I/S Resource Group: Aligning Technology with Business

Aligning Technology with Business - In A Nutshell...

Aligning Business and Technology is still an elusive dream in so many organizations. This is largely because of all the rapid-fire changes in both Business and Technology. Bold new ideas, buzzwords and hype from vendors, authors, and media create excitement and confusion:

Service Oriented Architectures
Business Transformation
Wireless RFI
CRM
Globalization
BAM & BI

The list of new acronyms seems endless, partly explaining why it’s so easy to lose focus. To regain focus, let me present a very simplified overview of how many organizations have been achieving business - technology alignment -- In a nutshell…

A Vision of Change

“You’ll never get anywhere if you don’t have a goal” is such a cliché. Every parent passes it on to their children. Yet most technology projects fail because they do not have a clear vision of the end result. The lack of a clear vision is like a gaping, yet unseen, wound. It leaves the project open to all sorts of problems – scope creep, loss of support, fixes that fail, and analysis paralysis - to name a few.

Successful technology projects have a vision of the business as it will be at the successful conclusion. A clear vision, “warts and all”, complete with the expected business value and the impact on all the stakeholders. This vision clearly compares the current business situation (the “As Is”) to the desired business situation (the “To Be”) and it is expressed at three levels – Business Performance, Business Process, and Technology.

Business Performance

Business Performance - delivery of value to customers and benefits to stockholders, employees, vendors, and the community – is the business of business. Performance is not just financial. It comprises all the measures that indicate how well the business and its components are functioning, even subjective measures like community goodwill and customer satisfaction.

Successful technology projects are rooted in a compelling desire to change the business to reach a clearly envisioned target state. Performance measures provide a clear basis for expressing that change. Each Objective describes a specific, measurable, and realistic change to a single business performance measure and the timeframe for the change to be accomplished. Objectives set the direction and destination for business process change and can be used to measure progress.

Business Process

A Business Process is an interdependent collaboration of defined activities, people, and technologies that create and deliver outputs (products and/or services) of value to customers (internal and external). Every business has processes but not every business recognizes their existence. Rather, many focus on jobs and people performance to achieve progress. That limited focus ignores the interconnections between parts of the business…and those interconnections are frequently the source of problems.

Business Processes are defined, described and documented, most often, via a graphic process map. The map helps everyone involved in the process to see themselves as part of that collaboration. Improvement teams review the “As Is” process. They identify the process changes that must be made to achieve the performance change objectives. The summation of these changes defines a target vision for the new business process – the “To Be” process. That vision is based upon some expectations of technologies being in place to enable improved processes. These expectations are documented and published as the technology requirements.

Technology

New or revised technology almost always has an impact upon business process and performance. If that impact is planned for, expected, and in a desirable direction, then the technology is generally well received. Technology changes that fit this optimal profile include those resulting from performance targeted business process analysis. The alternative is the all-too-common situation of technology change without consideration of business process impact or without sufficient integration with performance objectives.

Two efforts work in parallel: technology deployment and business process preparation. The technology deployment effort involves acquiring and/or developing, installing, configuring, and testing the technology components. The business process preparation effort involves the business changes required to prepare to adopt the “To Be” process design and its supporting technologies. The business process preparation may involve job definition and workflow changes, business procedure changes, definition or changing of business rules, or even physical rearrangements.

The two parallel efforts - Business and Technology- culminate in new business practices using new technology as envisioned by the business. Both efforts are directed by the clearly articulated business performance targets. This is Business – Technology alignment…In a nutshell.