Computing Business editor Mark Samuels asked an important question recently:
“It's just a shame that after years of writing about the need for integration between IT and business, alignment is still at the critical - rather than the taken-for-granted - stage. Who's fault is that - the IT department or the business?”
The answer is straightforward – neither.
Why? Because traditionally Business and IT have not had a way of talking the same language. And if they can’t speak the same language, and therefore understand each other, then alignment just isn’t going to happen.
Today’s organisations rely on complex IT infrastructures in which resources are employed in parallel by, and in support of, a number of business activities.
This complexity (and the limitations of traditional modelling technology) has meant that until now it has been almost impossible to fully document, analyse, understand, and communicate the relationships between business activities and IT resources.
And this has lead to inevitable problems. On too many occasions projects have insufficient planning and documentation, project deadlines are missed, projects incur huge overspends and all too often the delivered solution is not quite what the business needed.
I’ve always found it extraordinary that some organisations will often spend, in one fell swoop, tens of millions on IT projects when they cannot see ‘the big picture’ of how business and IT interact.
Think for a second about how other industries work.
Would you approve the extension of a factory, or the building of a new corporate HQ, without seeing and understanding the architect’s plans? Would you expect the construction to be attempted without such plans?
Would you expect engineers to build a bridge without using diagrams to communicate to you how they were going to do it? Would you expect construction suppliers to design and supply their products without such diagrams?
Despite the best efforts of change control these analogies are equivalents to what happens daily in the IT world. With overstretched IT departments documentation is often the last piece of the jigsaw, and often goes missing.
But what to do about this problem? There is an obvious need for a simple, clear and logical way to visualise the alignment of business activities with IT resources and dataflows.
Architects and Engineers use pictures to enable the business and the professional to easily understand each other. A few years ago my business partner and I started investigating if the same approach could be applied to the business and IT. That is, showing the relationship between business and IT visually, in a way that was generally understandable.
What we came up with, after a few years of research and development, is what we call a Business and IT diagram (B&IT).
B&ITs are produced from a computer model (called Stroma®). They map and document the logical and physical relationships between an organisation’s business operations and the IT resources that support them. In other words, they put IT in a business context.
B&IT diagrams accurately depict the complex inter-relationships and dependencies of business processes, IT resources and dataflows in an easy-to-understand visual format.
They do this by utilising the OBASHI™ methodology.
Imagine a landscape piece of paper split into six horizontal lanes. To the left of the top lane write “Ownership”, to the left of the lane beneath it write “Business Process”. Then come “Application”, “System”, “Hardware” and “Infrastructure”.
Now you have a framework for organising the elements that represent individual Business or IT resources in your organisation.
B&ITs enable the responsibilities, roles, risks and costs of every IT resource (or group of IT resources) employed in support of each business activity (and/or set of business activities) to be clearly visualised and, thus, understood.
By portraying the relationship of business and IT in this way both groups can understand each other and the process of alignment can begin.
If you would like to see and interact with some example B&ITs choose any of the ‘Embedded’ options here.
Save an example of a simple B&IT and an explanation of OBASHI™ here.
As always, your thoughts, questions and feedback are very welcome.
© Paul Wallis 2007. All rights reserved.
Paul,
An interesting perspective. Too often the business thinks IT has is the magic solution, that IT solutions will solve all the problems. However, as you point out often the IT department can't communicate with the business, understand the business problems nor communicate the IT concepts. I once spoke to a company president who said that they were looking for IT people that "talked like the rest of us" which highlights the need for communication and understanding. This should be the responsibility of both parties but IT can't wait for the business to go first and must take the initiative. Your B&IT diagram may be the way to do this.
Mike
Posted by: Mike | October 02, 2007 at 02:02 AM