People and processes - Part I

The thing that makes knowledge-based organizations tick is people and processes. Some organizations seem to operate like the old “Bornholmer” clock – manual winding required, not quite accurate, looking a bit antiquated but still ticking away in its own quiet pace.

Others seem to be top-tuned like a sophisticated pulse watch and capable of adjusting and reflecting the exact performance at any given time. This kind of organization knows its present state and what to do to get even better – the people and the processes feel he heartbeat and optimizes continuously.

Surely it is interesting to understand the difference between these two kinds of organizations.
In my opinion it’s a matter of getting people and the processes to work in symbioses without the one part taking over completely. Keep in mind that it is possible to kill performance completely by overdoing either the people part or the process part. I think the main characteristics of an organization which (from the outside) is performing optimal are,

Transparency
Everyone (inside and outside) understands the processes, what is done and who is doing it. Even though a person only contributes to part of a process they “get the picture” and understand why their part is important. From an outside perspective the same level of detail and insight may not apply but to the outsider there is a clear understanding of what goes on what the expected result is.

Measurable
Another important aspect of a well-tuned organization is the capability to present key performance indicators of the processes on a monthly, weekly, daily and perhaps even hourly basis. If the processes are not measurable how can you know whether they are performing and improving?

Automated
Everything else being equal it is assumed that a fully automated process is cheaper to run than a manual – and less prone to errors. In that perspective, an organization should strive to automate processes as much as possible.

Obviously the automation part is where IT comes into the game – and this is where it gets exiting seen from a software vendor like ScanJours perspective.
One of the first rules creating good software is to make sure you understand the users.





To that end we have created a persona model covering the generic user roles in companies working with software like ours. For each persona – for instance “Michael” - we describe what Michael does in his daily work, which tools he is using, who he interacts with and in which ways. Based on this we create an intelligent role based user interface. Sometimes it makes sense to group several personas like “Martin”, “Susan” and “Johan” into a group – in this case “Information workers”, because they share some characteristics.

In Scanjour we believe in creating a role based user experience targeted the different users. Currently we are doing this based on two offerings, the Web client for Captia and the Office client for Captia. In the coming release of Captia we will furthermore showcase a new thin client browser based user interface, which will step up the overall user experience and introduce a number of new concepts which we believe will set the standard for enterprise case- and content management solutions.

In part II of this blogpost I will further discuss the process aspect further and how it relates and links to people.