Systems thinking has been around for quite a while; in the 1960’s it was the subject du jour. Very good articles and books were written then bringing cogent ideas from academic study to the rest of the world – two of my favorite books were C. West Churchman’s The System’s Approach and The Design of Inquiring Systems.  But times change, and there is good reason to look again at the systems approach.

In one of my first courses about Business Process Management, the chairman, an expert in Total Quality Management, was making a major difference between Process Management and Management by Process.

For me it was just a question words. Some years after, making a return on experience from my first BPM initiative, I really understood this difference when I discovered the remedy had been worst than the disease.

I was both privileged and pleased to have the opportunity to present a keynote address at the BrainStorm DC Conference in Washington DC last summer, where my presentation focused on the subject of relating enterprise strategy to business outcomes. By way of reintroducing the topic, I prepared a brief summary of that presentation for publication in the January 2009 edition of the Government Bulletin.

“If we want to enter in an automated processes schema, the principle problem that we must resolve is the modeling of the current and proposed context.  Based on my experience in process automation I can say that there exists a high-priority necessity for the correct evaluation of the current activites of the process one wishes to automate in order to assure the successful future implementation of the automation of the said process, based on four fundamental factors: maturity, process definition, organizational culture, and managerial drive.”

Companies are right to be cautious about employing software to solve process problems. Automating a broken process simply serves to make it more efficiently broken. However, documenting processes is the first – and in my opinion, the most important – step in the improvement cycle. When Lombardi recently offered to demonstrate Blueprint, their web-based documentation and collaboration product, I approached the demonstration as a business professional with processes that need improvement, rather than an IT analyst or industry expert. Criteria for evaluation were ease of us