SAP DESIGN GUILD

xApps – A New Practice for Next Practice

By Karen Holtzblatt, InContext Enterprises & Joerg Beringer, Head of xApps Design, SAP AG – 10/20/2003

SAP xApps are composite applications that implement "next business practices" – to improve existing work practices to better achieve business goals, to reduce resources needed to run the business, or to introduce innovations into business processes that increase opportunity. This article discusses how SAP xApps and other composite applications can go beyond the "bottom line," driving true innovation into the enterprise.

 

Composite Applications as Innovation Drivers

What constitutes innovation in business systems? Among other things, businesses must manage processes so that revenue generating products and services meet market needs and are produced efficiently. The job of a manager, as business management guru W. Edwards Deming once said, is to ensure efficiency, stability, and predictability in the processes of the company. Well managed processes enable an organization to focus on value creation through new product and service offerings. In poorly managed business processes, however, managers mire themselves in the "how" of the process rather than focus on the "what" that they are producing.

The synthesis of technological advances with good design practices can help overcome such problems. Business system innovation reorients organizational focus on the "what" of a business process by supporting and extending the way people work. The composite application paradigm – a new approach to business software that crosses traditional functional and system boundaries – can drive such innovation on different levels.

This classification scheme (see figure 1) describes three dimensions along which composite application-based process redesign introduces innovations that generate new business opportunity. In this paper we discuss these three dimensions and the role of user data as an underpinning in the redesign process.

Dimensions of Process Innovation introduced by Composite Applications

Figure 1: Dimensions of Process Innovation introduced by composite applications

 

Process Innovation

Composite applications can solve business problems through different levels of process re-engineering. Each level has its own innovation rationale and potential.

Streamlining Existing Processes

Business process streamlining is the first level of innovation that technology can introduce. Composite applications can address existing business practice improvement by fixing breakdowns and introducing changes and automation to increase process efficiency and effectiveness. But managing business processes presupposes the existence of a defined business practice. Manufacturing line processes, for example, could not exist without a defined method. Policies and procedures, such as those surrounding travel and reimbursement, are meant to support an efficient way of simultaneously meeting business goals and legal requirements while ensuring appropriate communication and documentation.

Good business processes coordinate people, information and other resources to get the work of the business done. Within a company, or a division of a large global corporation, business processes always cut across departments and business boundaries. As a result, business systems which do not support cross-department and cross-company resource coordination fail to support the efficiency of the organization.

By design, composite applications integrate data from multiple business systems. By leveraging collaborative technology they bring people together who need to coordinate to get their work done. They raise up information buried in stove-piped systems, providing the right level of detail for both managers and their employees alike. And they introduce organized workflow supporting the everyday activities of the people carrying out the work.

Surfacing Hidden Processes

Surfacing hidden business processes is the second level of innovation that technology can introduce. Processes like manufacturing, for example, require a well-defined workflow. But creative activities like idea generation and software design are people and communication intensive. A bird's-eye view of these processes looks like people talking and coordinating: hanging over whiteboards, talking by the coffee machine, having weekly coordination meetings, creating project plans, providing status, giving presentations, and generally talking about what they are doing or creating. Managers tend to think of managing these processes in terms of communication, coordination, team dynamics, and documentation of the designs and decisions. The process, as a process, is not explicitly defined. Composite applications can help businesses surface and start to manage these hidden processes explicitly.

However, surfacing hidden processes can only be achieved when the hidden process is mapped. As a hidden process it is even more tacit, more difficult to articulate than formal processes already defined within the organization. Modeling the real work process allows organizations to make decisions about how they want to work once they can see what they are implicitly doing. Real workflow can be defined, roles and responsibilities can be negotiated, tasks can be streamlined or eliminated, on-line artifacts can be created to replace paper, and collaborative environments can be implemented to bring people and information together. Only by revealing the actual practice can business begin to choose how they want to work rather than being driven by informal process that happened to grow up around new processes and technologies.

To really "see" the business process we need two things:

The key to success is to build the work models with reliable field data. Once we have articulated what people are doing, why they are doing it, and how the activities of one set of people impact and drive those of others, significant innovation of business process is possible. This high-level picture of the current business process gives business people the tools they need to "see" what they need to change.

