-invested processes that are handled by rote or manually - its a good place to start, because it is one set of processes that they'll have all too much experience with.
Scott
I was going to tell the college-hires my war stories from the Student Loan industry - I figured they'd relate to the process of applying for Student Loans... But then I realized they'd recoil in horror when they realized we'd improved the process of tracking them down to make them pay the money back :-)
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