David Heidt, a Managing Partner at Enterprise Agility, works with Fortune 1000 clients in the areas of business process analysis, requirements management, iterative development and implementation of enterprise solutions using model-driven development. Heidt is also President of the Chicago Chapter of The Association of Business Process Management Professionals.
Heidt maintains that business/IT alignment, or the lack thereof, is seen as the number one problem in IT today. An example would be the “death march,” IT projects that are doomed almost from the start. Poor business alignment is marked by frustration and poor communication between business and IT. There is an adversarial relationship between the two. Examples of this frustration include:
- Requirements analysis is often not completed in time to allow for design, coding and testing within the set timeframes
- Testing is a substantial cost associated with making maintenance changes
- IT has a backlog of activities with a large portion of it being maintenance leaving little time for new development
- IT works towards self-improvement but often is unable to fund the efforts
- The business side is skeptical IT’s ability to estimate and pushes hard to get what it wants
- Business creativity and new ideas are stifled by the inability to change rapidly
- Impact analysis is too complex and takes too long
- The business is unclear on how it works and relies on IT to tell it
- There is a significant amount of exceptions and manual processing necessary
All these frustrations result in costly errors, mistakes, lost customers, and lost market share.
The causes of this are:
- Poor business/IT collaboration
- Inadequate methods and skill sets
- Dependency on rigid silo legacy systems
- Poorly understood, monolithic business processes
The solution is to embrace a convergence of new technology enablers. These include business rules management and business process orchestration with Service-Oriented Architecture. Rules-driven business process management is the primary enabler for convergence to increase both direct and indirect ROI.
The four areas to address when fixing the collaboration dysfunction are:
- Addressing the processes and rules interdependency
- Modeling the business for process orchestration
- Fixing the business analyst role
- Ensuring the business manages the business rules
The business rules are just as important as the business processes and if the process models aren’t linked to the business rules, it does not give a good representation of an organization’s operations. Business rules are interdependent with the business processes. In process analysis, often the business rules are considered an after thought. Representing rules in the tools that exist today is a challenge.
Process orchestration is different from process automation. Process orchestration is the flow and sequencing determined by the interpretation of the business rules and policies and can involve interrelated events and activities that reside in other applications and systems. The goal of process orchestration is to duplicate the behavior of the actual business environment. Most business process modeling initiatives don’t accurately represent the complexity of the business or the business events. Poor process modeling is evidenced by a large percentage of exception handling and manual processing.
The role of the business systems analyst is very important. The analyst has to bridge the divide between business and IT, working as a facilitator and advocate to bring reality into the analyst process. Poorly defined business scenarios result in poorly defined software requirements, according to Heidt. Requirements that are incomplete or contain assumptions that aren’t true can’t help this process.
The business must manage the business rules. The rules need to be in the language of the business and owned by the business and should represent a common vision between business and IT. The challenges for a business to manage the business rules are:
- The business analyst needs a high level of skill in domain expertise
- IT is uncomfortable giving up control
- Business analysts are uncomfortable being directly responsible for changes to a production system
Following these recommendations allows the business to have confidence in the results because the business actually creates the rules that will determine how the processes work. It addresses the dysfunctional relationship between business and IT and enables collaboration. These problems can’t be solved overnight, but by embracing the new technology enablers, businesses can evolve into agile organizations that rapidly respond to customer and marketplace demands
