Why Taylorism is a good thing
November 01 2011 by Jakob Freund · 8 Comments
Dawn at 300 km/h
Actually I have been rather annoyed by some evangelists, preaching (“Adaptive”) Case Management as it would be some revolutionary new understanding of how the (working) world could become a better place, while the emotions behind that belief are rather similar to those in Charlie Chaplins “modern times” and therefore neither new nor revolutionary (but catching nevertheless).
On the other hand it is a good thing to distinguish between structured processes and those that are more or less unstructured and therefore not really suited for the taylor-oriented management approaches, let them be ways of organization or certain technologies like process engines. I just do not like the connotation that “the world” becomes more and more unstructured, or that taylorism is somehow “evil”, because all those statements sound like ideology to me, and ideoloy has never been a good advisor.
I would even claim that
a) taylorism as a good thing and
b) The limit of taylorism in the world of services is by far not exceeded and therefore
c) taylor-oriented technologies (like process engines) have a damn bright future
Huh, how could he claim THAT!? Tailyorism, isn’t that the thing with the machines and the inflexible production lines and all those zombie-workers that are completely unhappy in their daily work? Well, more or less, yes. But there is one completey killing argument: It is also the one that scales.
Let me explain it somehow different. There is a really nice quote I recently read by Alfred North Whitehead: The progress of civilization can be measured by the quantity of actions we can execute without thinking. And I also have a really nice example: Traffic lights. When I approach a crossing driving my car, and the lights are green, I just go on driving, with about 50km/h in German cities. This is rather fast, but I am completely sure that there will be no one coming from the left or right crashing into me, because there is a defined system I can rely on.
Actually, when I am driving, I am a zombie worker most of the time. Sometimes, of course, there are “unpredictable” events, like a child running over the street, or an alien spaceship landing in the middle of the highway. Then I become a knowledge worker, handling that case with my horribly flexible brain.
But what if I would be a knowledge worker all the time, if there would not be any traffic lights (or traffic rules in general)? I would approach every crossing, looking right and left and right again, and then carefully cross it. I would do that *all the time*! What does that mean for my grade of efficiency, and for that of all the other “knowledge workers” in German streets? If German tourists drive in Italy or Spain, they are often completely scared of all the people ignoring the traffic rules, of all the *unpredictableness* on those streets. Actually I think, if it comes to driving, Germans are more like zombie-workers, and people in other cultures are often more like knowledge-workers. But hey, you can say anything you want about Germans, but for sure we are rather efficient.
So the bottom line is: Making the world more predictable (yes, it can be done), and then applying axiomatic systems to it, is nothing invented by taylor and somehow an “accident” of the 20h century, but it is a central component of human evolution. It has always been there, and it will always be there, as long as people are interested in less work and more free time.
OK, so how do those thoughts apply to BPM in general and process engines in particular? They are about axiomatic systems for business processes, about standardization and less flexibility, but also about less work and more free time, or in other words, less costs and more profit: scalability. If I am running a business, this is my biggest interest. If I need knowledge workers for those parts of the process that are unpredictable but necessary (!), so be it. But my ambition will always be to reduce those parts, because knowledge workers are expensive, and they cannot be copied, and therefore they are not scalable, and therefore I consider them a risk and the need for them a problem I have to solve sooner or later.
OK this sounds a bit harsh, and of course it is not true for every kind of business. But I want to explain why there is still so much to do for BPM and process engines in the world of services, like insurances, banking, telco etc. One example: In Germany we have a lot of rather old, traditional insurances, and we have the new ones that operate their marketing and sales activities mostly online. Those new players could realize their processes on green fields, they used a lot of BPM methods and technologies without the need to regard existing culture, policities, habits and people who must be kept busy because you cannot fire them (and who therefore are considered “knowledge workers”). Those new players are small and extremely efficient, and in those market segments where you can already apply that kind of taylor-oriented approaches (like car insurances), they are a real threat to the traditional insurances.
So I think while the discussion about unstructured processes and how we can handle them is a good one, it is a bit exaggerated. In the end, optimizing business is about scalability, and scalability means production lines, and that means taylorism. Case Management won’t change that.
