Traditionally business was “technology limited”, in the sense that we had to use what was available.  A couple of examples to clarify:

Paddle Steamer Engine

The same is true of the majority of business processes.  There is an unspoken assumption that the employee must accept the environment, eg the IT environment.  This makes it very laborious for Virtual Teams.  Again an example:

• A Swiss financial services company (using Notes) bought another company in Ireland (using MS environment).  The result was that even something as basic as the e-mail address list from one location was not immediately visible to the other.

It was therefore interesting to be invited this week to the opening of the new offices of Canoo in Basel. These specialists of RIA (Rich Internet Applications) provide desktop-like functionality through a browser interface.  This has many advantages including:

• Virtual Team members have the same environment wherever they log on.
• Training is reduced, with corresponding increase in reliability, because of the familiary interface style.
• Maintenance is vastly reduced because applications do not have to be installed and updated on hundreds or thousands of desktops.

Of course this was not possible 20 years ago.  This does not mean that we have to apply the restrictions of that era in designing our business processes today.  With RIA for example, it makes more sense to design the business process first.  This means that maintenance, training and actually logging on (eg from a hotel bedroom at a conference) are also part of the business process and should also be considered.

Technologies such as RIA make it easier for business process design to START with what ought to happen, then design the tools.