Business Interaction Management

Your best salespeople possess vast knowledge about how to connect with and motivate people--and perhaps take the company to the next level. But they rarely get to share their knowledge with senior managers. As a practitioner and student of business-to-business selling for more than half a century, Clif Reichard has learned to translate sales knowledge into leadership knowledge.

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.

The talk of heterarchy is taking me back to Gerard Fairtlough's book on The Three Ways of Getting Things Done (hierarchy, heterarchy and responsible autonomy) - but this mention of systemic organisations leads neatly to Bill Tate's new book on systemic leadership in the systemic organisation.

BPM (Business Process Management) has been a hot item over the past years. Still, most of the basic concepts of BPM have their roots in production and supply chain environments where repetitive, standardised processes prevail. Unfortunately, today's business environment has evolved towards a networked knowledge economy where processes exhibit far greater complexity and variability. This briefing is a pleading for a more interaction-focused BPM approach.

In our last post, we discussed talent development as an operational challenge. This time around we'll explore how the organization itself needs to change so that it develops a talent edge.

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?

Eight emerging trends are transforming many markets and businesses. Executives should learn to shape the outcome rather than just react to it.

An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

Over the past years, the customer has moved to pole position. Customers are no longer passive participants in the sales process but now dictate the rules. Experience creation is the associated buzzword. However, there are also other needs...

It goes without saying that no matter how much talent a company might have, there are many more talented people working outside its boundaries. Yet all too many companies focus solely on acquiring talent, on bringing talent inside the firm. Why not access talent wherever it resides?

About one month after the release of our Shift Index report, one question that keeps coming up is whether we can offer a succinctly define what the Big Shift is that our Shift Index seeks to measure.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.