Transformational change enabled by Information Technology (IT) has been a
fact of life in recent times - and that is unlikely to go away.
Today's organisations face the challenge of relentless change and many
struggle to proactively plan their enterprise’s evolution. How do we
plan and deliver an IT-enabled future, while adapting to the changes
wrought all around them.
It is a delight for me to be guest editor for the first issue of the Alinement Magazine for 2012 and bring together a number of different author's responses to this challenge.
To ensure interesting and diverse viewpoints, I asked colleagues from around the globe to share their thoughts on planning and delivering the IT-enabled enterprise. The response has been overwhelming, with many more articles than originally expected. As a result, I expect that I will be delivering more editions of the Alinement Magazine!
In this edition, you see different views on planning the IT-enabled future, predominantly from an Australian perspective. In a future edition, we’ll take a more global perspective, with input from Spain, Argentina, Netherlands, Portugal and other countries. Finally, we will tackle the theme of delivering the outcomes intended in the new plans for IT-enabled business.
Please take the time to consider the views of specialists in corporate governance, planning and change management, as they explore aspects of the central challenge: planning the evolution of the modern, IT-enabled enterprise.
Plato apparently said “A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers”. Having worked with successful balanced scorecards, KPI dashboards, measurement programmes with functional size measurement at its core, ISO/IEC 15504 capability level assessment baselining, one would expect that I would oppose Plato’s statement, in support of this issue’s theme.
However, I admit some disillusionment in the world of numbers. In addition to the successes I’ve experienced at my previous companies, I love to hear successful measurement stories of improvements to organisation success, productivity and frameworks. I even love to hear about the excellent quest to support practical application growing with users and not stagnating.
What has caused disillusionment is that "measures" can be less than ideal.
Measures are emotion-free snapshots:
How do we manage Nations with the marginal political victories in recent elections in Australia, US or any number of AGMs? Are they just a snapshot of the confidence we have in our elected leaders? How do we manage in the face of these akward figures? How do we get the national/organisational culture to move on and work to achieve its organisation’s goals)? Would your measurement framework cope with something equivalent to the recent Wikileaks challenge? Is it simply taking a lateral view on establishing a multi-dimensional framework to cover all governance areas? Or are such challenges just "noise" to be removed from the measures in order to keep reporting simple for your management?
Measures are qualitative, as well as quantitative.
Consider an individual's KPIs for, say "integrity" that one could never over-achieve on as a measure! Tenders have been awarded based on measurement-driven weighted spreadsheets with well-defined criteria, as well as relationships and trust ("priceless"). We recently worked with a customer to measure their capability to implement two solution options based on past process performance. The associated risks (qualitative) with each option, as well as the capability levels achieved in the past, provided a valuable indication of potential future performance.
Oliver Wendell Holmes said “Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.” Looking at maturity models and measurement, we can rephrase this as: measurement maturity is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite. As management matures from art to science, managers distil the infinite mountains of world-wide information to the most critical finite measures, making more reasoned decisions that are based on measures, but also guided by our experience and intuition.
Coming from the IT world of 1’s and 0’s, technologists can sometimes see things in black and white, and struggle to reconcile both views. Certainly customer value is a variable which obviously depends upon the customer - their needs but also their maturity in knowing what is appropriate for their situation.
Wikipedia explains that “in Chinese philosophy, the concept of yin (ying, for those less versed in the Chinese language) and yang is used to describe how polar, seemingly contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other in turn.”
In the movie What Women Want, Mel Gibson’s character begins to understand his intended ‘customer’, when he gets into their minds. In the movie, the secret seemed to be in the ability to read minds. Spending 15 years in IT, there are times I wished we had such a Star Trek Vulcan-like tool to better understand what our customers REALLY wanted. In this issue of the Alinement Magazine, we get into the minds of our IT customers, hearing from experience in the domains of measurement, security, improvement and Gen Y!
From the CIO's viewpoint, balancing technology with business value is impossible if business decisions are delegated to the CIO by virtue of them being technology-enabled investments. While they may appreciate the opportunity to implement a new ERP or upgrade a customer management system, well-governed IT needs business owners to fully appreciate the investment rationale, prior to them taking ownership and implementing the technology-enabled portion.
