Process & People

A traditional approach to organizational engineering is to document business processes and functions. Although this approach can be traced (in modern times) back to Taylor, it received renewed attention in the 80's & 90's with the popularization of Michael Porter's Value Chain concept.

As an engineer there's a lot about this I find appealing. It neatly bounds the problem and supports the kind of analytical slicing and dicing that we techies live for.

However, as a framework, I suspect it may be a better fit for incremental innovation than for disruptive innovation.

These thoughts were triggered by a discussion of Value Nets on a journalism blog. Two diagrams (showing value nets for news) focus on roles and the value that each role provides to other roles.

My snap reaction was that the focus on People and the relationships among them would probably catalyze more innovation than a focus on Process. At the very least, it's a nice complement to the traditional Process-centric approach.