I admit it; I waste hours a week playing video games. On my phone, laptop or tablet; on a train, bus or airplane; when I have time and when I don’t, I and millions like me find that the positive feedback from these games keeps us addicted. A silly banner pops up and says “Congratulations, you’re a winner!”, or tells you you’re still lagging behind the champion, and you just have to play again.

Thirty years ago, Donald Knuth introduced the notion of literate programming.   He wrote “Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.”   His premise was that over the lifetime of any successful program, far more hours would be spent reading it for purposes of maintenance and enhancement than were originally spent creating it.  Furthermore, most of this would be by people other than the original author.  If this is true, a little more effort in documentation by the original author will be paid back many times.  We believe these principles are even more important in Process Modeling than in traditional programming. 

I learned the importance of metrics and predictive analysis from an unlikely source in an odd place — the McDonald’s near my college — yes, the place with the golden arches! When I started working there, I didn’t know about Ray Kroc or his revolutionary idea about portion control. I simply wanted to earn money to cover my car and insurance payments.

Everything was measured at this store, from how long the fries were blanched to how long burgers were grilled to the amount time food was allowed to wait in the warming area. In addition to the process measurements, the store’s managers and assistant managers were responsible for recording the day, the date, the weather, special events within a ten mile radius, hourly sales from each register, hourly numbers for each item sold, and amount of items sent to waste each hour.

There’s increasing attention and focus on reducing complexity. Leaders recognize that certain forms of complexity in their business, which do not add value to customers, involve unnecessary costs. From an IT perspective, as applications continue to grow in size and sophistication, the corresponding challenges in the integration of complex systems are perceived to non-value added drive costs.

Paying special attention to complexity through the application of business process thinking and BPM systems can be instrumental in reducing complexity that customers are unwilling to pay for.

Generally, customers don’t like complexity. But they do like choice and value. The challenge for many organizations is to see the business from the customer’s point of view and take action to reduce the non-value added component of complexity.