Although RDOSP isn’t a very compelling acronym, it is a compelling concept. 40% of job activities are ad-hoc in nature according to a 2004 report published by McKinsey. The report refers to these as “tacit tasks”. These 40% of processes are currently unaddressed or under-addressed by most BPM software solutions. Organizations are making due with band-aid applications, the competition in this space being email and spreadsheets.
What leaves these 40% unaddressed by more rigorous solutions is that their impermanence makes them hard to target:
• Following a traditional project lifecycle, by the time the requirements are understood, the need may have passed or the focus radically shifted.
• The short duration of an ad-hoc process’s lifecycle also makes an ROI-based, project justification difficult. For a 2-week long process, payback can’t be justified over 2-years.
These problems can be addressed. There is a single barrier to overcome: deployment time. How does one achieve the rapidity and simplicity required to address, in a cost-effective way, the ad-hoc processes that make-up a substantial portion of the world’s work?
Rapidity requires two key ingredients:
1) Frictionless instantiation of a development/processing environment.
2) Digestion and implementation of process details inside of a minute.
Frictionless instantiation is becoming more feasible with advent of Cloud Computing and Platform as a Service (PaaS) movements. Simplicity requires two additional key ingredients:
1) A scaled-down definition of what constitutes an ‘adequate’ solution.
2) The unearthing of workable assumptions and the pre-building of widgets to allow processes to be ‘mashed-up’.
We find applications for RDOSP capabilities in traditional “transactional” process fulfillment as well. An organization might start the journey toward automation by first taking a single, simple step. A multi-generational approach is certainly more palatable to certain organizations because it allows for ongoing organizational learning and a faster path to short-term value.
