If only enterprise IT worked like my iPad ... or at least my car
Architects and biz chiefs still not talking
Posted in Management, 4th April 2013 15:29 GMT
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It’s extraordinary, but with all our high tech knowledge and skills we don’t have a vocabulary to articulate the business problem in a way that allows effective communications between the participants. Many IT organizations have embraced services as a way to organize systems capabilities more effectively. These might be Web Services or APIs or referred to collectively as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). But, even if these software services are architected to align with business perspective, they are always managed as a technical matter, defined and managed by the IT organization.
Yet line-of-business managers do understand services as a business concept; virtually every business product today has a service component to it. The global service provider industry has formed around this idea, and in the UK today service industries account for 77 per cent of the economy. So while IT and business share the common underlying concept, at the practical level there is no meeting of minds.
In order to create a better bridge between business and IT we need to work with both the “how” and the “what” the business is, and we can do this by complementing business processes with business services. Business services are a very natural way to talk about “what” the business does today and tomorrow, while business processes focus on the “how”. Because you don’t reinvent an industry by just analysing business processes, you also need to evolve and innovate with improved and new business services.
A good example of a service oriented business is Amazon.com Inc. They are well known as a service provider because they have constructed the Amazon enterprise as a set of business services which are offered to various external parties – enabling suppliers to sell second hand books or electronic goods on the Amazon platform; or providing data storage and Cloud services to other enterprises. 
The Amazon business services combine the compute and the business service integrating the commercial contracts, business processes, people, physical assets as well as the service interfaces that enable computer to computer or computer to device communications.
Using a common business and IT concept permits sensible analysis of whether a service is just a unit of cost, or what the strategic value is now and in the future, and what it adds to the business value chain. Given so many line-of-business managers are thoroughly familiar with the very high technology in their smart phones and other devices, it really is time for IT to treat the business as a mature partner and for the line-of-business manager to take real responsibility for the business service as a whole product.
Whilst Amazon is a very public example of business services providing extraordinary business value, the same ideas are being adopted by more conventional enterprises. Examples of enterprises that the author is currently guiding down this path include a global technology infrastructure service provider, a global document service provider and a European bank.
Increasingly we see a convergence of IT and business organizations. The business service concept is an essential piece of vocabulary to focus on business innovation and get everyone singing off the same hymn sheet to potentially huge advantage of the business. Just look at the Amazon example! ®
David Sprott is the CEO and Principal of Everware-CBDI International. He’s a consultant, researcher, author and educator specializing in service oriented architecture and related practice. You can hear him share his knowledge and experiences at the "Iasa UK Architect Summit - Enabling Disruptive Innovation" on the 25th and 26th of April 2013 in London. Click here to find out more.
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COMMENTS
The rot start started when...
Up till the mid 1990's you would find the top boss in IT was someone who had worked their way up to the top of the pile and had some reasonable IT knowledge (they'd done their time).
Then in the late 1990's you'd find that the top person was some weasel, who'd been crap at IT but worked in the IT department and had been good at sticking their proboscis in unpleasant places. About the same time project managers started appearing in IT, again they were not good at IT but they acted to keep an eye on admin but weren't in charge.
Then after 2000 I noticed that there was an influx into Project Management of people who'd been on a one week Prince course and used to sell snake oil in the dot com boom.
Next came the System Architects who had been again had very little IT experience (if you asked them questions you found this out) but had some sort of Microsoft authorisation, their golden rule was if it is not a able to run on Microsoft platforms or is written in house then kill the project - I worked on many projects that there was no software available to run on Microsoft so they all died in the end.
The final nail in the coffin was offshoring where any requirements were coded regardless of whether they were self contradictory and none of our bosses knew how to turn on a PC, yet made strategic decisions like "We haven't got time to test it just read the code, see if there are bugs and put it live tonight" (they'd never heard of the halting problem).
Then all of us who knew anything were surplus to requirement :o
My experience is everything was always done slap dash because all that was important was that the customer got what they wanted.
If you try to explain sensible ideas as shown in that diagram to the people "at the top" their eyes glaze over and they not and promptly forget everything you just tried to teach them.
Then they return to responding to whichever customer screamed at them the loudest 5 minutes ago.
Save us Apple
Granted I haven't followed the RBS fiasco, but the difference between your iPad, your car, and general IT service is that you paid an exorbitant markup on your iPad and car... You get what you pay for and no one wants to pay for good IT service. Many don't even really know what level of service they're really getting. They just want someone like Apple to make all their decisions for them so they don't have to think. Yeesh, when you drink the kool aid you really fall in love with it don't you.... Your iPad isn't nearly as special as you think it is; it does the 10 things Apple lets you do with it and that's it. Enterprise IT isn't allowed to say no. Ever.
Beyond that the idea that technical types in IT suck at business and business types suck at IT isn't new... Both sides need to put in more work to reach the other.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear... Part II
"It’s extraordinary, but with all our high tech knowledge and skills we don’t have a vocabulary to articulate the business problem in a way that allows effective communications between the participants."
Who is "we" in this case? If we are making sweeping generalisations then I would have changed the overall intent of the passage to read "we generally don’t have the time to get all of the key participants in a room to make sure everyone is on the same page".
Also, I think that blaming the RBS fiasco on technology alone is purely shifting the blame onto platforms that would have been architected technically to have been as available as possible - my understanding is that it was HR cost-cutting and staffing issues (i.e. outsourcing to less knowledgeable resources) that caused this particular failure.
So David, I noticed you are also at this Architecture Summit? I suggest you meet up with Gavin Payne who is also there - it seems you both need to drown your sorrows.
Wow! That was like being in a really extended Dilbert strip.
The new Office Garage series:
