Business vs IT
How often do you hear that in an enterprise? I have worked in a number of businesses and often hear the words from the business such as “IT doesn’t understand what I want” “This system does not do what we asked for” and from IT “We have given the business what they asked for” “Why can’t the business tell us what they want better?”
At best this promotes a divide between the two most important areas of a company, at worst it can cost substantial money to rectify and vastly impact customer satisfaction.
How can you get around this without beating everybody with a big stick? Use business process modelling (BPM) to represent or design processes.
BPM, when applied effectively, enables a smooth transition from the interface with the customer through to the design of systems and methods to support that interface. At the end of the day it is all about the customer and a business should be designed with that in mind.
Business process modelling can take the companies core values, strategy and objectives and distill these into progressively lower levels of process that can be easily understood by business representatives facing the customer, operations personal supporting the business representatives and of course IT providing the systems that support both. All staff can understand how a process works and what the inputs, outputs and interfaces are with that process. An effectively modelled process can enable IT to better understand a business’s requirements and build a more focused system.
Modelling a fair representation of a business process is not always easy but then neither is running the business itself. The last thing you need is for a ‘disconnect’ to exist between key departments. I have found that while often effective models can be built by interviewing key personnel in the business and passing these down to IT in an appropriate language, often a better way is to workshop a process with representatives of business, operational and IT areas. This enables all areas to make their contributions from their point of view but most of all, the group gains a much better understanding of each others objectives and difficulties. The same argument applies to developing models between divergent business departments.
Give it a go. You will be surprised at how effective it can be at breaking down barriers and if you need help, of course give us a call!