An intrinsic relation between two things A and B is such that the relation belongs to the definitions of basic constitutions of A and B, so that without the relation, A and B are no longer the same things.
-Arne Naess, The Shallow and Deep Ecology Movements

While a self-organizing system's openness to new forms and new environments might seem to make it too fluid, spineless, and hard to define, this is not the case. Though flexible, a self-organizing structure is no mere passive reactor to external fluctuations. As it matures and stabilizes, it becomes more efficient in the use of its resources and better able to exist within its environment. It establishes a basic structure that supports the development of the system. This structure then facilitates an insulation from the environment that protects the system from constant, reactive changes.
-Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science

For those managing change, it often seems there is a sharp distinction between the process of change and the change being introduced, but this is an illusion. David P. Norton, ex-CEO of the consulting firm The Nolan Norton Institute and now a Director with the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative states: "To execute strategy is to execute change at all levels of an organization. Seems self-evident, but overlooking this truth is one of the greatest causes of a failed transformation effort." Whatever we choose to call the "change process"--reengineering, Six Sigma, Change Management, innovation--it changes over time and those changes need to be managed, just as it exerts control over the processes it seeks to improve or introduce. Any theory of process management must recognize this and break down distinctions between the process of change, the process under change and change in both.

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Participants in a business process include employees, information sources, business units, computer systems, business partners, machines, trucks, goods, even business processes themselves (for example as occurs in outsourcing). Change occurs through the acquisition or loss of these participants, through the growth or contraction of relationships among them and their interactions with the environment. A business process "moves"--as it changes--in the multi-dimensional space of time and structural evolution. Like a living entity under the influence of Darwinian evolution, it exists in the past, the present and has possible futures. In understanding a business process we therefore distinguish different characteristics such as state, capability and design.

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When technologists examine the applicability of each of these new techniques, and compare them with more established practices such as component and object-based software development, they are, in effect, examining their relevance to modeling and supporting the classical six domains of change within a company: process, organization, location, data, application and technology. Yet process is not a category. Process encompasses change in the representation of the other five. Therefore, in developing a process representation language, the third-wave innovators looked not for a single new theory, but a theory that provided a synthesis of other theories. In process calculi they found approaches that could describe the previously separate descriptions of a company's organization structure, locations of operation, data model, application logic and technology infrastructure requirements. They then asked, "what if this were the basis of a new foundation for computing?"

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In process calculus, relationships represent anything from a physical link (a lorry arriving at a warehouse) to a business relationship (two par-ties entering into a contract) to a mathematical property (such as calcu-lating tax). Using just a tiny set of primitives, these theories can unify both the large-scale (macro) structure of mobile process systems and the small-scale (micro) structure representing intricate behaviors, themselves processes.

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In conventional computer languages there exists the concept of a "type." For example, the type of the number "five" is called an integer, the type of the text "hello" is called a string. Such types represent values--such as 24, "customer name," "purchase order number." These values are then aggregated to form records and these are stored in databases. All conventional languages focus upon computation using values and records, for example, counting customers that match a certain criteria or evaluating their credit worthiness. By contrast, in process languages derived from Pi-Calculus, types represent behavioral patterns. In business terms this would mean things like "signing a new customer," "exchanging contracts" or "performing work." In this strange world, computation is harder to envisage. To do so, think of analogies such as "measuring the acquisition cost of new customers," "understanding the value exchanged through a negotiation" or "analyzing work habits." If brown is the new black in fashion, then behavior is the new data in the third wave.

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This process approach, where process is the new first-class entity, can be applied even to the lowly task of adding two numbers--one plus two equals three. The sum itself is a process.

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Imagine a typical business application today and ask: "Why does it stay the same? It's digital stuff right? So why can't it change? Why does a new version of the application have to be developed for each and every situation? Why can't it adapt to me?" This is no fantasy. IT industry experts are already anticipating software programs that will write themselves to agreed process patterns. IT infrastructures will take on--automagically--the form of the organizations that use them. From now on, the business process is the "app," and the "app" is nothing more than mutable data. For this is the "third wave" form of business asset described in this book. Let's move on and build the new "process-aware" applications of the third wave and not try to preserve a paradigm that fails to fully represent the complexity of business. Those companies wishing to take this step will need a mission critical infrastructure designed for the purpose, the business process management system (BPMS), upon which they can manage their "mutable process data."

Excerpts from Business Process Management: The Third Wave, Howard Smith and Peter Fingar, ISBN 0-929652-33-9 Off-press November 2002, Meghan-Kiffer Press