But I also think that most of the existing BPMS-Technologies lack certain abilities to realize good process applications, which means besides other issues, those that can cover both structured and unstructured parts. At camunda, we aim at those issues with a new kind of BPM-Platform called camunda fox, based on the open source project Activiti. There have already been a couple of blog posts about it, but those adressed mostly IT-people like architectes and developers. In my next post, I will explain what makes fox different in a way that it is also interesting for those of us that are not particulary interested in Class Loading, Persistence Layers and the like 
Excellent post giving the ACM vs BPM debate into the right focus.
If you compare business processes with production processes, nobody would really suggest that the automotive industry shoudl get rid of the structured production processes and have cars manufactured individually by knowledge workers as it has been done before Henry Ford introduced the assembly lines. There is a niche for highly individual sports cars which are produced in small workshops. However, as you say in your post, this model doesn’t scale. Most car buyers couldn’t afford these special cars, and they are quite happy with the cars assembled in factories. They are affordable and meet most of the customers’ requirements.
However, as we all know, cars are highly customizable, and it is hard to find two cars with identical colours, interiors, engines, extras etc. The structured processes allow for a high degree of (pre-defined) variations. As you stick to those pre-defined variations, you are fine with the structured process. Only if you want to have extras for your car that are not on the manufacturer’s price list, you need to go to a garage and have your individual equipment installed.
Something similar is required for BPMS, i. e. highly configurable processes that scale well. Most traditional workflows only have a very low degree of variability. We need more sophisticated ways of adapting processes than only selecting different paths at a gateway. Different process parts need to be combined in a flexible way according to pre-defined rules so that individual adaptations of processes can be done automatically.
For highly scalable mass processes, ACM is definitely not the answer.
2011-11-01 um 1.04 pm Uhr. Verfasst von Thomas AllweyerIdeology removed from the controversy, the difference between (A)CM and BPM(N) boils down to:
- In BPM(N) the state of a process is represented by Tokens, managed in a process engine
- in (A)CM the state of the process corresponds to the processing state of the work and is stored in the case file
Depending on state, allowed activities are selected more or less restrictive.
It is not difficult to find an abstraction which comprises both. This unified abstraction already exists: UBPML (U for unified), see ubpml.org. With additional features like inheritance of tasks, artefacts and constellations, it fulfills all the requirements from the comment above:
- highly configurable processes that scale well
2011-11-01 um 5.15 pm Uhr. Verfasst von Andreas Leue- ways of adapting processes than only selecting different paths at a gateway
- parts need to be combined in a flexible way according to pre-defined rules
- individual adaptations of processes can be done automatically
Can’t wait for your next post!
2011-11-02 um 12.27 pm Uhr. Verfasst von Stefan StuderHi Jacob, hi guys,
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Jacob, your text releases such an amount of my thoughts that I hope to structure it well
I believe that there is a place for both: BPMN (representing routine processes) and Adaptive Case Management (representing ad hoc processes) because both phenomenons exist in the [business] world for a long time and both approaches, BPMN and ACM, try to provide software support for processes. This in principle relates to RED/BLUE concept of Gerhard Wohland.
I totally agree to you Jacob, that making the world more predictable and structured is a great advantage in many areas of daily life.
(But to “measure the progress of civilization by the quantity of actions we can execute without thinking” seems a VERY great simplification to me. What is the human brain made for???)
To my opinion the world does not become more and more unstructured but – and that sounds contradicting somehow – the world becomes more and more structured or unified and at the same time more unpredictable.
Structured and unified in terms of global brands, similar work-flows on internet sites, look alike shopping malls and city centers – this the Taylorism in the real word – the constant pursuit for scaling to have less cost and more profit.
Unpredictable in terms of rapid global changes leading to heavy distortions in markets and societies.
I propose not to judge the one or the other as evil, good or bad and to not to talk about ideology but what about to talk about INTERESTS.
Jacob, I think (as part of the IT community) we have to accept that EVERY invention or innovation do not stand on its own and is always used for certain INTEREST and Henry Kissinger stated decades ago that in the world of politics there are just interest of states or parties – there is no ethics or humanity.
