SuccessfulWorkplace

Process is about action. When we talk about processes, we’re talking about everything an organization does in its ongoing operations. And so, it makes sense that in order to improve operational performance, many organizations use process improvement techniques such as process mapping to get a handle on all the actions that make up their process flow. The problem is, […]

Probably my favourite tool in the arsenal of analyst techniques has to be decomposition. Whether it’s functional or process decomposition there is nothing like it for arranging problems into the big picture. Then breaking that picture down into its component parts so that you can start to make sense of it. And yet hierarchy, in […]

BPM is a globally-themed concept that has remarkable similarities from country to country. In line with that, the following is a guest blog by Janne Eriksson of Sweden, a business process management professional who works in the Nordic Countries: I recently read an article by Swedish researcher Anna Rylander (University of Gothenburg) about Design Thinking. […]

The new year is an opportunity for a torrent of predictions of what will happen in the days to come. There’s no shortage of opinions, but most look a lot more like trends than solid prognostications. That’s because trends are easier to get in front of than predictions that may or may not come true. […]

A customer doesn’t see your technology when they interact with you, they see your process. They don’t know or care that you’re using Ruby or PHP, and they don’t know your compliance requirements. Customers see and feel the pleasure or pain of your business process management abilities. BPM’s two forks But there’s a dissonance in BPM […]

You’re all fired up for the new year, right? You can just taste the 2014 achievements now as you come off the holiday break with new career resolutions and energy to carry them out. Or maybe you’re not completely fired up (or rested) but know you need to show real progress this year. If neither […]

Every day we get to see misdirected, mindless marketing material. You’d think with all of the conversation about Big Data and analytics, we’d be past that by now, but it doesn’t feel like we are. Why isn’t Big Data changing our world in more visible ways? Why aren’t analytics being used to target the right […]

We joined Snapchat during the holidays. Ironically, after waiting so long to try it out, we did so one day before the New Years Eve security breach. Are we shocked that Snapchat provided people with a false sense of security? Not really. The Internet has shown us repeatedly that cyberspace follows the same rules that […]

We’re three days into 2014 and I’ve had it up to here (waves hand over head) with 2014 predictions. Not to say we haven’t done one or two of our own (cough, cough). Rather spill more ink on one more list of what to expect, what do you say we take a different tack and […]

What makes data analytics so interesting isn’t necessarily the volume of data, as an excellent example of data analysis showed on FastCompany this week, where they covered A Map of the Geographical Structure of Wikipedia by Olivier Beauchesne, a data scientist in Montreal. Beauchesne took geocoded articles from Wikipedia (meaning the writeup had a location […]

We’re dripping with technology. Look around you…everyone’s carrying a computer in their pocket that gets checked an average of 150 times per day (according to Kleiner Perkins), and data and analytics are the talk of…well…the modern world. Why, then, is the workplace still essentially the same as it was pre-Internet? We still have the same […]

My first software sales job and I’m twenty-five, selling CRM for Dataworks. It’s 1996. I had no skills; the only thing I knew was Sales was social; it’s about people. And I was persistent because that’s all I had. I wanted to get into software because I thought I needed to become more technical. I […]

How many of us, when asked what we wanted to be one day, said, “I want to be a salesperson”? No one. The truth is that most of us sell overtly or indirectly every day and 2014 will place even more importance on selling. As we automate more and more of the work environment, we […]

I’m just going to say it: the smartest person in the company often isn’t the best leader and the hardest working person won’t inspire others by putting out enormous effort. Smart and hard-working people get promoted (for a while) because their personal traits are admired. But their rise won’t create a better place to work […]