Business Interaction Management

Successful efforts to exploit the growing importance of complex interactions could well generate durable competitive advantages.

About half a century ago, Peter Drucker coined the term "knowledge worker" to describe a new class of employee whose basic means of production was no longer capital, land, or labor but, rather, the productive use of knowledge. Today, these knowledge workers, who might better be called professionals, represent a large and growing percentage of the employees of the world's biggest corporations. In industries such as financial services, health care, high tech, pharmaceuticals, and media and entertainment, professionals now account for 25 percent or more of the workforce and, in some cases, undertake most typical key line activities. These talented people are the innovators of new business ideas. They make it possible for companies to deal with today's rapidly changing and uncertain business environment, and they produce and manage the intangible assets that are the primary way companies in a wide array of industries create value.

Why companies like Best Buy design their office spaces to encourage more employee interactions

This blog is focused on "exploding" old concepts and thinking about economies, organizations, communities, and groups.\n\nWe will focus on patterns of connectivity and self-organizing behavior in economic and social networks and how these new structures lead to resilience, adaptability, agility, transparency, and innovation.

FIPA Interaction Protocols (IPs) specifications deal with pre-agreed message exchange protocols for ACL messages. Below are the Preliminary, Experimental and Standard specifications relating to IPs.

Business process management in open environments remains a stubborn and important challenge. In open environments, autonomous organizations having heterogeneous information systems interact in an ever-evolving manner. The nature of the contractual relationships among such organizations has a significant bearing on the modeling of the business processes in which they participate. Conventional approaches are not suitable for open environments because (1) they lack support for modeling and management of contracts among organizations, (2) the modeling abstractions they offer do not afford crucial software engineering desiderata such as reuse, refinement, aggregation, and verification, and (3) they fail to provide the designers with guidelines on adapting the models should the underlying requirements change.\n\nWe propose a novel approach for engineering interorganizational business interactions. Contractual relationships are modeled via commitments and the interactions for enacting the contracts are captured via the modular abstraction of protocols. Relative to how organizations value the various terms of the contracts and how the contracts are played out via protocols, safety and benefit of the contracts are reasoned about. A protocol specifies rules that govern the interactions among the organizations. Protocols can be published to a repository, shared, reused, refined, and aggregated. We propose a methodology-Amoeba-that guides software designers in the face of evolving requirements on how the protocols and contracts can be adapted.

While thinking about the concept 'interaction' it is important to understand that the traditional business view and the real world's view on the interaction do not really match. When businesses interact, they want to achieve something. When people interact, they want to understand something.

All interactions are crucial steps in any business process. Yet, in most process descriptions, interactions are just endpoints. Once we get there, the process reaches completion and everything is OK. There are no further consequences. Unfortunately, this is incorrect.

Today's networked era requires a new way to make investment decisions that incorporates intangible assets and more accurately depicts how value is created. The industrial age has run out of steam. Look at General Motors. Look at Chrysler. We are witnessing the death throes of management models that have outlived their usefulness. The network era now replacing the industrial age holds great promise. Networked organizations are reaping rewards for connecting people, know-how and ideas at an ever-faster pace. Value creation has migrated from what we can see (physical assets) to intangibles (ideas). Look at Google and Cisco.

I can't tell you how many companies I have worked with that have encouraged or tolerated a large degree of geographic dispersal among employees and management teams. "We're virtual, and proud of it," one told me. "It doesn't matter where you live anymore," many employees of virtualized companies have argued. "We travel all the time anyway," has been another frequent mantra.\n\nBut I recently encountered a company that is moving the other way. Eclipsys makes software for healthcare providers. The company's headquarters is in Atlanta. Last week, it changed CEOs. The previous CEO, Andrew Eckert, lived in Silicon Valley. By all accounts, he did a good job in the role, and the company has been doing well. However, the board of directors felt that the company couldn't be managed successfully from afar, and held discussions with Eckert about moving to Atlanta. He was committed for both family and career reasons to stay in California, however, and declined to move. The board decided to change leaders, and Philip Pead, who had previously headed and sold a healthcare software company in Atlanta, got the nod as the new CEO. Pead had moved to Miami, but is returning to Atlanta to run the company.

Here's an interesting rumour (from Mike Arrington, so let's take it with a skyscraper-ful of salt): CBS turned over Last.fm listening data to the RIAA.\n\nThe music industry has big, big problems. Let's use them to illustrate a bigger idea: next-generation leadership.\n\nIn my zombieconomy podcast, I discussed the idea of leadership - not as an individual capability, but as an organizational capacity. Organizations that act as leaders break new ground consistently and unstoppably.

Social networks now exist for several years and some of the behaviour of such communities is reasonably well understood. Enough to know that there are potential pitfalls. However, somehow we always seem to forget. Twine, a perception of social interactions.

In this white paper, we introduce the concept of Business Interaction Management (BIM). We explore the reasons that make that there is a need for a better understanding and mastering of such expertise and we position it against better-known disciplines such as Business Process Management (BPM).

BPM is hot, but has some limitations and deficiencies. In this presentation, we explore the need for a more interaction-focused approach that we call Business Interaction Management (BIM)

In recent posts we've described a massive institutional transformation that will occur as part of the big shift: the move from institutions designed for scalable efficiency to institutions designed for scalable learning. The core questions we all need to address are: who will drive this transformation? Who will be the agents of change? Will it be institutional leaders from above or individuals from below and from the outside of our current institutions?

In business, most investment decisions are based upon a Return on Investment (ROI) analysis. This is OK as long as the assessment of the potential outcome can indeed be made in a realistic and objective way. Otherwise it simply becomes a leap of faith or the false excuse for not investing.

In order to make correct decisions, you must understand the context. And in order to understand the context, you better have hands-on experience. It all makes sense. But is it always true?

Times are tough for many businesses, yet some are holding their own, even thriving. Best Buy, Cisco, Target, Starbucks, and Jones Lang LaSalle come to mind. How do they do it? According to a new book by Harvard Business School's Ranjay Gulati, it is customer-centric firms-those with a so-called outside-in perspective-that are most resilient during turbulent markets.

I've seen a bunch of posts bubble up over the past few days that are really sparking my curiousity about what is really going on with Twitter, so I need to do a little brain dump. Bear with me.

Real solutions and progress emerge when we are able to unify apparently conflicting views on the same reality. Do emergent social software platforms (ESSPs) provide a context for this to happen?