Digitization represents a revolution that may be the greatest opportunity for growth that our company has ever seen.
-GE 2001 Annual Report.

In The Max Strategy, Dale Dauten tells some interesting stories about Walt Disney, or "Uncle Walt," as he liked to be called. Now there was a man fizzing with intelligence. Someone once asked Walt about his "secret" and he said this: "Do something so well that people will pay to see you do it again."

There's a scene in Snow White where Snow is standing beside a well. And she tells a flock of doves that it's a wishing well. She demonstrates, saying something like "I wish my prince would come." Then, we see her as if from the bottom of the well, right through the water. We watch her face, shimmering in the surface of the water, as drops of water fall into the well and create ripples moving out. Now imagine drawing a shimmering face reflected in water that's rippling out in circles. Imagine how hard that would be, especially since this was long before computer
animation.

As workers and as consumers, both online and offline, we are each enveloped by a myriad business processes, the intricate, dynamic, ever-changing manifestations of the economic activity of companies. Whether we are disinterested or actively engaged in these processes in large part determines the wealth of those who weave them. Companies are looking for secrets, skills and tools that will enable them to create and mesh together business processes that are so outstanding that customers will "pay to see them" time and time again.

Like Uncle Walt, companies are not lacking in imagination, but unlike The Walt Disney Company in 1937 that could afford to employ a thousand animators, companies today cannot afford to be distracted by the labor-intensive animation process. To create the compelling business processes they so desperately seek, companies are now looking for the business-process equivalent of Pixar's computer-assisted animation methods-the ones Disney now uses. This book is the end of their search.

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