The Work System Method: Connecting People, Processes, and It for Business Results

One of the most important skills in a manager's arsenal today is the ability to marshal organizational resources effectively and efficiently to effect competitive advantage or respond to competitive threats in the environment. Among the most important assets at manager's disposal are the myriad business activities that actually describe and allow the business to do what it does--call these activities business processes or work system. But whatever you term them the astute manager has an excellent understanding of those activities and how they may be shifted like pieces on a chessboard as required. In this technology enabled and globally distributed world many of a businesses processes are enshrined in silicon, either as off-the-shelf software components in stand-alone products or more often in enterprise software like ERPs and CRMs. Those processes that truly provide unique competitive advantage are often the processes that are the customer built and configured for the firm. In either case in order to identify, configure or implement and manage these software instantiations of a firms special way of doing things or special capabilities a manager needs to recognize and describe his firms business activities. One common error managers make is to assume that the act of knowing and describing critical interactions between the organization and its customers and other stakeholders can be safely left to others, often to technologists or consultants. DUMB, dumb, dumb.... But until recently there has been no clear, transparent and relatively transparent way to understand, describe (model) these "Work Systems". Business processes are embedded in larger intentional systems of activities something Alter calls Work Systems. A work system is a system in which human participants and/or machines perform processes and activities using information and technology to produce products and services for internal and/or external customers. A work system's goal is to provide value for its customers. Almost all current work systems are IT-reliant. Thus, work systems typically rely on IT but are not themselves IT systems. For instance an ERP is not a work system. Given that the astute manager knows that productivity gains may be acquired via various forms of automation, that same manager will be constantly looking for ways to deploy technology to make the doing of work more effective and efficient. If that manager understands and can describe the system he wishes to automate stands a much better chance, when working with IT staff or consultants, to get the desired result. In my view Alter's "Work Systems Method" is an incredibly useful tool for any manager. It is intuitive, it relies on concepts and ideas known to managers and it does not require learning new software or modeling conventions to put a useful model together. This book, is not an exciting read; it was intended to be functional and instructive. But it is a clear, descriptive and usef