That being said, I am a strong advocate of standards. As you read Alain’s article, you will understand that this also revolves around value! So, what are the unwavering needs of technologists? The articles we have brought together in this issue offer us some great insight into customer drivers, as well as what technologists need to explain or do, to synthesise apparent contradictions. Customers and technologists are not yin and yang, but can create harmony if they go about it in the right way! Would customers be frightened off if we predict what they want in a Twilight Zone-like ‘What You Need’ giving them what they want before they ask for it? Imagine a world where technologists respond to customers in the way they need, but still being unwavering in what they reasonably need.. Hang on – that’s the promise of the latest hype. Maybe we shouldn’t be looking for Silver Bullets that fix the problem, but rather walking a mile in the other person’s shoes!
Tell us more about your experiences with speed, security awareness, process improvement and dealing with different aged customers – and whether you identify with Gen Y, Gen X or Baby Boomer!
Business processes represent an opportunity for dialogue about collaboration, re-engineering and automation, within, and even outside, enterprise borders. The new issue of Alinement Magazine encompasses various aspects of processes: their models, their architectures and the required leadership, that allows the capture of the core business interactions of an organization.
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is right: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” Similarly, neither a business nor its myriad stakeholders remains the same for long and processes capture this dynamic aspect of business.
While most discussion of business processes (Six-Sigma, for example) focuses on customer interactions, modeling an organization’s internal processes can be as important as its external processes. The services offered by the IT department are a case in point, with Service Management frameworks like ITIL bringing them to business visibility, ensuring they can no longer be circumvented by the rest of the organization. Proper evaluation of these services is essential in order to show the value that IT can bring to the organization (as shown in Rahul Mohod's article). The need for IT departments to measure, and sell, their services and capabilities becomes clear when they have to compete for survival in times of mergers and acquisitions, or stave off the threat of outsourcing.
Even as we struggle to address the full implications, businesses have become heavily reliant upon software and IT. In this context, the Business Motivational Model (BMM – see Mark Walsh’s article) provides a valuable resource for organization's looking to transition to a process-based enterprise. The close relationship between processes and IT suggests that business process is not far removed from a software process. The Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) or, alternatively UML’s use cases and activity graphs, can be used to model a series of increasingly complex business processes that might then be enabled by IT. Excellence in process modeling not only serves to document the end-user interactions and aid in their optimization, it can also help to identify business priorities for IT automation, helping separate business needs from wants.
The value of an enterprise-level process architecture arises from the insights it can provide executive management and the promise of “creative and frictionless action”. Business intelligence (BI) embraces this concept by incrementally sifting through data, processes and corporate knowledge to create a dynamic matrix that brings together otherwise unrelated (or siloed) information. As argued by Tiwary, BI can also expand its horizons to include collaborative intelligence that takes the concept of BI beyond one organization. The key to future business success is to see beyond simply competition, and use the concepts and technologies of business intelligence to achieve collaborative intelligence.
These different facets of business process show why it is a driving force for innovation in the enterprise. And as we continue to use IT to enable, support and automate the execution of these processes, efficient business processing becomes a reality.
Tough business times are not new. What is new is the rapidity with which economic difficulties can appear on the horizon and engulf our businesses. Alvin Toffler, a few decades ago, predicted that not only are we inundated with change, but also the rate of change is increasing. Therefore, the need to base our business on a robust suite of fundamentals that would help it sustain through tough times is essential.
Furthermore, synergy between the myriad elements that make up the organization – typically the leadership, the analysts who understand, model and optimize the operations, and the business as well as information technology (IT) strategies of the organization, amongst others – is another crucial element of a organization that, if engendered correctly, can help it weather storms such as the current Global Financial Crises.
The latest issue of the Alinement Magazine is squarely focused on these fundamental aspects of business. This issue develops the idea of close cooperation between business and technology in a extremely practical way. The three authors who have contributed to this issue, are highly respected, experienced and pragmatic professionals covering the business and IT domain. All have indepth understanding of both the business and technology aspects of organizations and have been practicing as well as advising organizations on their business and IT strategies.
Firstly, Keith Sherringham, a highly experienced IT consultant with a flair for writing, discusses seven business fundamentals for tough economic times. While stressing that these are not necessarily new, Keith presents them succinctly and reminds us of the need to adhere to them especially when the going is rough. Keith also discusses the reasons why and how these fundamentals work in practice.
