Dr. Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for developing his Micro-Lending
practice and the creation of the Grameen Bank. The idea is fairy simply in that
his company would setup an environment where extremely poor people would be able
to get small loans in order to create businesses. He talked to 42 impoverished
women from a nearby village and found that they were all hardworking people who
were paying outrageous fees to suppliers because they could not pay in cash. Dr.
Yunus found out that US$27 was all that was needed for the women to buy their
supplies directly and bypass the creditors. He gave each of the woman a small
loan, and was quickly paid back- and each of the women had enough profit to
continue to directly purchase their supplies-instantly making more profit than
they ever had before. When you look at the business model you will see some
interesting dimensions:
- The company loans money to individual within small groups of 8-5 people
- The small groups apply “Social Collateral” to each other to ensure payment
- The
company receives a repayment rate or more than 95%
- Loans are quick to setup
without lengthy documentation
- Loans range from $20 - $200 in size
- Small
weekly payments are used versions larger monthly ones
- Rates are higher but
most view the availability of capital more important than the cost of the
capital
- These loans make an immediate and big impact on the family • Simple
loan product offering
Clearly, micro-lending is a great idea that has worked to help millions of
people. One interesting aspect of the Web 2.0 environment is the emergence of
Micro-Business Processes. At a recent conference I attended, one of the speakers
referred to it as Business Process (Big BP) versus business processes (little bp).
Big business processes are usually automated with large scale investments in
products like SAP or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products. In many
ways, the entire SOA movement revolves around automating and re-engineering the
business process. However, these systems don’t address the thousands of small
business processes or Micro-Business Processes that our organizations deal with
on a daily basis. These small processes might include an approval for purchasing
office supplies, signing up for a Cancer screening, or tracking our “To Do”
items in a central location. How do these processes compare to the Micro-Lending
described above?
- The processes are usually limited to a small group of people, either on a
team or within an organization
- The processes are quick to setup without
lengthy documentation or training
- The cost of these systems are low when
spread across thousands of environments
- These processes make an immediate and
big impact on the organization.
- The processes can be quickly integrated with
other Social or Collaborative tools
- The life span of these processes can range
from a few days to years
- The value of these processes is in the numbers or
volume of information processed • Easy to setup and administer
Just a few years ago, the micro processes were delegated to email or the
physical presence. For example, suppose you wanted to ask folks to register for
an upcoming training class. Since you don’t have a centralized application (i.e.
Big BP) you would ask attendees to send an email confirming their registration
or passing around a signup sheet.
Many of the processes were integrated into documents or spreadsheets in order
to capture the metadata of the transaction. This metadata might include the
class selected, time of attendance, or which food item they would bring for the
Lunch and Learn. Today, we have a whole new toolbox of technologies that enable
the automation of these processes. In many ways, the formal applications deal
with business processes from the top-down perspective which require higher
levels of investment. The informal organization or project based organization
needs bottom-up technologies that are simple to use and easy to engage. It’s
common knowledge that the most critical information that flows through out the
organization never gets captured or reused by the enterprise.
Collaborative tools such as Microsoft’s SharePoint or Social Software tools
such as Social Text’s Wiki, enable the end user to build business processes
themselves. While some of this value is hidden in the “User Generated Content”
description, the ability for end users to create “User Generated Business
Processes” has enormous implications. First, with simple collaborative tools we
can capture the contextual information to supplement the codified information
normally captured. Organizations can become agile and be able to adjust their
internal processes to match the external world which never stays static for
long. Additionally, organizations can built up communities where they can
information and best practices to enable some element of reuse.
And, they are doing just that. Over the past 3 years, we have watched our
organization deploy well over 45,000 collaborative environments along with
thousands of social software environments. The information worker is embracing
the technology and starting to take control of the final frontier. However,
there are still problems and concerns that have emerge. Principally, we just
went through 15 years of breaking down the silos and organizational barriers to
integrate the large business processes. Commonly referred to as Enterprise
Application Integration, organizations have spent years integrating similar
business processes. Now, we are moving in the opposite direction by allowing and
encouraging the development of these small business processes. Clearly,
redundancy and replicated metadata will happen quickly.
So what does this mean? It means that the first part of Web 2.0 which allowed
the individual to capture and disseminate information is moving along but the
ability to integrate business processes on the individual level is just
beginning. In the world of Metadata, we called this jump the difference between
an active versus passive repository. The days of the passive Web 2.0 environment
are coming to an end.
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Clearly, nothing
much is going to happen until you get the infrastructure in place but the impact
of overcoming the technology barriers is relatively low. However, like shooting
a rocket into space, you need a lot of energy just to get the momentum going.
So I don't want to short change the technology barriers but you will spend a lot
of energy and resources with little to show for the effort.