By Jonathan Crow
We've been here at the Gartner ITXpo
Emerging Trends conference in Las Vegas this week. The show has been
very well attended and exceeded my expectations. But, I wanted to take
a moment out of our time pitching to attendees to talk about some of
the conversations that are being had here.
First off, in one session Andy Kyte talked about why leaders place IT
Strategy before Business Strategy. This is a conversation near and dear
to to our hearts. What we have been preaching is better collaboration
between the business and IT groups. And the fact is that we provide the
tools to facilitate that collaboration - a single tool that can be used
by both to build and deploy processes.
Andy Kyte talked mostly about IT assets and how decisions are made
within the organization to spend money on IT resources. But I found a
lot of what he was saying applies to how decisions are made within the
organization about Business Processes.
Some very provocative and interesting comments (and humorous, he really was quite entertaining):
It is exceptional to find people at the top of the org chart who are leaders.
The cultural myth is that bad cheese is the starting point for good
strategy (leader gets up in the middle of the night because of the bad
cheese and the muse gives him/her the inspiration to build the
strategy). Moses comes down from the mountain to bring strategy to the
masses. Obviously it doesn't happen in the real world.
Waiting for the business strategy doesn't work, but going on with IT strategy in the lead doesn't work either.
So, what do you do? We need a new vision for how IT and Business
leaders collaborate. There is an assumption by the Business world of
how agile the IT world is, and how fast the technology can change to
match what the vision is. The gap between the assumption and reality is
what kills us. While Kyte was discussing, in the main asset planning,
we find this equally true in the BPM space. In traditional BPM tools
when the tech staff develops the process, because they are using
different tools than the ones used by the business analyst, there is a
disconnect. When the process is developed in Intalio both groups use
the same tool. We have seen cases when the techie went to the business
user and showed where the the process was defined, and where there is a
break in the process because, for example, the data is not there to
support the process. So, instead of showing the underlying gobbledygook
code the business user sees the graphical tool for mapping data and can
clearly understand the disconnect.
Businesses go through customization and integration for applications
that are about to go through upgrades, all because of the budget cycle.
We in the business community are very bad at terminating bad
applications. The equivalent in the business process world is how
processes are defined, written in stone, transformed into code for
execution and locked into deployment. What is needed is flexibility in
being able to design and deploy on the fly (hmm, how coincidental is it
that we do that?).
There is a need to create a well defined knowledge base used to support
the decision making processes a living strategy that informs the
realities of the business vision and where we are in relationship to
the vision and is continuously revised. A longer term view gives us a
better understanding what is possible and what is desired and limits
the gap between the two. Create a shorthand notation which is
digestible by all not something pulled out once a year that is
monolithic. In the BPM space there can be a huge disconnect between the
business users and the IT analysts. Having people work within the same
tools gives each group visibility into what is desired and what is
possible. Within our modeling tool we give ability to annotate the
various steps within a process, or even attach documents. This allows
both camps to build a common language, in essence a living knowledge
base of the process that can be easily modified.
There is conflict between stakeholders. There is nothing wrong with
conflict. There is everything wrong with undocumented conflict.
Understand the wants demand and needs of the stakeholders, but also
understand that it is impossible to fully satisfy everyone. We should
follow the Japanese model of arguing before the decision and agreeing
after the decision is made, instead of the model here of letting one
side dominate and ignoring the decision after. Well, not sure how to
rectify the cultural aspects in a BPM tool;) but good advice.
So what have you seen? Is there a disconnect between Bus. and IT in
your organization? How have you handled it? Are there ways we could
better address the issue?
Look for more discussions at Gartner ITXpo on the blog tomorrow.
Source: Intalio
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