What the future of process management will look like — and what it should look like
So what is this “crowd mining”? Well, the word says it: crowd — mining. Or better: mining your own company's knowledge and the experience of the crowd. But how exactly does that help a company? And what does it have to do with “normal” process management? Let's take a closer look.
The starting point: the process of process management
Process management in itself is already very useful. It offers an enormous number of advantages that are of great value to many companies, especially in today's increasingly digital world. Whether it is support for a digital transformation or a boost to productivity, there are plenty of reasons why introducing orderly process management pays off.
So far, so good. The workflow companies typically use to practise process management is nevertheless somewhat dated. Often only a handful of process managers are responsible for administering the system and, above all, for filling it. Which means the person who actually carries out the process is not the person who enters it into the system with all its subtleties. That is done instead by a process manager, who first has to interview the employee doing the work. That information can get lost in this form of process capture hardly needs saying. More important is how much time this workflow can take: the process manager is permanently occupied going from employee to employee, having processes dictated to them. And once they're finished? The whole game starts again.
In a large organization in particular, that is simply not a productive way to work. Especially since a system filled by a few “experts” can also have a high barrier to entry. So we asked ourselves: how can we finally subject process management itself to a bit of process improvement?
The answer: organizational crowd mining as the next step for process management
The levers we see for solving the problem are actually quite simple: you promote the process owners themselves to experts on their own processes. They record their own processes in the system. The former process manager takes on more administrative duties for the management system instead. So it is an empowerment of a great many employees — the “crowd” — who are responsible for their processes anyway and are accordingly expected to tend and maintain them in aiio. You drill deep into the knowledge of your own workforce (“mining”) and end up with a comprehensive knowledge base covering the knowledge and experience present across the whole company.
The advantages of crowd mining are equally quick to see. Making the process owner the “process expert” inside the system ensures above all that the processes recorded really match the processes as they are. The process manager, now more in the background, saves an enormous amount of time: they only send the request to capture a process to the process owner instead of recording the entire process themselves every time. They can focus instead on modeling the captured processes and on improving the as-is processes that aiio has gathered from the people involved. Involving employees also markedly increases acceptance of a process management system filled by crowd mining.
aiio's payoff: process management as a TEAM effort at last
With crowd mining we finally turn process management into an inclusive experience for the whole team and the whole company. Every employee takes part in process management and becomes an “expert” on their own processes. People who used to be merely AFFECTED become actively INVOLVED with aiio. That is the power of the whole — the power of crowd mining. That is aiio.