26 Feb 2012

Adopting IT Enabled Process Management and A Process Enabled IT

In 2011 I was inveted to present at an IQPC Business Process Management Conference in New York. It was a priviledge for me to speak on this topic in front of many respected and established leaders in Financial Services Industry.  In this article I discuss in some depth two seemingly contrasting ideas - IT enabled Business Process Management and Process enabled IT, and how these practices in their intersecting sweet spot, can lead to a cohesive business-IT agile, collaborative and progressive model.

To many in business process management there has traditionally been little room for IT principles.   In fact,  IT is seen as an enabler of the end-result for optimized business processes.  Conversely, to many in IT, 'process management' is frowned upon and seen as road blocks that get in the way of creative solutions and time to market.  From the lessons learnt in my prsonal professional career,  in creasingly these two mode of thinking are converging out of the need to produce quality products in shorter time to market.

Driving Factors
Let's first look at what drives the need for such convergence.  In today's business climate,  some core questions are in the mental forefront of the stakeholders.  Answers to these are used as sort of a barometer of sucess.  Some of these questions are:

  • Do my daily operations support business strategy?
  • Is our responsiveness to market changes fast enough?
  • Do we clearly know what we are asking for, and will truly get? 
  • Am I getting the right facts about my business at the right time so I can optimize my decision making?
  • How do I demonstrate value in advance to ensure investments are made to the right projects?
  • Are we focusing on our core competencies, and collaborating with providers for less critical needs?
An inter-weaving desire can be extracted - by aligning day to day business with the set-forth strategy of execution and contantly keeping watch and reacting with changing landscape in order to maintain the delivered product/solution as value add to the users. In turn, maximizing the investement and reducing excess with razor sharp focus on doing what the company does best.   At the core of this desire lies agility for transformation; something that is achieved when business and IT are successfully and closely internconnected as equal partnernishp in corporate relationship and even more so in day to day working model.   Such partnership cannot be achieved by mere will power nor can it be forced as a cultural mandate.  I believe a more organic and intentful approach is needed to ensure success. 

Three Prongs
My proposed successful organic approach consists of three prongs that equally apply to both IT and Business Process Management:
  1. Business optimization: Where Business Process Management (BPM) optimizes business operations by way of defining, customizing & deploying process, it is also used in IT to optimize the processes of development methodology.
  2. Agile business solutions: Where Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles enable flexibility and improved time to market in IT supported processes, it is also used in business process management to define resusable process blocks by mapping these blocks to their respective services.
  3. Strategic planning and guidance: Where Enterprise Architecture (EA) merges strategic business and IT objectives with opportunities for change through portfolio gap analysis, transition planning and architectural governance.
 Let's dig deeper into the value proposition each of these prongs can deliver.  
  • BPM with its core aim to ensure the right resources are doing the right things,
    • enables measurable process outcomes and operational efficiency
    • allows for rapid customization and deployment of re-usable building blocks towards new solutions
    • provides real-time recognition and reactive capability to changing business events
    • creates end-to-end visibility and actionable insight into holistic business model
  • SOA with its core aim to ensure the right solutions are being developed that support right time to market,
    • brings Increases agility to IT development cycle or business processes
    • lowers cost to build solutions
    • reduces risk through prioritized solutions
    • delivers re-usable and flexible solutions
    • aligns processes with services supporting them
  • EA with its core aim to ensure the right changes are enacted the right way,
    • provides faster, better-informed, strategic and tactical decisions with validated results
    • helps prioritize investments to support business goals
    • improves risk management of organizational transformation
    • provides enterprise-level communication and visibility for people, processes and assets
    • standardizes and governans shared business and IT building blocks
For the People, Of the People
A good model of methodology must have the full backing of the people who make up the organization.  The people must recognize the issue at hand,  the value proposition of the methodology as well as practical skills required to implement.  Sometimes this means recruiting new talent with prior familiarity with skills required the method, sometimes this means having training at all levels of the organization to teach the skills. Regardless of the skills development,  it is imparative that all groups involved have an equal level of understanding and talent in the methodology.  If the IT in its understanding of SOA surpasses the Business understand conversely if Business' understanding of BMP surpasses that of IT; the result can be nothing short of chaotic and disasterous.   At the core foundation,  Business and IT must adpot the exact definition of Business Optimization, Agile solution, and Stategic Plan.

