Funny how time slips away

Blog: KWKeirstead's Blog

It’s been six years since some of us starting soapboxing about ACM vs BPM.

https://kwkeirstead.wordpress.com/2010/09/18/life-beyond-corporate-silos/

I don’t see much of a change –we continue to see folks trying to shoehorn BPM into all kinds of initiatives where end-to-end “solutions” are being proposed for work that does not have a convenient a start point and pathways that dovetail into a single “objective” and we continue to see proposals to dismantle silos by transitioning to “flat organizational structures”.

. silo

Keep the silos!

Silos are nothing more than pools of specialty resources – silos can be centers of excellence, they are great for mentoring and their residents can easily come out of their silos, apply their knowledge/skills to run time initiatives and then go back to their silos.

If you think about it, there is not much difference in a digital world between a handoff of work within a silo (i.e. change of shift) and a handoff between silos.

All work involves the transformation of inputs to outputs and we have R.A.L.B. (auto-resource allocation, leveling and balancing) software that pretty much sees to it that things do not fall between the cracks so it really does not matter where knowledge/skills are parked.

Of course, hierarchical, project, matrix and “flat” organizational structures all have pluses and minuses.

Consultants who transition from BPM to ACM/BPM typically find it easy to work within less than optimum organizational structures.

Changing organizational structures is best left to change management consultants – it’s not easy to transition from one organizational structure to another without going through a corporate cultural change.

Filed under: Adaptive Case Management, Automated Resource Allocation, Business Process Management, Case Management, MANAGEMENT, Operations Management, R.A.L.B. Tagged: ACM, BPM, business process management