| Backgrounder: |
Background - poor perfromance in Business IT alignment
Businesses and governments are universally focused on trying to “improve” the business process, eliminating unnecessary time and cost, improving quality and predictability, reducing waste and variation.
Much of this “improvement” has been aided and abetted by IT – thanks to a combination of modern computing and modern communication – any process that is easy to automate has been or is being automated, any process that is easy to move to another country with a lower cost base has been r is being moved. And a few things have been automated or off-shored that should never have been.
But there are two major problems with this agenda. Firstly, there is huge frustration with IT in general. Businesses often experience IT not as an aid to change but a hindrance to change. Secondly, there are growing questions whether it is the right agenda for the 21st century. (Not just doing things right, but doing the right things.)
One problem has always been the gradual onset of inflexibility. Automation always carries a risk – in optimizing a business process to the current requirements you may make future change more difficult. A simple manual procedure done in your own office may not be the most cost-efficient, but at least you can make changes fairly quickly. Delegate the same procedure to a computer, or to a call center in Bangalore, and it may take weeks or even months to change anything. This is the trade-off between adaptation (efficiency) and adaptability (flexibility).
Another problem arises when people talk about doing things to The Business Process, (or perhaps The Value Chain). The BPM industry offers us plenty of tools for modelling, monitoring and managing one business process at a time. But much of the challenge of business process management in large enterprises comes not from trying to orchestrate a single process, but to choreograph multiple processes.
For example, a company may have a Customer Relationship Management process dealing with customers, and a Product Planning process dealing with new product development. Should these two processes be managed separately, or should they be joined up somewhere? How can we tell? Certainly not from inspecting models of one process at a time.
For another example, an entertainment park (think Disney or Universal) might traditionally have had one process for resource allocation (e.g. sending staff to specific zones in response to real-time events), and an entirely separate process for resource planning (e.g. deciding how many staff you are going to need tomorrow). As it happens, both Disney and Universal are implementing new ways of synchronizing processes of this kind, supported by real-time business intelligence1.
If we look at any two processes side by side, we may be able to find places where separate processes could be joined together. Conversely, if we look at a single complicated process, we may be able to find places where the process could be broken into two or three stand-alone processes. But if there are dozens of processes, there could be thousands of different ways these processes could be joined and unjoined, synchronized or desynchronized. So the real challenge is not to generate a proliferation of process alternatives but to produce an interconnecting set of processes that deliver the business goals in an efficient and flexible manner. |
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