I was reading the July issue of CIO magazine when I came across a quote from Ross Mayfield, the president and cofounder of Socialtext, which produces enterprise wikis. The quote from him reads, “(Employees) spend most of their time handling exceptions to business processes. That’s what they are doing in their inbox for four hours a day. E-mail has become the great exception handler.”
I couldn’t agree more, but I would like to add to his statement and say that, in my opinion, e-mail is not just the exception handler, but in many cases, it’s the primary method for business process communication.
How did we get here and why has it happened? There are a number of reasons, and I’d like to expand on a few.
- Making it up as we go along.
- Not enforcing business processes.
- Business processes that are not automated or automated with software that is outdated or doesn’t fulfill the user’s needs.
- Lack of communications within an application or integration with other communication mechanisms.
- Lack of communication alternative besides e-mail.
This is especially true of small to medium companies, and is a critical factor in them not graduating to becoming bigger companies. If your business processes do not exist, or are not being used, then your company is too dependent on critical employees. Aside from the fact that that makes you vulnerable to those employees leaving, it also means that your company cannot scale. Of course the downside of business processes can be the dreaded 'company policy' that is so hated by customers. A successful company is one that can solve that dilemma, and judging by the number of such companies it cannot be too difficult.
Spend some time reading the linked article and a bit more time thinking about your companies processes and how to automate them without stifling the ways in which you deal with your customers. After all, other benefits of well designed and adopted processes include exposing performance metrics and quality control.
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