Perceptive processes - making sense of business as-it-will-be

Businesses are getting better and better at providing technology to support "doing" processes. But what happens when managers need to undertake "thinking" processes, asks Jyoti Banerjee? In answering the question, Jyoti proposes that we recognise a distinct group of business processes that he calls perceptive processes.

There are many different kinds of processes in an organisation. Traditionally, processes have been divided into two categories: transactional or non-transactional. Although that is helpful in terms of identifying which processes need to dealt with by computerised transaction-processing systems, the distinction seems incomplete in an era when almost all processes can be handled by computers.

It is still useful, though, to distinguish between different types of processes. This paper suggests that all kinds of processes in an organisation may be categorised into two different types:
* Learned processes
* Perceptive processes

These two modes of processes are rather analogous to the distinction that psychologists make between experiential cognition and reflective cognition in human thinking. To put it differently, this categorisation separates "doing"€processes from "thinking" processes.