| In a recent discussion with an ECM/BPM expert he | | | | these 20% groups are not related in any way. In any |
| brought up the commonly used principle that BPM can | | | | case it can also be 15/85 and it does not even have to |
| be justified by the 80/20 Pareto Principle. I accept that | | | | add up to a 100. |
| it would be too expensive to define and manage a | | | | This idea of looking at 20/80 rather than 80/20 would |
| 100% of business processes so if you manage 80% | | | | mean that we need to monitor ALL processes to |
| then BPM is justifyable. I thought about that for a little | | | | identify which 20% make 80% of revenue and which |
| while. When Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto | | | | ones cost. Analysing and encoding all processes to do |
| discovered that 20% of people own 80% of all wealth | | | | so is not feasable and it would anyway ruin the |
| he was surprised that the distribution was the same in | | | | business. Quality, revenue and profit are a complex |
| other countries. It is probability of distribution inherent to | | | | balance and not easy to achieve with a common |
| complex adaptive systems that is most likely related to | | | | approach. As I said before: In times when we look to |
| the Gauss curve. I admit that this link is intuitive off the | | | | increase business agility, it seems foolhardy to reduce |
| top of my head. | | | | people agility by insisting on vertical applications or rigid |
| I propose that this is maybe used the wrong way in | | | | processes. |
| BPM (and other scenarios). The Pareto Principle would | | | | Our approach at ISIS Papyrus is to model business |
| for example suggest that 20% of customers produce | | | | entities in metadata and empower users to collaborate |
| 80% of revenue. If we now apply it the same way to | | | | in processes freely while enabling monitoring and |
| BPM then 20% of processes would produce 80% of | | | | auditing. The Papyrus User-Trained Agent can perform |
| revenue? That makes a lot of sense to me. That | | | | such interactive process discovery and then guide |
| does NOT imply that these 20% of processes have | | | | users. It is simple to add cost/time/quality/value fields to |
| to be rigidly controlled. Are these the same 20% that | | | | processes and fill them with federated operational |
| make 80% of profit? Maybe there are only 20% of | | | | business intelligence and thus identify the 20% groups. |
| processes that need 80% of control effort? Possibly | | | | As discussed above not all processes can be |
| there even 20% of processes that cause 80% of | | | | monitored and tuned to the same principles. |
| cost? Also seems to make sense. It is most likely that | | | | |