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by Shawn Chambers
April/May 2008
I think we overemphasize the tool rather than the craft when communicating the value of information technology. You can flip through any magazine, web site or even the Sunday circular and you’ll see the latest and greatest PC, notebook, widget or gadget. You can browse just about any college continuing education calendar and enroll in everyday, bread and butter courses in word processing, spread sheets and the like. And, if you are so inclined, you can even learn how to install and manage a Linux network. So, what? At the end of the day you’ve learned to write a memo on a lightning fast machine you bought at a trendy electronics store and made sure others on the network could read it. What did you do that you couldn’t the day before? But, what is being marketed in any mainstream media source that can evolve your business into a higher-level organism able to adapt to its environment better than its perceived competition? Nothing. Nada. Because, there is no rapidly available technology able to envision possibility, and then design the infrastructure needed to position your business on a collision course with opportunity. This product is still being manufactured by the human mind. However, there are some very powerful tools to facilitate the process of turning profitable ideas into business systems, and the next generation of business science students is going be able to run them at full speed.
 Mind mapping
Wikipedia defines a mind map as “a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making and writing.” Mind mapping software (think highly specialized flow charting) gives you powerful, but easy, tools to randomly jot down insights and structure them into a coherent path of action. I’ve been using MindJet’s MindManager Pro for about three months now and have integrated it into just about every project I work on. The process usually starts during a sales or strategy meeting where I’m left with an action list of things to complete. I scribble a few things down on paper and then, after returning to my laptop, I map out a finished solution — or parts thereof. I can return to it and modify it as I find time or inspiration. As a concept develops into a business plan I can link structures on my mind map to web pages or reference documents offering clarity to others involved on the design team. I can include budget spreadsheets and other supporting documents that evolve with the process so that when we’re ready to implement a plan the entire package can be handed off to the project manager for execution.
Process modeling
For anyone who’s suffered at the pointy end of a quality auditor’s pen, the emphasis by any international standard is mapping processes and documenting non-conformances (breakdowns) and then reverse-engineering system failures to root out causes. The complexity of the challenge increases geometrically as you begin adding people, tools, equipment and raw materials to the equation. Where a plumber might be able to simply follow a few feet of copper pipe back to a leak, a business may have to backtrack through hundreds of people-tasks and a myriad of electronic documents to find out what went wrong.
Process modeling software simplifies the detective work by providing blueprints to all of your systems, processes and resources and, in some cases, can even run visual simulations to help you identify bottlenecks before they happen. A number of standards have been developed over the last decade to visually represent business processes, such as Business Process Modeling (BPM), and there are a lot of great tools out there, such as TIBCO’s iProcess Suite, that makes the life of corporate architects so much more fulfilling.
Application design & development
Once a process has been approved, then implementation could be as simple as handing a list of updated tasks to an employee to complete. However, it may require a piece of software to be written that interfaces directly with a piece of machinery, such as a CNC lathe, or with a person, such as an electronic order entry form or a new payables check format. For the latter, a very detailed set of blueprints needs to be available to the developer in order to connect the software to the database and the platform by which users will access it, such as through their web browser or a desktop application. With a properly configured process model developed with tools based on the unified modeling language (UML) then the blueprints created by the business process modelers can be utilized by a software development tool, such as Sparx’ Enterprise Architect, which minimizes the conceptual losses usually experienced during the translation process.
Tying it all together
What Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) standards did for allowing businesses to exchange financial information, Extensible Markup Language (XML) is doing for exchanging information between processes. Your mind mapping software should be able to export all of your structured concepts to your process modeling software via XML. Your process modeling software should be able to export its class and component structures to your systems engineering software via XML. Innovative ideas should be able to flow from the executive offices down to the production floor in a matter of hours, now, rather than weeks or months with the right people in place to craft concept into cash flow. It’s not an exact science of when, but one should consider having a trained systems analyst on staff at about the point where you find it’s necessary to implement a quality control system. They should have a working ability with the unified modeling language (UML) and be familiar with a robust development tool in order to speed you along the process of converting ideas into value-added systems. UML and XML are the standards being taught at all levels of education now, and within the next few years will be the accepted means by which successful businesses manage processes and share information both behind and beyond their firewall.
Conclusion
Effort and dialogue should be made in considering how your organization will integrate these languages and structures into your everyday work environment because this is all about being able to convert opportunity into cash flow in the smallest amount of time. And, if you don’t have anyone around you who understands the urgency in adapting them, then maybe it’s time to outsource computer services and redirect budgets toward hiring people who do.
Shawn Chambers is the marketing manager for Warehoused Plastic Sales, Inc., and blogmeister of The Plastic Spork Blog. He may be reached at Warehoused Plastics Sales, Inc., 90 Venture Drive, Unit 8, Scarborough, ON M1B 3L6 Canada; (416) 281-4300, fax (416) 281-1641, e-mail: shawn.chambers@wps.on.ca, www.myplasticstore.com.
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