Operational Agility

Sean McGrath wrote an interesting piece at IT World suggesting that use of swivel chair interfacing is often the best integration strategy available to an organisation.

I am not sure how many swivel chairs it would take before Sean would see an automated approach as more suitable.  I’ve certainly seen banks of people doing little more than this type of business process, inconsistently and with plenty of errors – in itself a very expensive way of doing things.  I do, however, take his point and this is not a criticism of what is essentially an excellent post that raises a number of important points.

For me, the most important point Sean raises is that “if you cannot build a new end-to-end business process that covers both systems manually then you do not understand the requirements sufficiently to start coding it.”

These thoughts are also picked up by Reg Braithwaite in an equally excellent post Is software the documentation of business process mistakes?  Reg argues that if your code represents the “user manual” of the business process, then if the code is too complex, this may well be because the process is too complex.  In other words, get the manual process right before you automate it.

The only reason swivel chair integration exists is because of the inflexibility afforded to the business user by the existing systems.  Business users are left with manual as the only option available to them.  It is the quickest, cheapest and most reliable way of getting a business process done – which is a sad indictment on the state of affairs in IT.

My interest in this subject is that innovative solutions like Blue Prism are trying to address these issues, bringing agility to the business, but without damaging the integrity of the underlying systems, or creating the need for new code.

There will always be some place for swivel chair integration but let’s keep it to a minimum.  Once a process can be done manually, the only things that should prevent it from being automated are the need for human interaction, or the need for human intelligence (e.g. expert judgement).

Following on from my last post about CIO recognition in the board room I was excited to discover that relevant coverage had reached the mainstream press, notably the venerable Financial Times.  An article by Alan Cane titled “It’s much too early to write off the role of the CIO” looked right on the sweet spot…..until I read it.

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I frequently muse on the relationship between IT and the business, so I was interested to read this WSJ article by Amit Basu and Chip Jarnagin, that dares to suggest that IT’s isolation is even greater than I thought.  Namely that a glass wall exists between IT and everything else.

The article is pretty balanced and does point out that it is not exclusively IT’s fault.  Indeed one of the problems IT often faces is getting appropriate representation around the board table.  I don’t buy the argument that CIOs bring this upon themselves.  It’s up to the CEO whether he wants IT on the board.  A secondary decision is who to appoint, and if there is nobody internal, then he can recruit externally.

I also like the fact that Amit and Chip point out that there is a responsibility on the business to embrace IT and try to understand its value.  Conversely there is clearly an onus on IT to focus on and demonstrate the value that it adds.

There is a need to speak each other’s language and IT people are frequently accused of using jargon, but how many IT people (or how many business people…) understand all the jargon used by accountants?  Senior officers are obliged to learn the accountant’s language if they want to get on, so why not IT language too?  Equally, accountants have had to learn a bit about marketing geek lingo too, and we are all at the behest of HR’s guide to political correctness – a language all of its own.

So how come other disciplines are always accepted and IT often isn’t?  Is Information Technology just the newest profession?  Can we look back at accountants and learn from how they gained recognition?  What about marketeers?  Didn’t they all just prove that they added value at some point in the past?  In the absence of recognition from the CEO, maybe the CIO is the only person who can raise the profile of IT in their own organisation.

Will I look back on this post before I retire, and wonder what on earth I was talking about?  By then, surely IT will simply be an accepted profession in every organisation, like Finance, Sales, Marketing and HR are right now.

The age old CIO dilemma.  Buy vs. Build.

On the one hand, you buy in a package from a vendor.  They bring industry “best” practice.  They guarantee that your administration is as good as your competitors.  The trouble is that it is equally as bad as your competitors.  So it puts you in an equal position, not an advantageous one.  The lowest common denominator?  At the very least you are making your business subservient to the vendor’s view of the world.  Sometimes this can be good, sometimes it can be bad.

The traditional alternative is to build your own system.  For the purposes of this argument, I am placing this in the same category as buying a package from a vendor and then trying to tailor it to your environment.  The former can be very rewarding and can differentiate you greatly, but can also be very expensive.  The latter is almost always the worst of both worlds and creates expensive and long term projects, contorted business solutions, and a support headache long into the future.

So is there a third way?  I think so.

Your existing systems can adapt to changing business requirements if there is a process management layer capable of making sense of the existing infrastructure.  This can lead to business agility on a new scale if you implement it properly.

With the right tools and methodologies, new horizons are possible.  New standards in customer interaction, faster service, better compliance, process adherence, first time resolution and other desirable customer outcomes are all possible….in the short term.

Joe McKendrick at ZDNet picked up on my previous post on short termism and budgets, and suggested that the time may be ripe for “Guerilla SOA”.

That’s exactly the sort of thought I had in mind.  However, if you can implement the guerilla initiatives in such a way as to keep an eye on the long term future even better.  So if you are using mashups for example, the architecture is flexible so new data sources can be plugged in and out down the line.  Guerilla initiatives are great at delivering value in local areas of the organisation but one day it will be desirable to join up the dots.

I guess I am arguing for a bottom up approach to SOA which is hardly a new suggestion, and not one that everyone agrees with, but seems well suited to these times.

David Linthicum makes some recommendations on what to do if your SOA project is threatened by budget cuts.

