No, it’s not because it’s fun to push down stairs (alone or in pairs). Your organization is like a slinky because it’s a flexible entity that expands and contracts, is often completely unpredictable, and it is all too easy to get into a completely tangled and unmanageable state.
Complex Relationships Make Flexibility Difficult
As far as organizational flexibility and unpredictability goes, organizations rarely operate in a strictly hierarchical manner, but that is how they are described in a corporate directory. In the real world, most companies operate with an ever-changing set of complex relationships between departments, people, systems, roles, virtual teams, and geographies. This is common across all industries and is fully supported by the independent and flexible organization model in ActiveMatrix BPM.
Different industries and business models deal with varying degrees of organizational elasticity. Some of the most extreme examples of elastic organizations are retail and retail banking that open and close stores and branches regularly. In the past, this expansion and contraction had to be addressed by large amounts of custom code that, over time, led to the dreaded tangled slinky; it is occasionally recoverable, but not always—and certainly not fun.
Easily Adaptable Processes
One of the many new features of ActiveMatrix BPM 3.0 is the built-in zero-coding support that accommodates elastic organizations and alleviates the tangled state that custom coding brings.
With ActiveMatrix BPM, business processes can locate and interact with locations that have been open for four days just as easily as those that have been open for four years. Locations can be opened and closed seamlessly without interrupting the implemented processes. The locations/branches are mapped and resolved at runtime, and so are the employees. At runtime, ActiveMatrix BPM also evaluates and resolves employees assigned to each of the regions and branches, as well as their positions or groups.
ActiveMatrix BPM detangles the slinky by enabling you to have a single business process that can deliver work to the manager at Branch 109 just as easily as the manager of the new pop-up location, Branch 4823, and only presents employees with work relevant to the location they are assigned to.
Check out this short video to see how ActiveMatrix BPM 3.0 supports elastic organizations and prevents tangled slinky syndrome.