Inventing New Processes

But what about creating new processes? Inventing business processes is the third level of innovation. The next best practices emerge when new technologies can be applied to better achieve the fundamental intent of people and of businesses. This implies that those designing these practices know how to apply that new technology to take advantage of it and are clear on what the fundamental intents are for people and businesses. Data about how people and businesses work now reveal their intents. Modeling the work provides the lens needed to really see what is going on in the system of work trying to achieve those intents.

What happens when an organization can start to see their real business process? Next practice design comes when designers change their point of view and redefine the scope of a particular business process. Consider the difference in process redesign from within the following business boundaries:

New process design comes from widening the scope of redesign beyond the traditional scope, challenging "business as usual".

 

Practice Innovation

Using the term "business process" often hides the fact that today the success and efficiency of all business processes is ultimately the result of what people do. Even in fully automated environments which depend on robots and complex machines, people must tend, provision, monitor, and fix those machines.

Good designers of next generation business processes recognize that redesign of practices must be planned for at three levels of impact: the business process and its associated business rules and workflow, the work group that operates to achieve a particular intent at different points in the process, and the individual who carries out and organizes daily work within the workgroup and larger business process.

Workgroup Practice

No one works alone. People in businesses are always part of a workgroup (often multiple workgroups) which implicitly or explicitly are part of a larger business process. These teams, formal and informal, communicate and collaborate to get the work done. Workgroups continuously collaborate and coordinate to share information, design, and project status. They review each other's work, create and change schedules, approve requests, pass tasks, and create events. Workgroups may be co-located or they may be distributed. Rarely do workgroups have a physical "place" to continuously work together. Too often they have to rely on technologies like email, shared data stores, phone, fax, and air travel to make their collaborations work.

Moreover, formal teams tasked with producing a product rarely think about how they participate in the vertical management work group. C-level managers, general managers, directors see the teams carrying out business strategy to create value as part of their larger workgroup. Visibility into what they are doing, their progress, and the success of the business strategy is the way they manage their operations. Yet they can only see "what is going on" by talking to people.

Composite applications have the capability of bringing together information, providing status, creating contexts for productive coordination and communication, supporting distributed meeting and moving tasks and information between work group members. But for real innovation we need to design "how" the people in the work groups will work so that they can focus on "what" that workgroup is trying to accomplish or track.

Individual Work Practice

Individuals participate in a workgroup and are part of the larger business process. But to do this they have to do their individual tasks and organize their personal work in such a way as to enable the efficient coordination within their workgroup and create the business value of the overall process. In the end, if the individual's work is not efficient and on-target, innovation at any other level can not be realized.

Improvement at the level of the individual alone can increase efficiency of the overall work process and work group. Too often redesign fails to account for the real work practice of the person. When individual work is seen by an organization focusing on business process redesign as a source of data, the redesign can turn individual work into mindless data entry. If individual work is seen as a step at the end of a defined workflow without consideration for the collaboration that occurs at that step, the work group activities will not be supported. And if optimizing the work is seen as the fixing of one complaint, one problem in the business process, one system, or one small part of the work, the productivity of workers can decrease because the coherence of their work is fragmented.

Effective innovation that reaches deep into the daily lives of the people in an organization must be designed for the work practices of the individual participating in the workgroup. It is not enough to optimize business process flow from person to person, department to department, or company to company. Real innovation comes at the desktop where real people do their tasks, manage their priorities, find and share documents, and collaborate with others. Composite applications, when designed with deep user data, can create business value at all three levels of practice.

 

Impact of Change

Change impact comes in two forms: real changes in the organization and how technology must be used to achieve these changes. Change management, indeed risk mitigation, is as much related to how innovation is designed as to the design itself. Depending on the design of the composite application and its innovation level, software can introduce minor or significant changes to how people work. Depending on the quality of the user experience, using the new systems can make adoption easy or irritating. But if the process changes and system design is driven from user data and then iterated with the future users, the quality of the practice redesign and the user experience can be managed. A user-centered design process is the best guarantee of easy change management as long as the design team is aware of how the redesign will impact people's lives.

