Loading ...Organizational Transformation – the missing key
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:
- 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;
- “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;
- “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
There are many excellent blogs and other resources on the Internet which explore methodologies and Best Practices for business process re-engineering, project management, systems implementation, software engineering, and change management. However I could not find much help with unlocking value of integrated utilization of these disciplines to facilitate Organizational Transformation. In this blog I would like to focus on this subject. I would like to stress that this is not an academic inquiry, but a practitioner's desire to discuss and share practical business knowledge and Best Practices. Let's see how it evolves - "Every brilliant idea quickly degenerates into a lot of hard work" - Peter Drucker.