Hamster Wheel
I recently bought dwarf hamsters for my kids. Cute as hell and very friendly – they love nothing better than running about on your lap, up your sleeves and chirping contentedly to themselves. When they’re in the cage, and not sleeping, they spend a lot of time running in the hamster wheel. They need exercise (3 miles a night apparently) so this is goodness, but I’ve been trying to fathom why on earth a creature with a reasonably sophisticated repertoire of behaviours should take so much pleasure in so mindless an activity.
What I’ve realised through much observation is that when a hamster runs in the wheel it’s not for the joy of exercising its muscles but because its tiny brain is telling it that when it does this it is actually travelling somewhere new. If you watch you’ll see that the most determined wheelers run for a short period, jump off and quickly explore and then get back on again, and they will do this over and over and over again. They think they are visiting new places, and must be very disappointed to discover that just like with human travel, everywhere appears to be exactly the same. In their case of course, instead of McDonalds and Starbucks they find a totally familiar food dish and water bottle.
And so it is with much human activity – we run in our own hamster wheels for several hours a day, and when we got off we find that we’re in exactly the same place as we were before. The sense of movement or progress was illusory, we have not moved on and the in-box is still full, the same problems are still there. Hamsters, like humans, can suffer stress. Those with particularly dull environments can become obsessed with the wheel and run themselves to exhaustion.
If I can worry about hamsters, then how much more should I worry about the people around me, about the working environment that I create and the work experience my children will have. We can’t get away from the need to work but the good thing though is that in the case of non-manual work, we can eliminate much of the tedium, the dull mechanical and repetitive tasks requiring no creativity, human interaction or thought.
BPMS has moved on from automation of simple processes and focus is now on giving structure and support to the huge variety of complex activities known as Case Management – activities which involve “practice” and not just “process”. The stress in this kind of environment can come from trying to keep track of many threads and orchestrate complex parallel tasks – and again BPMS can take the strain, keep things under control and give the security of knowing that the thread can’t be lost. In a BPMS supported case management world, people spend most of their time taking in information, negotiating and discussing, making judgements and applying the skills and expertise they have developed. I’ve worked on many technologies in my life but rarely have I found myself working in an area which touches directly on so many people’s daily lives and has the power to make them more effective, less bored, less reactive and less stressed.
And now if you’ll excuse me, my own hamster wheel is calling.
About the Author: Paul Moorhead is the Product Manager at Singularity.
Author : Paul O’Neill
Tags: BPM, BPMS, business-process-management, Case-Management, Process
March 31st, 2009 at 11:26 am
I can understand the need to make the lives (I think you mean jobs) more effective, less bored, less reactive and less stressed but every business has compliance and regulatory needs, how does case management cater to these mandatory control?
April 2nd, 2009 at 4:29 am
Hi Neeli,
Thanks for the great question. There are few things more stressful than compliance and obviously BPMS can remove a great deal of the worry from ensuring appropriate approvals, oversight, sampling, records keeping, business policy and audit trails.
Compliance and regulatory needs are usually pretty rigid and typically much more “process” than “practice” but Case Management can play an important part – particularly when handling exceptions from the normal compliance processes. Freedom of Information requests, Legal Discovery, Sarbannes Oxley and other regulatory requirements can all require human intervention and judgement and a choice of possible paths to progress the case. Case Management deals with this variability within an otherwise well defined process, keeps all parties on track and honest and gets you from the “I hope I’m doing this right and haven’t forgotten anything” to a “I know I’m doing this right” world.
What Singularity offers is case-oriented BPM, that simultaneously automates the rigid, mandatory requirements common to compliance, while allowing the flexibility necessary for handling case-type elements that are not rigidly pre-defined. We could illustrate this by the customer on-boarding process for a bank. Anti-money laundering legislation requires a variety of checks, the overall process has a target duration and defined artefacts to be created but depending on, among other things, the type of trading the applicant wishes to carry out, their country of residence, and the credentials offered, very different series of checks (in series or parallel) may be judged necessary.
Singularity’s Case Management support in our BPM Suite enables us to define the beginning and end of the process and set hard milestones while allowing for the required flexibility in execution – we don’t specify how you get there in advance, just that you have to get there by a specified date or within a specified budget etc. These execution decisions should generally be at the discretion of the human case workers. So you need sufficient case or process support to ensure a minimum level of delivery quality, without compromising the freedom to satisfy the customer’s needs or respond to a changing situation. With quality control or compliance – you want to ensure that this is inherent in the operating processes, so that stuff cannot go out of band.
Therefore case-oriented BPM delivers the best of both worlds – and does it in a more satisfying way for all parties – i.e. it gives the right support (and remove the drudgery and cost from routine tasks that can be automated), but doesn’t constrain excellence and innovation.
In a sense I think we’re moving from a world where Case Management is seen as the special case (no pun intended) to a world where it’s the linear determinate processes that are the exception. It’s a bit like when chaos theory and complexity theory first arose and were seen as something exotic, but we now appreciate that in fact the vast majority of real world systems are complex and it is the simple systems that are the special cases (pun intended this time).
Paul
April 7th, 2009 at 10:51 am
Paul,
. Case Management as I see provides a level of 2.0 in terms of empowerment to the knowledge workers to collaborate with partners, customers, colleagues. Not sure if Andrew McAfee agrees to this though.
Thanks for the detailed explanation. My interests are primarily into 2.0 ish technologies which i am trying to track here, trying being the operative word