I think in the world of business there are ALWAYS INTERSTS. Interests striving for Taylorism or automation and interest striving for effective and traceable problem solving and other interests.
And in the history of software engineering we have undergone areas with intense discussions about the role and responsibility of software engineers in military projects and data privacy or even nuclear energy (maybe you were just a baby that times
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From a professional point of view BPMN and ACM are “just” addressing different problems: routine processes and ad hoc problems and from my point of view there is no need to run down one another.
From a economical point of view routine processes can be automated and automation scales and generates less costs and more profit. So we talk about AUTOMATION!
From a economical point of view ACM can establish a way to solve problems in a controlled and documented environment which opens the chance to reuse ways to solve certain types of problems and thereby COLLECTING KNOWLEDGE. This in turn can increase the satisfaction of the affected customer (internal or external) and organizatin too.
And I really doubt, that a company really want to get rid of experts to solve real hard business problems….
From a social point of view every step in Taylorism or automation removes a degree of freedom from a knowledge worker and changes the work to routine. That is, knowledge is being transferred from human being to software. Because human beings have a inherent need for creativity and cognition, this process undoubted has a social aspect.
From a business point of view every step in Taylorism or automation potentially can remove a degree of flexibility which eventually causes problems in handling ad hoc problems and maybe requires a kind of compensation[ by knowledge workers?].
This in principle also relates to the RED/BLUE topic of Gerhard Wohland and it is conceivable that an organization with a very high degree of automated end-to-end processes and badly documented business knowledge becomes a kind of concave organization with a risk to miss market engagement and a drain of business know how to external providers.
Maybe the critics on BPMN is based on the experience in some areas that it is extreme difficult to handle all the possible variations (that is a reaction on different external events reflecting environment situations) in BPMN models which in principle can be seen as the relocation of the business logic from traditional software [objects] into a business process [engine].
Let me give an example from my business: On the big airline hubs like Frankfurt, Munich, Paris or London environmental or terror events are a huge challenge. In case of extreme weather or ash clouds massive amounts of passengers, baggage and aircraft have to be re-scheduled and handled.
The effort in terms of human intelligence and software capabilities to handle those situations in a automated way is enormous. Now – one can ask the question whether it really pays to provide software to automate those scenarios or to handle them with ACM like software.
For example is the chance to have a critical weather situation on London greater than in Frankfurt. What happens if we get a mild winter in Germany and the complicated software is never needed? Does it pay? And what about the business knowledge in automated process environments? Is the knowledge documented structured or distributed in many software applications?
This leads to the area of business knowledge management including managing of business vocabulary, business rules and business decisions.
I agree to Dr. Allweyer: in the area of BPMN we need capabilities to combine PROCESS SEGMENTS at run time based on BUSINESS DECISIONS. Maybe the use of decision services could be a great improvement and simplification on process level. And to my opinion covering structured and unstructured processes will be one of the biggest challenges of future enterprise software.
A final statement to the “free time” argument – Jacob. I think the term “less work and more free time” is maybe a simplification and a kind of ironic for routine workers. No one of the service staff at a big airport gets more free time because of increased self service capabilities. Be honest: sometimes the free time has the form of unemployment.
I believe all this things are related to each other and have many aspects (professional, economical, social and maybe more). And everywhere in life a good thing for one can be a bad thing for another. But that is life. I would appreciate if we all could be aware of that
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Best Regards and have good days, Uli
2011-11-02 um 2.34 pm Uhr. Verfasst von Ulrich Gumgowski[...] Jakob Freund has written an interesting defense of Taylorism, and he makes a few interesting points that I don’t recall seeing in previous discussions about ACM v BPM. Actually, when I am driving, I am a zombie worker most of the time. Sometimes, of course, there are “unpredictable” events, like a child running over the street, or an alien spaceship landing in the middle of the highway. Then I become a knowledge worker, handling that case with my horribly flexible brain. [...]
2011-11-28 um 5.33 am Uhr. Verfasst von A Defense of Taylorism » Process for the EnterpriseI posted an answer here: http://www.bpmnforum.net/blog27/bpm/taylorism/
2011-12-02 um 8.56 pm Uhr. Verfasst von Frank Michael KraftHi guys,
I don’t intend to argue for or against BPM/ACM, since I perceive consensus in the discussion regarding the fact that we need of both approaches.
