I met with Dr. Leon Kappelman a couple of weeks ago at Starbucks where we enjoyed a wonderful conversation over non-coffees. Dr. Kappelman is the chair for SIMEAWG (Society for Information Management’s Enterprise Architecture Working Group) and as such is doing some very interesting and good work on the issues facing Enterprise Architecture (EA).

His article, “Bridging the Chasm,” states the vision of EA as being the bridging of the gap between strategy and implementation.

As Enterprise Architecture is to Dr. Kappelman, so Workforce Automation is to me. In our discussion, we realized that our two areas of expertise meshed beautifully - Workforce Automation is the method by which Enterprise Architecture may achieve its goals.

Think about that phrase above defining the vision of EA:  “...bridging of the gap between strategy and implementation.”

In other words, the strategists come up with a direction to take the company, now the workforce has to implement it. But between those two easily-said steps may lay uncontrolled costs, huge delays, misinterpretation and conversion risk. And ever more often these days, the strategists are in a position of having to change direction again even before the last edict has been fully implemented.

Prior to Workforce Automation, we have always been up against a natural and lengthy process – that of the requirement to evolve an operative paradigm in order to transfer the knowledge of how the strategists and visionaries saw to do a thing into the heads of the larger workforce that would actually perform the tasks (I’m using “operative paradigm” here to mean a cultural view of how to do a thing (process) as opposed to the broader Khunian paradigm world view). 

New methods being taught to the workers must compete with the current operative paradigm – often creating a friction that leads to misinterpretation and turbulence. The instruction set for a new methodology must await the evolution of a new operative paradigm to reduce resistance and increase efficacy. And because paradigms are contextual (low in specific detail) in nature, there is still a limit to the organizational benefits a newly evolving operative paradigm will bring about. This is why, even over many generations of learning, operations are still “messy” and not actively formulative.

With this understanding, I feel we arrive at a reason for actual urgency in EA. Since the law of accelerating returns is driving increased rates of change throughout human society, we can see a time coming (or are we already upon it?) where the increasing rate of industrial/technological change is driving a needed similar increase in the iterative evolutions of operational methodologies. To the point where the time between any two subsequent methodologies, the latter being a necessary evolution of the first, does not leave time for a corresponding operative paradigm to evolve. As a result, we must find a replacement for what operational paradigms provide and ideally a replacement that is not contextual but explicit. Such a replacement must be able to take any strategic change of operations and immediately confer it to the workforce effectively without waiting for an operational paradigm to evolve.

We want to remove the timelines, low granularity and frictional effects of the operative paradigm from the equation. The trick to replacing the need for an operational paradigm is to remove the need to transfer knowledge of process from the strategists to the workers. Do so and we remove the source of friction between the implementation of new strategy and any current operative paradigms (we also remove the need for an operative paradigm altogether). 

Workforce Automation is the implementation of process without the requirement of the worker’s knowledge of the process. The heavy lifting of EA will be the creation of a Workforce Automation methodology (including interpretive modules) that transfers policy directly from the strategic leaders of an organization to the workers on demand and without distortion (the negative effects of current operative paradigms). But Workforce Automation without the interpretive modules can be implemented today by means of various BPM systems as long as those systems support the following:

• ability to render workflow (including instance-explicit instructions and automated hand-off of instructions (John’s done his piece so now Sally gets her piece of work))
• flexible escalation subsystem
• full audit trails with contextual access
• evolutionary redesign of processes
• multiple versions of the same process running concurrently
• instance-based process control (ie, allowing a process to be modified for specific instances of events)
• rate-based process control (process changes its behavior based upon frequency of running)
• process flow transfer (eg, a process running against one object can kick off another process against a different object)
• event accumulation triggers (ie, a process is set to trigger on the xth occurrence of an event (either explicitly or on average))

Implementing Workforce Automation using a BMPS with at least these characteristics can strengthen EA, reduce overall risk and support shorter subsequent change cycles that cost far less to implement and are more accurately interpreted.

In the meantime, let’s all stay tuned as Dr. Kappelman’s and the SIMEAWG’s work progresses.

The QBOS Tradespace platform is an innovative Workforce Automation system. QSortium members have the ability to implement Workforce Automation for their clients directly into the very applications they simultaneously build for their clients.

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