Changes in Procedures

Procedures at the level of the individual and workgroup are often tacit and ad-hoc. Procedures to get the work of an individual done are passed informally from old to new professionals. Procedures for how to run groups are often unarticulated. Procedures for how to do the tasks designated by the particular business process are not well defined. Alternatively, individuals, groups, and process definers write down paper check-lists of what to do for given tasks. These lists may be individual or passed around. They may be formal "methods" for doing work or informal learning over time. Systems may design rules of workflow or access to data but rarely design in these task-oriented procedures. When system design does not reveal and support these activities they may inadvertently complicate the work, decreasing productivity instead of increasing it.

Composite applications can reveal task procedures, attach appropriate information to each step, call up relevant application components, allow people to check off what is done and what is not, and move task information between people in a workflow, retaining context and history. Revealing and defining procedures helps new people learn how to do the work and ensures that experienced people can accomplish the steps without skipping a step, losing information, or duplicating effort through redundant data entry.

Changes in Roles and Responsibilities

Any process redesign will redesign people's roles and responsibilities. Shifting tasks from one knowledge worker with a set of skills to another with a different set of skills will change expectations for people and departments. Bringing information together to support the whole work of a person will change collaboration, teamwork, and management interaction, as well as the extent of administrative help that person might need.

Composite applications will make these role changes possible by shifting responsibilities from one job role to another, turning a difficult task into a commodity or by making information more easily accessible. Entire work roles may be automated. And new roles may be introduced. Revealed processes may now have mangers overseeing them. Information metadata will need to be managed. Process changes will introduce role changes. System capability will introduce needs for system or information support.

Planning for change means being aware of the shifting human changes: at the level of the department, the group and the person. When the people being impacted understand the waste in the current processes because they can "see" the process, when they participate in co-designing the future roles and systems, people will know the value of change and will more easily accept new practices. Resistance can be managed through a human-centered redesign process.

Changes in Structure and Culture

Invariably changes in business processes, work practices, and systems used to perform work cause cultural change within the business. If the cultural change supports business goals and human values, business culture will move to support the new practices. But if system changes serve to devalue the individual or undermine business goals, resistance will be directed at the system. Balancing the conflict between the goals of the business and the values of the individual is often a challenge in system design.

If employees are forced to enter data without having any personal benefit, for example, they will resist the system and the value to the business will not be realized. Effective innovations design business processes and systems taking cultural changes into consideration. Good system design considers the impact of one change on all people involved. Policies that enforce data entry will not eliminate the resistance, instead it will disempower employees and build resentment. Negative cultural impacts must be anticipated when evaluating system and process redesign so that positive corporate culture is not undermined. On the other hand, automation can eliminate mindless work releasing employees to deliver more value and use their knowledge. At the cultural level, this change creates a valuing culture which itself builds the desire to contribute.

Introduction of new technologies can also conflict with corporate or country culture. Accessibility to skill evaluations, personal data about employees, and transparent tracking and measuring of task completion can provide the information to aid management. But within some countries these "advances" are seen as invasions of privacy or confidentiality violations. Redesign always occurs within the cultural boundaries of the country and the company. As such, good design must take into consideration implicit changes to culture to ensure that adoption is successful

 

Making Innovation Happen?

No innovation is ever totally disconnected from what went before. Process redesign changes how people work through technology introduction, changes in roles and responsibilities, and changes in how tasks are accomplished. Process redesign can introduce change at the scope of the individual activity, the workgroup, the department, the business process or the collaborative industry process. Process redesign can streamline the work, reveal existing practices so they can be managed or introduce whole new ways of working or revealing information. But any redesign is still trying to achieve a business intent or a work practice intent - but in a new way.

Because successful change is built upon a deep understanding of how businesses and people work now, designers need a way to "see" the existing work practices: the issues, the roles, the activities, and the overall workflow. Seeing allows deliberate change to the overall business process at any level of innovation. Seeing ensures that innovation does not stop at the business process level but reaches deep into the work group and the desktop of the individual. And seeing ensures that the impact of change is desired and managed. As such, innovation needs:

Contextual Design can provide the user-centered design techniques to help companies model the business process, the human practice, and involve the users in CO-designing the result. Composite applications can make these redesign real in businesses today.

 

References

 

top top