This Blog May Change Your Life
During a recent car journey my wife posed me the following question
- ‘If you were to go back in time and give yourself one piece of advice, what would it be?’
It’s a great question - (especially after passing on future lottery numbers and racing tips had been out ruled), what personal decisions would you change, and more interestingly, what would then be the ripple effect on the rest of your life?
In my own instance it leads to one of those time-travel mind-twisters. Let me explain; I had a decision at college to either do a post-graduate degree, or take a job at a research institute. I chose the latter, and shortly afterwards met and developed a firm friendship with one of my new colleagues. Many years afterwards during a night out he introduced me to a fantastic lady, who turned out to be my wife. If I’d taken a different path, then I probably wouldn’t have met my wife, then she couldn’t have asked the question, and this blog entry would not exist.
How does all this relate to BPM and Process? I was in a client meeting last week, and one of the areas under discussion was the ability to walkthrough a process map, and visually see different paths being executed. This is a powerful technique used to engage with the client at an early stage, and explore the different execution paths and conditions and see how changes in the data can cause additional tasks to be invoked.
Singularity also provides an additional component - the Process Simulator. This lets the client model ‘what if’ scenarios, such as sudden load on the process, or a number of process workers reporting in sick. By executing these scenarios against the benchmark process the client can get an understanding of how the process will react under certain conditions. This is also how we can show process improvement, by executing the new process against the current process and comparing the results. This works especially well where processes are being iterated within an overall improvement program.
Time travel is inexorably linked to the fundamentals of physics, and even then some of the smartest guys ever to contribute to our understanding of the nature of matter still disagreed on key aspects. Einstein never really accepted the new quantum mechanical explanation of matter, with the inherent uncertainty it brought. ‘God‘, he is often quoted as saying ‘does not play dice with the universe’. When Heisenberg published his uncertainty principle he showed that it’s impossible to know the speed and position of a particle at the same time. Effectively the very act of observing an event means you affect the outcome. You can never know the exact state of the present, so it’s impossible to predict the future.
About the author: Manus Savage is the Partner Manager at Singularity, a leading BPM vendor (www.singularity.co.uk).
Tags: BPM, Business-Process, Process-Improvement, Workflow