My friend, all theory is gray, and the Golden tree of life is green.
-Goethe

While each scientific theory selects out and abstracts from the world's complexity a peculiar set of relations, philosophy cannot favor any particular region of human en-terprise. Through conceptual experimentation it must construct a consistency that can accommodate all dimensions of experience, whether they belong to physics, physiology, psychology, biology or ethics.
-Alfred North Whitehead

The third wave is not a new management theory. Rather, it supports, accelerates and amplifies existing approaches to management. To illustrate this we consider the application of BPM to the processes of Six Sigma and Change Management. Then we visit the measure by which process management itself is measured, Return on Process Investment, and go on to envision how management theory will evolve.

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Six Sigma is a management technique that aims at developing and delivering near-perfect products and services. It has been claimed that Six Sigma is only useful for problems that are "hard to find, but easy to fix"--as contrasted with the radical reengineering approach, whose
advocates focus on problems that are "easy to find, but hard to fix."

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Measure activity. A BPM process can express the DMAIC data collection plan precisely, whether it involves analysis of a single element or of many elements from across multiple systems. It can also immediately start to collect the data from the operational systems and work patterns under study in a fully automated manner and on a regular basis. Metrics data will be more valid and more accurate as a result of being collected automatically.

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The objective of including process management systems in a Six Sigma initiative is to help organizations deepen their focus on processes, include automated systems, and take change off the critical path altogether. With BPM, even companies that have never applied Six Sigma may do so easily. We believe process management should merge into the corporate background-no more thought about than the use of email today. Some are predicting the possibility for BPM not only to build in change, but to build in process and quality improvement as well.

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Aside from processing costs, time-to-market is the key factor that makes the change management process so critical. Most manufacturing companies complain about the time that it takes to process a change request--a change order, a notice, or the like. It can take weeks to turn one around when they actually need it in days or hours. According to one estimate, the average cost of processing a paper-based change request is $2,500. Companies that fail to adapt their products and services quickly to changing market demand incur considerable opportunity costs that can spell the difference between success and failure. Change management is central to that adaptability. What's more, changes that occur early in the product design cycle are far less costly than those implemented later on, when product changes have broader implications for the entire supply chain. Using BPM to implement an electronic change management process across the supply chain allows problems to be addressed early on and reduces cycle times significantly.

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Measurements can be made by asking questions which point to associated metrics-whose answers demonstrate a measurable impact on the business. A balanced scorecard approach is useful in formulating the right questions because it's important not only to measure things right, but also to measure the right things. For example: What if this process could be deployed within this time frame? What if this process could be deployed within this budget? What will it cost to design and implement this new business process using our current change manage-ment methods as compared with third-wave methods? What if this process could be fully automated? What if this process could be tailored to each customer's needs? What if this process could be completed in one day instead of three? What if this process could be updated on a daily basis? What if this process could be executed with ten times fewer errors? What if this process could involve these business partners? The total cost/benefit picture is an aggregate of the following factors:

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Management theory emerges in response to major changes in the bigger world in which companies operate. For example, Fredrick Taylor's theories arose in response to the early days of the Industrial Revo-lution. The Chaordic Commons, a network of researchers and practitioners that study the application of chaos and complexity theory to organ-izational design, take inspiration from Dee Hock, founder and CEO emeritus of Visa International. Some claim that it was he who first con-ceived of a global system for the electronic exchange of value. The group attributes the success of Visa-that now links in excess of 20,000 financial institutions, 14 million merchants, and 600 million consumers in 220 countries-with a Chaordic form of organizational design.

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In Brian Arthur's work at the Santa Fe Institute he points to the problem of examining the resulting trajectories of individual participants and emphasizes the discovery of structure, and the processes through which structure emerges, across different levels of the organization. The study of such distributed multi-participant processes, grid-like systems, emergence, chaos and self-organization are going to set the stage for the theoretical work that will underpin the scientific application of third-wave process management over the coming decade. For business people don't want to have to change and then re-deploy "applications," no matter who, business or IT, does the associated work. Ultimately end users of technology just want business processes to be able to change. In the third wave, the business process is the self-organizing app! What would Fredrick Taylor-arguably the world's first management consultant and practitioner of time-and-motion studies make of all this? What new "killer management theories" can be envisioned? How do we calculate their ROI?

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