Focussing on ROI and $$$ measures is certainly a good idea.  I also totally agree that if you can’t justify a business case to yourself then you should cancel the project.  Shifting around resources and reallocating from other projects is only a good idea if those resources end up being allocated to the biggest business case – i.e. they are targeted at achieving best value.

My personal view is that budget holders will give much more support to business case and $ ROI arguments than any other justifications.  However, the current climate is very short term.  Most enterprises are focussed on short term cash and short term profit.  Directors are targeted on short term measures.  They are also ever less likely to hold their role for more than 2 years.

So when you try to justify your project, bear this in mind.  There is no point in demonstrating that your $25M investment will pay back handsomely over 10 years.  You must find ways of proving that your project will deliver incremental short term benefits so the longer term project funds itself and delivers ongoing business value as well.

Longer term management views may well return when the economy starts the next upwards cycle.  In the meantime, we all need to live within the current constraints.

As a shareholder and customer of Standard Life, I was pleased to read that their SOA initiative has saved £60M in its ten year lifespan.

SOA case studies (well, successful ones, at any rate) are all too rare.  SL’s is also based on principles of reuse.  Although there are different views on this subject, I cannot help but think that reusing services in many different processes is a good way of saving money (and thereby cost justifying the investment).

CIO, Keith Young said “SOA helps us get products to market faster” he later followed “We contract out some routine things, but generally we try to exploit the expertise of our in-house staff.”

This sounds a bit like an in-house IT function that acts as a trusted adviser to the business.  I will be holding Standard Life for now, and I’ll look forward to a super bonus when my endowment policy matures.

I think the reported death of the software programmer is a little premature but I admire Marks & Spencer for paying more than lip service to the role of business staff.

They have empowered “super users” to create their own applications using business friendly tools based on graphical, non-technical platforms.  Business Objects is quoted as one example of a tool that is in business hands.

M & S IT director, Darrell Stein is a convert.  Dr Nikolay Mehandjiev of the University of Manchester (arguably the spiritual home of computing) points to the reduction in misunderstandings citing the normal “transaction costs and delays associated with having other parties in the loop”.  Dave Cheeseman of Arista Insurance suggests that speed to market is the most important driver and that his insurance specialists will always be better informed, and therefore, more effective than programmers.

All good stuff so far.  But in a fantastic piece of balanced journalism, Computing’s Lisa Kelly has managed to unearth a naysayer from a surprising source.

Philip Virgo is a strategic adviser for the IMIS and he claims that giving users the power to “define their own needs and programme them directly often produces a result that is not fit for purpose”.

I wonder if Mr. Virgo can tell me how many programmer produced business applications are fit for purpose?  How many have delivered yesterday’s solution for tomorrow’s problem?  How many delivered a cart, when the user had asked for a horse?

He goes on to say that “many tools are as user-friendly as a cornered rat” and that a “super user is someone who was a competent user but is now an incompetent programmer”.

I could have learnt HTML but I elected to use Wordpress to publish this blog (and what an excellent tool that is).  And I don’t even consider myself to be a “Californian liberal academic”, but one of the managers who Mr Virgo thinks cannot cope with a helpful business tool.

I wonder if Mr. Virgo and his IMIS colleagues may better promote their profession by supporting, rather than criticizing, initiatives that help end users enjoy the benefits of computing.  After all these tools would not have emerged had the traditional programming model been adequately serving end user needs.

Programmers are still needed to build the platforms, tools and solutions that enable end user computing.  As for business applications, we should be giving power to the users.

I was at a large telco last week chatting to the manager of a 1,000 seat call centre.

We were talking through the inconveniences that agents have to go through in terms of navigating through a variety of systems just to give the customer what they needed, in this case upgrading their contract.

The problems were obvious in terms of the corporate systems.  Like any other enterprise, these were divided into functional silos paying little regard to the business process.  However, additional difficulty had been added by the use of complex spreadsheets as workarounds for missing system functionality.  Am I painting a grim picture?  Not at all – I see this in every large call centre, not to mention back office.  This is the norm for operational managers – they come to expect it.

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I was idly leafing through my December copy of The Banker in which 2007 awards were liberally sprinkled upon the great and the good of the banking industry.  But for such an IT driven industry, I was amazed to find that only one award existed bearing any relation to technology.

José María Fuster of Grupo Santander won “CIO of the year”.  Even in the title, The Banker mistakenly named the award Chief Investment Officer of the year – oops!  I guess that getting some parts of the banking industry out of the old oak-panelled rooms and into the modern world will take another generation!

Meanwhile, no such delay for Grupo Santander whose SOA inspired “Alhambra” multi-channel core banking system (to replace the already successful “Partenon” platform) appears to be steaming ahead and if reports are to be believed, will be something of a kick up the banking industry’s behind.

Like HSBC, Santander’s reputation is to build rather than buy.  For Santander, this decision seems to be related to competitive advantage, not cost.  If one buys an external system, one benefits from all the experience that the vendor has gleaned from working with other organisations.  However, this can create a lowest common denominator.  This may be OK in non-core parts of an enterprise, if you just want to make sure that you are no worse than any of your competitors, and to do so at least cost.  This can free your corporate energy to focus on building competitive advantage at the front end, via marketing for example.

But if you are using your systems and processes as a route to competitive advantage then build is surely better.