From the point at which get up in the morning until we go to sleep at night, as sentient beings we are constantly thinking and making decisions.

Thinking is not so much an end in its own right (unless you’re a philosopher) it allows us to process the available information in order to make a decision and plot a course of action.

Decisions occur at many levels for example what to wear, what to eat, what to buy, how to spend our time and so on. In work, (particularly in the Western world) as we have moved away from manufacturing towards office-based or service based jobs, in which decision-making has become evermore important.

In an increasingly sophisticated society, decision-making has come under increased scrutiny and is open to be challenged at multiple points in time.

As organisations, we want our staff to make decisions
• as quickly as possible
• as cheaply as possible
• taking all relevant information into account
• in accordance with policies and procedures
• and in a manner which can be audited should the need arise to defend it occur

One only has to watch the tv news to see high profile cases appearing in court, following poor or untimely decisions which have resulted in negative outcomes for one or other side.

Systems which support effective decision-making, and which support consistent outcomes irrespective of who was assigned to make a decision, have a significant role to play in modern organisations.

In Davenport’s “Thinking for a Living” seminal work, perhaps we ought not to label it as thinking rather as “Decision-making for a living”.

We are all decision-makers to a greater or lesser extent, and some are tasked to make decisions on a routine basis which affect individuals and society as a whole. Therefore surely it is worthwhile equipping our staff with technology which supports the decision-making activities according to the criteria set out above.

If you don’t agree with this, consider the decisions that you or your staff make on a routine basis, and the consequences of what has happened with some of those decisions when they have been less than ideal. Finally consider the impact on individuals who have been affected by such decision-making.

The public sector exhibits many examples of organisations whose staff routinely make decisions that affect citizens and society as a whole, surely we want those decisions to be the best they possibly can be.

Often when you strike up a conversation with someone who you haven’t seen for a while, comments such as “I can’t believe how quickly time has flown” or “it just seems like yesterday since…” are often quite common.

Everyone comments how busy we all are, and how many things we all have to do or how much juggling of spinning plates we do.

It’s the same in our work lives there are many threads of activity running in parallel all seeking to command attention. Some tasks fare better than others, with some to-do items languishing at the bottom of the list on a semi-permanent basis.

Time is a precious commodity both in terms of time spent and elapsed time.

For organisations, time is a critical factor in many ways dependent on the nature of that business. There are few that I can think of, if any, where time is not relevant.

In many organisations that I visit for the first time, I find that they have evolved spreadsheet-based tracking systems in order to manage their performance against time. The human effort to keep such tracking systems current and accurate is not insignificant, equally it provides no support for actually getting the job done on time. Other organisations may lack tracking capability and wonder why complaints arise due to untimely actions on their part. Organisations which are slow to respond then face unnecessary demand to respond to chaser calls and letters (this is “failure demand” in “systems thinking” terms or non-value adding time in activity based costing terms).

The most agile organisations have a keen eye on time, act in a timely manner, avoiding unnecessary work and are admired for providing timely service.

In the workflow and BPM domain, time is a key facet of the technology. The Singularity Process Platform provides extremely comprehensive facilities to support organisations in keeping on top of time, whether this is through defining the timescales over which processes and tasks execute, or for tracking the amount of time spent on work (as part of work performance) or finally in terms of effective escalation management. Finally the ability to have an accurate chronology of how you have dealt with something could well be a last line-of-defence when challenged on this front.

Without these facilities at your disposal, your organisation risks being at the beck and call of time, rather than it being yours to manage for the benefit of your organisation and customers.

Perhaps its TIME to look at how your organisation is performing on this front in order to improve how you are doing.

Over the past 18 months or so, we have collectively witnessed economic turmoil which few expected. Had we asked organisations at that stage what their plans are for the next couple of years, undoubtedly organisations would have been planning for growth. This just shows how fickle fate is, no one truly knows what lies ahead, and what challenges we shall meet.

