Soft-Side BPM: The Disembodied Personality--Part I.

This article presents the author's comments on the disembodied personality of business process management. An explicit process is a bodiless embodiment of personality, one containing quirks that will persist long after the supplier of said quirkiness has gone on to his or her reward. I cannot prove it, but I believe that it is impossible to divorce the physical manifestations of complex rational thinking from all degrees of underlying personality. Your process will reflect the essence of who you are; or rather, who the creators of the process are or were. For example, I was in a hurry to a meeting, but was almost out of gas. I stopped to fill up and pay at the pump device software with my Visa. Before I could pump, I had to let the little machine engage me in a conservation: "No," I did not want a car wash. "Yes," I did want a receipt. "No," I have enough life insurance, thank you. Finally satisfied with our conversation, the machine let me select may gasoline grade and it started the pump. The personality of the system was one of benign arrogance, benign because it was not a direct affront like some systems I deal with, but arrogance nonetheless, since I had to defer to a silicon boss for those precious seconds. I do not like the authority that comes from software products and their disembodied personalities. To confront process personalities, we need to give them names, to find their missing bodies.