Fred Smith, CEO and President of Fedex is quoted to have said "Information about Packages are just as important, if not more important, than the packages themselves".
Thinking this way has allowed Fedex to use this information to create new premium services such as being able to withdraw a package that has been already sent through Fedex. For an additional fee, they can track the package enroute and reroute it back to the sender!
I bet that this is used a lot by business users who have had second thoughts about some documents that they sent in a package and want to redo them and send them along again.
Information about packages are available on the Internet for anyone to track precisely where their package is at any time. This is possible only because delivery services consider information about delivery as important as the packages themselves.
The same principle can be applied to great benefit in business processes. If you think about it, for any business process, information about the business process and making it transparent to all participants could have the same benefits.
In fact some of this may already be happening. If you order anything online like computers or anything else you will be able to see the status of that business process as "Order Accepted","In Process", "Shipped", etc. This can be applied to most other end-to-end business processes like Order to cash also. Anyone within the company should be able to track ths status of any order through their own systems – Order, Scheduled to be Assembled or Manufactured, Work In Progress status, Shipping Status, Invoice Raised Status, Accounts Receivables Status, etc.
Currently many of the Information Systems companies use, are all islands of functional automation. They may have made all of them work automatically with each other with convoluted stick and glue integration. Financial Accounting Systems talk to Sales Ordering Systems that talk to Manufacturing Planning and Scheduling systems with exchange of transactional information, at best. Getting clear and transparent views of where end-to-end business processes are at any time could go a long way in first getting visibility into them and eventually result in Process Improvements.
Information about business processes could be just as important as business processes themselves!
Information is a source of learning. But unless it is organized, processed, and available to the right people in a format for decision making, it is a burden, not a benefit. – William Pollard
