Instill Collaborative Decision-Making

The second principle of BTM is to instill collaborative decision-making. The concept of collaborative decision-making is frequently employed as a catchall that includes everything from face-to-face communication to knowledge management to coordinating partnerships. This scope is too broad for our purposes, of course, so this discussion is limited to the role that collaboration plays in the specific context of BTM: decision-making that is either facilitated by modeling itself or undertaken to support the modeling initiative.

The idea of collaborative decision-making in BTM is a descendent of the broader concept of a virtual workspace, where potentially disparate teams can come together to access a common work environment, post and share supporting information, and communicate in real time to solve problems. For BTM, this virtual workspace equates to a combination of the model itself and three key levels of collaboration:

- Direct Collaboration is when people discuss issues in real time using tools like email, instant messaging, and notification services. These discussions are meant to facilitate dialogue between decision makers or to solve a specific problem. For example, an implementation consultant may need to establish which IT standards are in place through a direct question-and-answer session with members of the client team.

- Model-level Collaboration happens when more than one team member contributes to any individual model. This occurs quite frequently, such as when analysts require supervision and input from managers, or individual models span multiple skill areas or business units. A good example of model-level collaboration is a supply chain process model, where demand planners, plant managers, and supply planners come together to diagram an end-to-end flow of how a manufacturer plans and executes their supply chain. Model-level collaboration includes model check-in/ check-out , version control, change tracking, and model comparison/merge activities. This level of collaboration can also include aspects of document management to help teams share knowledge that supports their decisions in the model. And it can also act as a gateway to direct collaboration, for example when an inconsistency between two versions of a model is discovered and the team collaborates to determine which version is correct.

- Alignment-level Collaboration represents the highest level of collaboration in BTM. It is driven by the necessity to cross whitespaces to align multiple models. Because BTM spans business modeling, process optimization, and technology automation, it by nature includes a variety of stakeholders with unique areas of modeling responsibility. To cross these disciplines, team members often negotiate and come to a shared decision. This may involve a prolonged, robust exchange of information that includes elements of both model-level and direct collaboration. To facilitate back-and-forth exchange, team members utilize a mini-impact analysis of sorts, where each side develops multiple scenarios until an acceptable compromise is reached. A good example of alignment-level collaboration is when analysts from two business units compare process models to establish standards for enterprise processes.

Vertical and Horizontal Collaboration

The three levels of collaboration can occur both vertically (within a single business unit or team) and horizontally (across multiple business units or teams).

Most day-to-day communication within an IT project falls under the aegis of vertical collaboration. Its goal is to improve existing processes by sharing information and expertise. One manifestation of vertical collaboration is communication between team members at different levels of the same business unit, from executives to business unit heads to managers and so on. In the worst cases, top-to-bottom communication between those who set objectives and those responsible for meeting them resembles a version of the children's game, Telephone: The original message is garbled along the way and disconnects crop up between strategy and execution.

Vertical collaboration improves this process by making sure that the directives passed between managers and their reports happen accurately and in real time. For top-down communication this means that changes in strategy or goals are communicated in time to change course, and for bottom-up communication this means that needs and issues are passed back up to executives to make small, corrective changes that don't jeopardize the project as a whole.

However vertical collaboration isn't necessarily limited to members of the same business unit. Another type of vertical collaboration focuses on particular teams or business processes. An example here is product development, when representatives from marketing, sales, and engineering define specifications, share new product designs, and make update requests . The impetus for this collaboration is improved communication and efficiency: The marketing team knows which market niche to exploit, the sales team understands customer needs, and engineers have the technical capability to design new and exciting product offerings. By improving the flow of information between participants , tools that facilitate vertical collaboration in product development can improve speed to market and reduce production errors.

In BTM, vertical collaboration shares important characteristics with both manager-to-report collaboration and process and team-based collaboration such as product development. By encouraging team members to share metrics, project management information, and relevant knowledge bits, collaboration encourages holistic decision-making, and ultimately reduces development time and cost.

While vertical collaboration is all about efficiency, horizontal collaboration is focused on helping to share amorphous "great ideas" that can deliver unique insights that are especially powerful. Vertical collaboration is project and process-based, and includes stakeholders with multiple specialties. Horizontal collaboration is quite the opposite : General trends and opportunities are shared between employees with similar job functions, but who work in different business units or on different projects.

One example of horizontal collaboration could be the interaction between the customer service and product design teams in a consumer products company. Suppose that over time, the customer service team notices that a large number of the calls to their help desk are from users who can't figure out how to use a particular feature of a particular product. After documenting the issues, a service team member contacts the product design team. The two groups collaborate to determine the exact nature of the problem and change future versions of the product to make it more intuitive. In this example, two otherwise disparate teams (customer service and product design) collaborate to share a unique insight ( user difficulties with a particular product feature) in a way that was outside the scope of normal processes and regular communication.

