This is the name of Ron ‘Tater Salad’ White’s comedy show and it made me think - is it actually true?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8suVjclu8Zo[/youtube]

Can application of business process fix stupid? After a period of reasonable deliberation, I have come to the conclusion that Ron is right, they don’t call him “Tater Salad” for nothing. Even BPR can’t fix stupid, but it can eliminate it.

Nine weeks ago I ordered an audio adapter for my Blackberry Media Player, which never worked as advertised, from Seidio (seidioonline.com). After a long wait I called them and found out that they misspelled my address and the package was returned to them by USPS. After waisting half an hour of my time validating my address they assured me that I will have it in a few days. A couple of weeks passed with no package in sight, and I called them again, but nobody could explain the mystery of the missing package. I asked to cancel my order and to return the payment to my credit card, but was begged to wait just a little longer. Week later I filed a dispute for the charges with my credit card provider and completely gave up an idea of stereo sound coming blissfully from my Blackberry. Last night I got an email from Seidio, telling me that the package was returned again by USPS and requiring to validate the address. Imagine that to my surprise they shipped it now to my billing address and made 2 errors in it.

You probably wonder, as I do - how difficult would it be to automatically grab the addresses from the web form completed by a Customer to print shipping labels?

Sandy Kemsley in her Column2.com blog touched on the issue I would like to explore:

“Another issue is that the business tended to abdicate their responsibility for stating what they need to IT, so IT had to just make some guesses about it (which never works out all that well). Now, much like Connie Moore’s earlier comments on how business and IT need to be blended, not aligned, Phillips said much the same thing about breaking down the barriers between business and IT.”

The terminology, used in IT environment to describe business processes improvement and automation initiatives, is pretty telling – the IT talks to “Business” to understand “their” requirements to build software applications, test them, and “deliver” them to “users”, who are rarely happy with the results. Now, as a true believer in Neurolinguistic Programming, I will try to analyze the implications of this language use:

1. There are two parties to this initiative them (business) and us (IT), and in the best case scenario our interests are aligned, which means they are not really the same;
2. “Business” communicating requirements to IT, implies that “business users” truly understand how existing processes may and can be improved and automated. This assumption on a part of IT is a very dangerous one at best, because the development of a meaningful process improvement strategy and implementation of this strategy with an appropriate technology requires efforts of multi-discipline professionals, and leadership perspective, that most organizations do not have an access to internally. The “business users”, who are interviewed by IT business analysts, are certainly quite knowledgeable about the processes currently employed by their business units, and may have some valuable ideas for their improvement, but they rarely have appreciation of effect their requirements on end-to-end organizational process flows between the business units, technology ramifications, and over-all application thought leadership required to produce positive ROI;
3. “Deliver” implies supplier/customer relationship and by extension denial of responsibility for overall success or failure, and explain lack of satisfaction with the results.

I want to make very clear, that this is not a rant about qualifications and quality of people involved - for the purpose of this discussion I assume that we are talking about competent professionals of high integrity, who are not completely focused on politics (see Seven antidotes to the caustic politics of IT failure). I believe that common methodologies used to define, justify, and execute these initiatives are fundamentally flawed, and as such produces unacceptably low yield of success.

There is nothing as useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.
Peter Drucker

I believe the missing key is thought leadership, a holistic approach to Organizational Transformation that promotes integrated methodology of clear statement of goals, agreed set of metrics, which would allow to optimize business processes to the stated goals, change management program to assure adoption, application design focused on support of the change management program, technological implementation of software to support the application, contextual process/application training program to support adoption, and finally – compliance performance monitoring to assure that the investment is actually achieved.

“Wire cutters? Damage to five underwater cables that caused internet outages across the Middle East and Asia may have been an act of sabotage, the International Telecommunication Union says. “Some experts doubt the prevailing view that the cables were cut by accident, especially as the cables lie at great depths under the sea and are not passed over by ships,” its head of development said.

I don’t know whether we will ever find out exactly what or who caused this damage to the Internet infrastructure, but it is well documented that outsourced service providers as well as software development centers in the Middle East, China and India experienced serious downtime. What I wonder about is the economic impact on companies like Vipro, their customers, and other software companies with significant development presence in affected areas, such as Accenture (ACN), Cadence Design Systems (CDN), etc. I will keep looking for subsequent estimates and assessments of risk from attacks on infrastructure.

It also may be interesting to look at a possible impact on SaaS customers in these geographic areas, although it is not clear how many there are and what business processes are being supported by them.