Dale Nott then takes us into the interesting area of business sustainability and agility – as against pure software agility. Dale’s wide ranging experience together with his BPM work at Cinergi, comes to the fore in this article. To start with, Dale describes the business rules, process controls and metrics that make up BPM. This is followed by a succinct description of the challenges in implementing BPM and practical discussion on how to handle those challenges.
Finally, Satish Chandar takes a plunge in the field of authoring by outlining his vision of business analysis in sync with both business and IT strategies. Based on his wide-ranging experience, Satish takes us through the activities of a BA that can add direct value to business and IT strategies – such as clarifications and demystification, engaging with the organizational leadership and stakeholders and keeping the context of the IT strategies firmly in mind. Appropriate risks associated with this approach and how to ameliorate them are suitably highlighted.
This is a must read issue for all of us who are keen to learn from the experience reports of peers and who would like to bring about positive changes within our organizations that would enable them to survive and prosper in our turbulent economic times.
There are a couple of thoughts related to the cooking theme that have visited me lately .... a result of having to nurse an injured foot and so watching too much TV perhaps?
Anyway, has the efficiency of TV chefs ever amazed you and got you thinking about process efficiency and improvement? There is no doubt that the presenters manage to prepare any recipe in a flash and get a lot done in the kitchen in their allotted time .... certainly more than any home-cook could expect to achieve.
On closer inspection however, there are a few, somewhat obvious tricks that the TV shows use and I'm not just referring to the classic line: "Here's one I prepared earlier!" No, I found two main things that contributed to their speed and efficiency in whipping up lavish dishes in a few minutes: 1. All the ingredients were readily at hand 2. All bowls and utensils were out and ready to whip, chop, blend, dice ..... whatever was needed!
Even where there were no edits and the show was presented (pretty much) in real-time, it is the fact that everything is just there, right at their finger tips, that allows for massive productivity.
So the lesson I take away from this is that some activities/ processes are slow not because of anything intrinsically to do with the task itself. It is slow because of the logistics that needs to support the performance of the task. This will be nothing new to those familiar with managing or coordinating manufacturing processes where the supply chain can naturally become a key, limiting aspect of production .... but those of us who are knowledge workers often forget resource and other dependencies need to be managed before a particular activity can be performed efficiently.
Process definition that does not take into account the supporting tasks (take out the ingredients, assemble and plug in the blender, etc.) will not be fully representative of what has to be done ..... and therefore may miss opportunities for improvement. Having spent a large part of the weekend looking for a presentation that I had done a few years ago, I can attest to the time wasted in simply gathering the elements needed to do/make/cook-up something new.
In discussing the current state of projects in a large enterprise with an ex-colleague, he shared a shocking revelation with me.
He sounded incredulous: Did you know that there are TWO project managers for every project? One a business and the other an IT project manager!?!
This obviously shows that my friend has had a somewhat sheltered existence, somewhat removed from the realities of today's large projects. The shelter was provided by a vendor of project management tools no less, where he worked as a tool evangelist. So another example it seems, of preaching the good word but not being fully aware of what is happening in the trenches!
I could not resist and replied in an equally surprised tone: That’s amazing! You ONLY have two project managers?
The fact is there are so many different management roles in a project today it is hard to get excited about those with a project manager title. What about a Program Manager .... and all those Development Managers? Isn’t there a Release Manager around somewhere too? Perhaps there are a couple of Change Managers on the project? What about a Business Implementation Manager? .... the list can go on. You have to wonder - what do all these folk do?
The fact is that the more people there are on a project, the more interactions there are (the old n! problem) and the more meetings and the more reporting .... etc. etc. Maybe one should not complain. All that employment is good for the economy.
The Alinement Network is marking a major milestone with Bhuvan Unhelkar of MethodScience coming on board as the editor of the Alinement Magazine. In agreeing to edit at least three issues of the magazine, we can look forward to Bhuvan’s exceptional grasp of the current issues effecting business and IT. Bhuvan is also a contributor to the Alinement Magazine with a thoughtful article on the pros and cons of UML modelling that can be found here.
Bhuvan has chosen the following themes for upcoming issues: • Business Essentials in Turbulent Times • Process Analysis • Change Management
If you would like to contribute an article or commentary on the above themes, or generally provide some thoughts, please feel free to comment below, or simply e-mail us: editors at alinement dot net.