With a common uderstanding and definition the right talent need to be mixed in the cross-functional model. A balanced and diverse mixture of talen from all spectrum ensures a steady sucess based on business understanding with newer approach.  Some key recommendations include:
  • Engage business minded IT talent
    • If you take a molecular chemist and ask them to invent the perfect hamburger, their approach will be to start the best tasting molecule immaginable.  Whereas the perfect hamburger is not about just moleculart taste and involves the look, price, and serving quality as well.  Similarly,  an expert IT member who is great at technology but has very weak grasp of the core business of the organization could lend technically advance ideas with limited relevance to the business. An IT talent who is technically strong and has a deep understanding of business process and business model of the ogranization will bring technically advanced and business relevant solution to the table. A correct way to identify such talent is along with investigating their technical talent, to carefully investigate their reputation with Business teams.  Traits to look for- how easily are their ideas and explanations understood and accepted by business 
  • Engage IT minded business talent
    • Similar to the above group, a Business talent with very little grasp of technology, likely propose process improvements that are beyond the capability of technology whereas, a Business talent with great grasp of technology will produce results that are well within the realms of possiblity of delivery. A correct way to identify such talent is to look for- how easily are their ideas and explanations of business process understood and accepted by IT.
  • Demand ideas not just solutions
    • Solving the problem already identified for the cross-functional teams will lead to low mileage as only those problems will be addressed.  However, demanding ideas will reveal unidentified problems as well as potential solutions and improvements to existing process.
Nature of Approach
There are some actions required when implementing such a cross functional cross Business-IT method.  Although the approach may vary by the immediate needs of the orgnaziation, at the core the key factors of consideration remain the same. 
  • Address your immediate needs via SOA principles.
  • Ensure solutions are not specific to just one problem.
  • Think of your future road map.
  • Know your data (metrics) and your platforms (architecture).

Sometimes you are well aware of which things to do next, hence you should focus primarily on Solution Delivery with shorter incremental time to market. On the other hand, sometimes it is important to coordinate, plan and prioritize in advance, leading to more of an Enterprise Planning focus with reusable solutions.

 

Sometimes the most important objective is defining the future state of the business, hence your focus will be primarily on Business Architecture. On the other hand, sometimes the most pressing problem is lack of a visibility of your data and shared technology platform, leading to more of a Data driven technology architecture focus.

 

Success

In the end, an organization with such a day-to-day cross functional Business-IT teams working collaboratively to deliver nimble extensible and relevant solutions with quick time-to-market, can enjoy great success in an environment where,

 

  • Shared holistic approach applicable to the culture and environment.
  • Key stakeholders across business and IT are at the table, and can make quick and decisive decisions.
  • Explicit and accepted governance model, recognizing need to often shift cultural precedence and existing processes for optimized alignment.
  • Equal maturity of practice and timely governance for synchronized execution
  • Actionable integration between planning and solution delivery across all planes of business and technology architecture
  • Fail fast and early to fine-tune recovery and forward-moving strategy

 

25 Jan 2009

5 Predicted Web 2.0 Businesses That Will Thrive in 2009

An article on mashable.com predicts 5 Web2.0 Business Models with tremendous growth opportunity in 2009. The author starts points to
  • 'Co-Working Spaces' that lead to reduced cost and increased networking and sharing of intellect. 
  • 'Bootstrapping & Growth Based Business' where the lack of VCs in current market will force business owners to create growth based plan and go at it on their own with a high risk and low tolerance of failure but also leading to larger share of profit and more control of future of the business in the absence of numerous investors hungry for the profit.
  • 'Collaborative Tools' will keep travel and logistical expences down while work collaboration and increasing networking is done via tele-video conferencing & collaborative tools for peer design & construction. 
  • 'Idea Marketplaces' where ideas are generated and sold exposing one's bootstrap effort to larger organizations for rapidly adding to their services. Making innovation a global proposition. Lastly the author points to 
  • 'Workforce Marketplaces' a dicey and interesting sector to watch.  Although very cheap labor can be had for grunt work through international sites like, Rent-A-Coder and GetAProgrammer,  american talent can offer the talent and quality. 
  5 Web 2.0 Businesses That Will Thrive in a Down Economy by Mark Hopkins

Shafayet Imam's Space

Over the last 14 years I have worked at various skill levels of IT in Financial Investment Industry. Starting in my early career as a software developer constantly building my skills, I am now considered a goto talent (from reference consultation to speaking engagements) on Systems Architecture, Design, Integration, R&D and Technology best-practice across distributed technologies. Alongside, I have built a respected career in business knowledge around various aspects of financial investing, as well as successful talent in seamlessly bridging the business to the appropriate technology solutions. My career mile markers are defined by leading and delivering successful innovative products, and execution of both tactical and strategic multi-million dollar solutions with a high return value to the organization.

My work philosophy is of a practical approach to any problem - where the solution is simple to understand, modern in nature, and easy to follow. I have honed my mentoring and management skills to identify and grow talent amidst my team members, while using an agile SCRUM approach to manage, track & make visible time-to-task completed rate during the project life-cycle.

www.imams.me

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