However, if we say we need both approaches, I’m saying that we need them covered by ONE type of software tool and I really don’t care whether ACM tools get BPMified or BPM tools get ACMified.
I my business (I’m automating processes primarily for made-to-order production companies (Einzelfertigungs-Unternehmen)) you will encounter both types of processes – those which are stable enough to be defined as a rather rigid BPMN model (i.e. administrative processes) and those which are relatively unstable.
For example one of my clients manufactures complex customer-specific plastic parts and our system is supposed to control the manufacturing process. Once the necessary engineering documents have been created, there might be a rough idea of the manufacturing process. However during manufacturing, unforeseen issues might come up (like the necessity to repeat certain worksteps, or to add unforeseen ones, based on the knowledge of the worker ☺), even on a per case basis (due to the material). In large-scale productions you would perform a pilot production to make the process stable, but you typically don’t do that for made-to-order low volume production.
In order to cover this with our software (which by the way is based on Grails and uses Activiti as its process engine), I had to implement custom (non-BPMN ☹) workflow functionality, based on templates that allows modifications of cases at runtime (using a simple graphical editor) and which lets the user decide, whether he wants to store the modifications in the repository or not (= collect the knowledge). Most of the other business processes follow predefined BPMN-models. A combined, standards-based BPM/ACM technology could solve this in a much better way I think.
I by the way completely agree to Frank Kraft’s comment regarding the way processes stabilize over time and how they may be transferred to more rigid representations. With one exception: the third step, which is about implementing processes as hard-coded business logic inside systems like ERP? Maybe I’m missing something, but I really don’t get the point, why this concept should persist. I believe that there is no more need for baking process logic into IT-systems, provided that they use (BPMN based) process engines as their backbone to execute the processes.
Moreover, I believe that once a combined BPM/ACM technology exists, things will change dramatically. In my opinion it is essential that ACM process templates will use a standard format that allows interchangeability between tools from different vendors (exchange knowledge) as well as a transformation to/from BPMN (to “freeze”/”unfreeze” stable/non-stable processes). If the way business objects, forms, reports, business rules are specified and the way documents are stored could be standardized as well, we might see a completely different world of process related IT-systems (okay, in the mid- to long-term) future:
• There is a variety of vendors offering standards (as explained above) compliant process execution systems (I intentionally don’t use the word BPMS)
• Typical vendors of ERP/CRM/ECM/… systems like SAP/Oracle/salesforce.com/etc., which are KNOWLEDGEable about specific types of processes, become vendors of (BPM/ACM) TEMPLATES! for business processes (including all aspects like necessary specifications for business objects, forms, business rules, etc.)
• May be there will be even things like open-source process templates? Who knows?
Sure, this is a very keen and idealistic view of the IT future. But isn’t it exactly what we need? And isn’t time to go for it, now that the necessary technologies become available? For example, if look at the development on the noSQL DB sector – for me, these technologies (especially the schema-less part) are offering the opportunity to get rid of hard-coded business objects, much better than any O/R mapping technology. Okay, there’s still stuff to be worked on with these DBs, but it’s coming and we’re almost there…
I believe this big change will happen sooner or later. Of course, for the vendors of ERP, etc. -like systems it is very difficult to do such a big move, since it requires a radical change of their strategy, a lot of effort and even more important, to accept the disclosure of (parts of) the inner life of their systems (but maybe there will be ways to protect that). On the other side, if the necessary technology is available, there will be companies picking up the ball to gain competitive advantage. This eventually will make the other vendors change their strategy. It might happen earlier, if one of the big vendors takes on the role of a trailblazer.
Anyway, I’d be happy to receive some comments on my thoughts.
Let’s see what happens ☺
Markus
2012-01-13 um 12.45 pm Uhr. Verfasst von Markus Menner[...] Michael Kraft’s post on Taylorism is interesting, in that it is a response to Jakob Freund’s post on the same subject, but with a different perspective, and a pretty balanced [...]
2012-01-18 um 7.20 pm Uhr. Verfasst von Kraft on Taylorism » Process for the Enterprise