In their book entitled "IT Savvy" (see all new experimental Amazon sidebar below) Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross have done something that does us all a favour. The subtitle "What Top Executives Must Know to Go From Pain to Gain," is brilliant positioning for which we should all be grateful.
Most experienced practitioners know that the problems enterprises have in delivering new business capabilities cannot ALL come from IT's lousy project execution. Some part of the
blame for the low rate of project success must come from the ever urgent demands
of the customer, who in the name of "business imperative" wreak havoc
with any attempt to create a coherent enterprise architecture.
It should come as no surprise then that the authors penned an earlier book entitled
"Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for
Business Execution" - which oddly does NOT get referenced in the "IT Savvy"
book. Could it be that they do not want to show where they are taking
the executives? Certainly recrafting enterprise architecture as an
"Operating Model" and aiming to establish a "Digitized Platform" for
the business attempts to soften IT jargon.
Maybe using more business acceptable terminology is a lesson we can
all learn. In the meantime, all power to any attempt at educating
executives on how to make their IT more of a strategic asset.
The annual New York Time's feature covering "The Year in Ideas" an interesting read and highly recommended.
But there was an entry on the success of Massively Collaborative Mathematics that particularly impressed me ... and is relevant to the wider goals of this site. This entry describes how, as an experiment in collaboration, a mathematician challenged the readers of his blog to tackle an intractable mathematical problem .... which they amazingly went on to solve!!!!
Now, that is food for thought. If we can solve something like a mathematical problem maybe this whole "wisdom of the crowd" is not so far fetched. Maybe in future the expression "group-think" will start to lose it negative connotations?
Thinking how one might use this technique to solve enterprise management issues I came up with the following:
First there has to be the availability of the individual "brains". The mathematician concerned (Timothy Gower, a Cambridge mathematician and Fields medalist) had a very select following on his blog and so had the necessary "processing-units" available.
Second, not all problems can be expected to be suited to massively collaborative techniques. Gower's thesis was that mathematical problem-solving was largely a process of elimination and so many brains could reduce the possible outcomes until the final solution was reached. Much like computer architectures, not all types of computations are suited to parallel processing so we have to have a suitable problem.
Next, and most importantly, you have to have some coordinating body to keep track of the parallel results from all the different processes and to essentially direct/initiate the next set of processes. This of course sounds a lot like "central control" which some people might think is an anethama to collaborative techniques. But I see no contradiction here, and think this is a great example of the facilitative management that is essential to get the coherence needed in all the massive-parallelism that is taking place. So the challenge is to have just enough control to ensure the collaboration is coordinated and directed to the problem at hand.
This is not far off all the experimentation some businesses are doing with Social Media - both internally and through better engagement with their customer-base. Other examples of successful collaboration of indepenent groups is of course all those open-source initiatives that are around.
So presuming we can find the necessary processing-units through a site like this, and we can achieve the facilitative management approach working, the question that remains is: What activites geared to Enterprise Coherence could be suseptible to this approach?
Plato apparently said “A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers”. Having worked with successful balanced scorecards, KPI dashboards, measurement programmes with functional size measurement at its core, ISO/IEC 15504 capability level assessment baselining, one would expect that I would oppose Plato’s statement, in support of this issue’s theme.
eading edge technology to stay competitive does not mean that it is a driver for every customer. Technologists should allow and encourage customers to make that decision themselves (see 
Business processes represent an opportunity for dialogue about collaboration, re-engineering and automation, within, and even outside, enterprise borders. The new issue of Alinement Magazine encompasses various aspects of processes: their models, their architectures and the required leadership, that allows the capture of the core business interactions of an organization.
Tough business times are not new. What is new is the rapidity with which economic difficulties can appear on the horizon and engulf our businesses. Alvin Toffler, a few decades ago, predicted that not only are we inundated with change, but also the rate of change is increasing. Therefore, the need to base our business on a robust suite of fundamentals that would help it sustain through tough times is essential.
There are a couple of thoughts related to the cooking theme that have visited me lately .... a result of having to nurse an injured foot and so watching too much TV perhaps?
In discussing the current state of projects in a large enterprise with an ex-colleague, he shared a shocking revelation with me.
The Alinement Network is marking a major milestone with Bhuvan Unhelkar of 
The annual New York Time's feature covering "