The Power — and Foibles — of Process

My three-month-old daughter reminds me of both the power of a process — and why nothing is static. It's a lesson too many IT leaders have forgotten.

I’m loving my early mornings these days. My three-month-old daughter and I have a great routine.

She wakes up right as my wife has finished pumping breast milk. I then take her to the other room so my wife can get more sleep, change her, feed her, and then spend an hour or so playing with her before she takes her first nap of the day.

After a solid night of sleep, she is typically in a great mood, quiet and mostly chill. It makes for a magical morning of book reading and mat time.

It’s an amazing routine. Well, it has been for the past few days.

That’s the thing about having a new baby. Routine (or what we might call process in the world of IT) is all important. And yet our routine changes almost every single day as our daughter grows and changes at a breakneck pace.

It’s much the same for today’s IT organizations — process is important. But change is far more important. Yet, far too many IT leaders (not to mention consultants and pundits) appear to think that you can employ static, rigid processes to govern the IT operation.

The Process Foible

The industrial age was an amazing time in human history. The realization that you could systematize and mechanize the production of goods (and later services) to lower the unit cost of something was truly revolutionary. It transformed life as we know it and, I’d argue, improved our collective standard of living.

The challenge is that it was based on this concept that you could reduce almost anything into a static, highly-repeatable process. We in IT took that concept to heart and embraced an ethos of defining processes and practices that we could lock into place and harden as a way of driving efficiency and reducing costs.

And, in some ways, it worked magically.

The problem is that over the last decade or so, we have entered a new era in which the defining mantra is change.

Much like my daughter’s routine, the processes that we must use to manage and govern IT must now be in a continual state of change and flux — because the fundamental business drivers that IT must support are in a constant state of change and flux.

It’s for this reason that practices and frameworks such as ITIL and IT Service Management, and even newer more flexible ones such as DevOps and Agile, are facing headwinds. It is too easy for them to become static and dogmatic (which is more a function of human nature than an issue with the frameworks themselves) and thus lose their effectiveness in a world that demands constant change.

Creating Your Change Capability

Still, there’s a reason that we all gravitate towards a desire to build out a process and bake it into a piece of software: it allows us to pretend that we have control.

There may be nothing more scary to an IT person than the idea of continual change.

Yet, that’s the reality on the ground. There is almost no such thing as a static process anymore — and if we find a static process, we’re going to automate it to the point that we won’t need a human process to manage it.

But that doesn’t mean that we don’t need the discipline of process management. I’d argue we need it more than ever before. Much like I still rely on having a solid routine with my daughter to provide structure and comfort, process is still vital to the IT operational state. We just need the ability to change it dynamically — and the data to tell us what changes are necessary.

I believe this need is why we’re starting to see an evolution of thought and some new entrants into the market. Domains such as process mining are evolving to focus on this idea of continuous change and execution management (e.g., look at some of the shifts that Celonis has been making over the last couple of years), and we’re seeing areas like Digital Employee Experience Monitoring and Digital Adoption Platforms emerge.

Companies like Nexthink, Knoa, and WalkMe (among many others) have developed technologies that allow organizations to monitor what employees are actually doing within business and IT processes and with the software that powers them.

Smart organizations are then using that data to improve efficiency, but more importantly, to continually tweak their processes to meet changing needs.

Collecting this sort of experience data, using it to create visibility, and then creating a process (very meta of us, right?) to use that visibility to continually adapt processes is the foundation of creating what I call a change capability. Creating this capability enables you to simultaneously increase efficiency, improve the experience, and ensure your processes reflect reality.

Breaking Out of the Efficiency Trap

Every IT leader is mandated to continually improve efficiency — both within the IT function and by leveraging technology as an efficiency lever within the enterprise. This mandate has been IT’s raison d’être since its inception.

But efficiency shoudn’t be — and isn’t — a zero-sum equation.

I always know when I’m hearing a story of true digital transformation by virtue of its ability to simultaneously increase efficiency while improving the experience and delivering other business outcomes.

Doing the right things the right way almost always has the glorious side effect of improving efficiency and reducing costs at the same time because efficient processes result in less wasted time, fewer frustrations, and better experiences.

But when organizations get hung up on efficiency — or worse, dogma — as the sole or primary driver of an effort, things go sideways.

My daughter reminds me that we make things too complicated. We need to always be looking to create efficiency and to build processes and routines that make life easier — whether that’s for a 3-month-old or an enterprise organization.

But more than anything else, we need to make sure that we’re living in the moment and never forget why we’re getting up in the morning to begin with.

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