StrAIT Blogging

Let’s start by being very clear. For any business everything must ultimately align to the success of that business, period. That being said we can now focus on how all of the various pieces that make up that business must align with each other. At a high level, it is obvious that all business activities must support each other for the business to be successful. However, what I have observed over the years is that alignment is easy to get lost in the multitude of daily pressing details that we must deal with. This thought was best captured in Stephen Covey’s book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. In this book there is one diagram that has stuck with me over the years because it is direct and simple. It is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 Covey’s time management matrix
 

For more information on Covey’s teachings look here. In this diagram we see Quadrant I as the place where most of us spend much of our time. Quadrant II is where we need to spend most of our time. We need to manage our time such that we can spend more of it thinking about planning, relationships and collaboration. Spending our time here is where alignment happens. We won’t spend any time on Quadrants III and IV. We are wasting our time there.
So what else do we need to consider when aligning our business operations? I argue that we must first understand that all things technology can best be represented as a circle bisected into two parts. One part includes the tools; the hardware and software that enable our business to function. The other part includes how those tools are used to deliver real benefits to our business. Each of those parts is dominated by very different states of mind. Historically, IT has focused on tools and the business users focus on their application. There is overlap for each group as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2   All things technology and interest groups

The overlap between the interests of those two groups is important. The end user group must understand the tools well enough to know what can actually be accomplished in a reasonable period of time and the IT group must understand the needs of the user group well enough to deliver useful tools. Orchestrating the communication between these two interest groups is an ongoing activity between end customers of the tools and those people who must deliver those tools to the marketplace. It is a painful and inefficient process constrained by the financial interests and negotiating positions of each group. It’s beneficial to each group to make this process more effective.
We must also consider the methodologies that are needed for the alignment of business improvement work. For this we will focus on two of the most representative methodologies for their respective interest groups. For the tool provider group we will use RUP, or Rational Unified Process, as the most used (in its multiple variations) and for the end user community the BPM-based methodologies. The overlap diagram is shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3   All things technology and improvement methodology overlap
 

The key difference here is that BPM is about addressing what business processes are needed and the functionality of the tools each business needs. On the other hand, RUP is focused on the effectiveness of software development. Delivering business process improvements will consist of new capabilities delivered by some combination of revising the current tools used by the business, buying new software and writing new software. Neither BPM nor RUP alone is suitable for doing that, so managing the overlap between those two families of methodologies is crucial.
 

Finally, there is the overlap between those groups responsible for the day-to-day operation of the tools and those responsible for their daily application. That overlap is shown in Figure 4.  

Figure 4 All things technology and daily operations
 

The group responsible for the delivery of those technology tools to the business, either internal IT or external, hosted providers is represented by the ITIL, or IT Infrastructure Library, framework. The group responsible for the daily use of those tools is represented by the various continuous improvement frameworks, such as Six Sigma. Each of these groups needs some framework around which to manage daily operation and incremental improvements. Again, managing the overlap of these two interest groups and their frameworks is extremely important.

In each of the cases above, managing the overlap of the various interest groups is a matter of ongoing communication. That communication must happen within an oversight group composed of representatives of each of the interest groups with shared vocabulary and skills inventory. None of the groups need to be experts in the other’s fields but they must commit to understanding the basic needs and issues. This can be a challenge in most organizations but it is vital if the business wants to improve.

Alignment is important and complex. It requires a commitment from a business’s leadership to insure ongoing communications between the core groups within the company. It requires a commitment to include vendors, external service providers and other external stake holders in that collaboration in a meaningful way. So how do you do that? The options are growing every day. There are portal frameworks, like SharePoint and WebSphere. There are peer-to-peer tools, like Groove and Notes. There are Web 2.0 tools, like Huddle and Zoho. The list goes on. Regardless of what tools you use, the ongoing collaboration between the consumers of technology tools and the providers of those tools, both in improvement activities and ongoing daily operations is vital.

Thanks for your attention. Stay tuned…

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