[afrancis]

To me, a large part of process improvement is statistics, statistics and more statistics. I don't understand how storytelling alone, just as creating Visio diagrams alone could come up with a regime that allows one to measure, analyse, improve and control a system.

"My primary competition is non-consumption. Firms (especially fast-paced tech firms) will just bootstrap a solution using MS Visio or some other simple software application with no business intelligence behind the drawings. In other cases, firms spend a lot of money on consultants or on robust software and a team to learn how to use it. They often get lost in the process of process improvement with very little impact on the bottom line.

[ccustis]

Thanks so much for your comment! You are right, there is a mathematical component to process improvement which makes the proposed solution possible. Storytelling alone cannot foster improvement, however, storytelling is all the user will need to know how to do. By simply explaining the story of how the process currently works, the user can enlist the software to (1) translate the story into a process model using natural language processing to workflow diagram. From there, (2) artificial intelligence based on best practices and other process improvement business rules can determine how efficient that model (based on the original story) is. Then, (3) a recommendation or set of several recommendations for how the user can update the story/process can be given by the tool.

I talk a bit more about how the two (storytelling and artificial intelligence) can play a very big role in process improvement and business process management in this article:

http://bpm.com/bpm-today/blogs/1066-can-artificial-intellige...