Change Matters June 18, 2007
Posted by Jari Tavi in : Technology , trackback
Agility as a term has been abused at such a level that even the most monolithic applications have been made to look agile in marketing presentations. On the other hand, at the same time some other vendors are bringing in “new agility” by acquiring companies and using paper clips and chewing gum to glue them together as a “single new application”. Is this really the path that leads to solutions with true longevity? I don’t think so.
Is the agility truly something that is needed or has it just become a “me too factor” – a tick box in RFP’s – that everybody needs to be able to fill in? I believe that the need for agility comes from two different key drivers: First, because of disappointments and a “shell shock” after burning fingers with promises from vendors and second, people have woken up to the fact change is truly the only thing you can trust to stay.
At the end of 2006 Gartner started to talking about Business Process Improvement (“BPI”), and one of the sessions I attended put quite boldly the more traditional “business process engineering” to a position of “your fathers Business Process Reengineering (“BPR”)”. I must say that I was positively surprised, but as always, the skeptic in me whispered that this is a marketing trick from Gartner. Now I must confess, that after following the BPI initiative for more than six months I have become a believer myself.
The idea itself (design for change and incremental improvements) is nothing more than just common sense, but on the other hand, that kind of attitude gives also the software totally new directions and puts hype words like SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and WOA (Web Oriented Architecture) to a totally new context. SOA itself, in my opinion, is just a high level over a hyped framework that should enable things that everybody takes as a given – easy IT deployment – but on the other hand, that has never truly materialized.
To summarize: My opinion is that we are now starting to have both the human factor of BPI and the technical framework in place. The human factor is supported by agile frameworks such as SOA, WOA as well as agile process models and automation provided by software.
In my opinion IT has not truly enabled the transformation to happen in such a scale as it should be possible: this is because the IT driven systems have been too rigid and slow to change. Current operational models have been too often been built around shifting from the existing human driven processes to computer assisted processes like workflow. Instead, organizations should learn to truly understand the opportunity for transformation and innovation on how to change the behavior – how to enable a True Change and Transformation in operations like procurement, cash management, strategic alignment of processes over the fragmented functions etc.
From my point of view, the combination of BPI-style of thinking and SOA-like technology enablers truly let us to skip one generation of technology in certain processes like procurement. And yes, the agility is a mandatory part of BPI!
Change Matters!