The advantages of horizontal and vertical collaboration are predictably unique from one another. In vertical collaboration, the focus is on pervasive integration of well-defined team members and processes in order to share knowledge and improve efficiency. Horizontal collaboration, on the other hand, requires employees to identify and analyze important developments in their own work environment, and then to pass these along through free-form interactions to whomever is most equipped to act upon them. This is the foundation for an integrated organization that recognizes broad trends and shares them across business lines to provide opportunities elsewhere.

T-Shaped Managing

Both vertical and horizontal collaboration are essential components of BTM. Embracing both in tandem requires a management technique that Morten T. Hansen and Bolko von Oetinger describe in the Harvard Business Review as the "T-shaped management" model. In BTM, the vertical component of T-shaped management encompasses most day-to-day work on IT projects, and focuses on individual modeling teams and their managers on up to the office of the CIO and the CxO Suite. But BTM also requires teams to collaborate horizontally to share what Hansen and von Oetinger call "implicit knowledge, the type needed to generate new insights and creative ways of tackling business problems or opportunities." ^[4] These horizontal interactions could include a marketing manager who identifies a sales trend and passes it along to a product design team, or an IT professional who recognizes an opportunity to reuse an existing ERP system in another department. Figure 3.2 illustrates the roles that vertical and horizontal collaboration play in BTM, and shows some types of information that are commonly exchanged in each:

Figure 3.2. Vertical collaboration encompasses day-to-day work, while horizontal collaboration delivers key insights and opportunities

Contextual and Cultural Barriers

Before they can achieve T-shaped management, companies need to overcome both contextual and cultural barriers to collaboration. Contextual barriers are the biggest obstacle that stands in the way of collaborative decision-making. Most collaborative systems, including groupware or virtual workspace applications, don't integrate directly with everyday work environments, so employees are forced to leave their workspace ”be it a word processor, spreadsheet, CAD/CAM tool, or even the factory floor ”to interface with others. IT analyst IDC describes this phenomenon as a " schism between how people get information and what they can do with it." ^[5]

For vertical collaboration, the contextualization problem is more practical than anything else: Team members know what to share and with whom, but many times lack the infrastructure to communicate within their familiar business applications. In horizontal collaboration, however, the impetus for collaboration isn't as intuitive. Issues are less likely to be explicitly documented in the first place, and it can be difficult to determine who to collaborate with, as partners come from outside the immediate team or from different business units altogether. This means that not only do employees not know how to collaborate, but they also don't know when or with whom to do so.

People also fail to collaborate because of ingrained cultural and organizational issues. In the simplest case, they fail to recognize either the person with whom they should be collaborating or the need to collaborate at all. A process analyst faced with choosing to modify either a current purchasing process or a new procurement application, for example, might not know that a colleague in another department recently grappled with a similar problem, and so might be a good source of knowledge and advice.

A second, more deep-seated challenge is to overcome the strict concept of ownership that impedes collaboration ”especially horizontal collaboration between business units. There are innocent and not-so-innocent reasons why this happens. Sometimes, people simply assume that they should solve their own problems, and consequently miss opportunities to collaborate with peers who may have valuable insight into their dilemma. Other times, cultural barriers get in the way. Information from outside the immediate team may be considered untrustworthy. Or, in other cases, knowledge producers may fall prey to an ingrained tendency to hoard information for their own personal advantage. In organizations where employees compete internally (to acquire customers, for example), this last condition may require a system of incentives and penalties to encourage open information exchange.

The Advantages of Collaborative Decision-Making

Collaborative decision-making provides a number of important advantages for BTM. By combining vertical and horizontal collaboration to employ a T-shaped management model, enterprises can:

- Achieve the BTM equivalent of concurrent engineering: simultaneous and synchronized business modeling, process optimization, and technology automation

- Maintain alignment and communication between decisions made in disparate environments

Achieve Concurrent Business, Process, and Technology Design

The first advantage of collaborative decision-making is that it helps companies to achieve the BTM equivalent of concurrent engineering, where manufacturers collaborate at every stage of the value chain so that all aspects of product development ”from engineering to marketing to manufacturing design ”can be carried out simultaneously. Collaborative decision-making does the same for IT projects by allowing each activity of BTM ”business model definition, process optimization, and technology automation ”to occur simultaneously . When both product design and BTM occur concurrently, cycle times decrease and critical issues in quality control are addressed early on in the process.

Maintain Alignment Between Disparate Decisions

The second advantage of collaboration is that it helps team members to make intelligent trade-offs that maintain alignment between seemingly disparate decisions. When companies employ multiple tools for each of the three activities of BTM, they invite disconnects between choices made in separate environments. By collaborating to unify decision-making across multiple environments, team members can provide visibility into choices that are made in other areas of the project. For example, an implementation consultant may need to determine why a modification was made to a process in order to balance its relative importance against the changes to the technology infrastructure that it requires. By implementing collaborative decision-making, team members can identify and bridge these whitespace disconnects to maintain alignment across the board.