Recently I published Full-Stack Processes Part 1, which is my response to a thoughtful piece called “The Full-Stack Employee” by Chris Messina. (You can read either of them for a description of a Full-Stack Employee [FSE].) My main conclusions were:
- FSEs are often the missing element in failed or struggling process initiatives
- The FSE will become essential to enterprises as they start the transformation into becoming a digital enterprise
I foresee FSEs affecting the process world from two vectors. First, FSEs will become the primary process creators in the digital enterprise (covered in this blog). Second, as a process consumer, FSEs will demand far more process flexibility and many organizations will struggle with this evolution (stay tuned for Full-Stack Processes Part 3).
The Full-Stack Process Creator
As your business evolves into a digital enterprise, it makes sense that your business processes and their supporting platforms need to evolve with it. What I had not thought about until I read Messina's article is that employees are evolving for the digital enterprise as well.
Messina originally states, “Full-stack employees can’t put blinders on once they land a job; instead they must stay up on developments in their industry and others, because they know that innovation is found at the boundaries between disciplines, not by narrowly focusing in one sphere.”
Organizations will need to reimagine how they operate to transform into a digital enterprise. This transformation will require more than just automating existing processes and doing what has always been done; they will need to evolve and digitalize them. The FSE’s penchant for innovation and understanding of the big picture is what I think will propel them to be the primary process creators for the digital enterprise.
Organizations are looking for different benefits from process digitalization than they are from traditional process automation. Process automation’s focus is on efficiency, agility, compliance, and transparency. With digitalization, organizations want to innovate rapidly to differentiate and evolve their business… into digital businesses. To accommodate both sets of benefits and underlying business goals, new categories and styles of processes must be utilized. The needs of the FSE as a process creator and innovator are supported by these new process categories and styles.
Innovation through experimentation will be one of the FSE’s favored methods for process creation, which will require rapid and Agile process designing methods. Contextual processes (a.k.a. case management) and business apps (a.k.a. smart process apps) are new process styles very well suited to this due to not having to create the entire solution during the first iteration. This Agile process methodology gives the FSE an opportunity to learn more about how the knowledge workers are processing and interacting with the solution, and to build it up over time.
FSEs will also favor low-code app solutions, since they are not full developers, yet possess enough skills to configure and use common technologies such as CSS, JavaScript, or HTML tags. The FSE can quickly design, configure, and deploy use-case specific apps and solutions to experiment with new processes, solutions, products, and services with little involvement from the enterprise engineers or IT. Low-code business apps and contextual processes will support the FSE’s innovation through experimentation efforts that will usher in the digitalized processes required to become the digital enterprise.
Stay tuned for Full-Stack Processes Part 3 where I will be covering FSE as a process consumer.