In the information technology world, we have long used a methodology called waterfall, where each stage progressively builds on the previous stage, founded on an initial set of requirements which were relevant at the very outset. Organisations embarking on a waterfall project usually have to guess the current and future requirements at the beginning of the project as the founding stone on which the rest of the project is to be built.

When the world is in such a state of financial flux, information technology projects risk being seriously out of line with business reality given the typical timescale over which a waterfall project might execute. Requirements change, businesses evolves, new challenges arise, business models crash and burn - hence a linear progression of ICT projects from start to finish based on an out of date business vision represents a compromised methodology in which to support your business.

At times I have also found a disconnect between the effort associated with individual project requirements and the value that they have for the business. Embellishments are added to cater for some far off scenario which may or may not arise.

Information technology is not a special discipline, somehow different from every other function in business - it is there to support the business as a whole, and in a timescale which is valuable to the business.

This is why agile-based methodologies are becoming increasingly popular, because
• the timescale is the critical factor - taking place in a timeline that is relevant for the organisation
• functionality is prioritised according to business value and cost
• it constantly engages the business to ensure that real needs are being satisfied on an ongoing basis
• evolving requirements are welcomed rather than punished
• it reflects the evolving nature of business, and the fluid world in which we live

Singularity has fully embraced agile delivery both internally and on behalf of our customers. We have also bolstered the methodology with other business-relevant techniques which support the fact that ICT is a means to an end, not an end in its own right. It also ensures
• that a project is worth initiating in terms of return on investment before progressing unduly
• the voices of relevant stakeholders are heard at the outset, i.e. that the “Eureka moment” occurs at the start of the project rather than the end
• that executive sponsorship is in place from the start, demonstrating that this is worth doing
• business priorities are reflected in ongoing plans for project delivery
• things happen in timescales that are relevant to your business today, rather than being irrelevant at some distant point in the future

If your organisation is less than happy with ICT delivery, and hasn’t looked at agile before, perhaps it’s worth a look. After all, who wouldn’t want to be agile?

Of late in the BPM space, the topic of “Case Management” has been growing both in terms of coverage and interest, and a number of IT companies have rapidly being trying to “re-position” themselves into this area, but more by obfuscation rather than by delivering the capabilities that are required to meet this very real challenge.

I have had an interest in this area for a number of years now, based on the opportunity to work with real clients on the ground. Singularity based on ongoing feedback from such customers and real engagements has evolved our product over several years to meet this challenge.

A number of suppliers have tried to make out that case management is really just dealing with ad hoc processes. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you could picture that every case management oriented organisation began each day awaiting the chaos of entirely ad hoc processes, the ensuing results just don’t bear think about.

If case management was just ad-hoc routing of content around an organisation – then Microsoft’s Exchange and Sharepoint products would dominate this market – clearly that’s just not so!

Some key characteristics of case management are, in my opinion, as follows:-

• Specific paths within the case are very well-defined, and can be ascertained in advance, they certainly aren’t ad hoc
• the need to execute those different paths is based on external and/or internal events and decisions. So the case needs to be able to respond to an evolving picture over time
• there are often interdependencies between the different optional paths (or fragments) within the case, e.g. an event in one path may pause or terminate another parallel path. Several paths may block and wait until another parallel stage continues - this is typical of the case “pattern”
• equally these fragments may be executing entirely independently of one another, perhaps dealing with different stakeholders involved in the case

Some products may claim to support this capability, and can put up a good argument that this is so.

The acid test can be determined by asking how the product supports parallel yet interdependent processes in a single case instance, with dynamically shared and also private data, and complex synchronisation features between independent threads.

If you see overly complicated process maps with many loop backs, which are constantly monitoring for events in the other paths in the case, then look out, problems lie ahead for you.

If suppliers tell you that you only need to be able to route an electronic case folder containing documents etc on an ad hoc basis between participants, then in my opinion this is really no more than traditional workflow and is insufficient for dealing with case management scenarios.

I realise that this can be somewhat subtle for organisations who are moving into this area for the first time, however there is a very useful white paper from Singularity which explains this in much more detail. It is an excellent place to start your case management journey.