"The great end of life is not knowledge but action."
” Thomas Henry Huxley
Several months after first having met with Janet and Robert to discuss your dream house, you're almost ready to begin construction. But before the first batch of concrete can be poured and the first board nailed into place, you need a mechanism to make sure that the design they've come up with meets your exacting demands. To earn your confidence (and to avoid any late-stage misunderstandings that might result in tearing down a part of the structure to make a change), Janet and Robert have put together an exhaustive architectural blueprint of your dream house.
Recently, this blueprint has ballooned from a couple of preliminary drawings that concentrated on the overall look and feel of the house to a heavy stack of detailed diagrams. Most of the recent drawings focus on details that are beyond your limited grasp of architecture. But you're excited for the house to be done, and so you decide to spend a slow afternoon flipping through the unwieldy drawings and trying to imagine how the section expressed in each might look in the final structure. After just a few minutes, you notice that each of these working diagrams seems not only to focus on a distinct physical area of the house, but also specific subject matter: pipes in some, wires in others, and beams and supports in still others.
In the preceding weeks, Robert, the contractor, hired a team of specialized tradesmen ”plumbers, electricians, engineers , and so on ”who will handle the day-to-day construction duties . Each of these focused roles needs a set of working drawings that explains the project from their individual point of view. Tony, the plumber, constructs a riser diagram to show how water will get from your well to each of the bathrooms and sinks, for example, while the electrician, Willy, needs to plan circuits, outlets, and switches. The structural engineer, Emily, needs to design beams, trusses, and support.
Obviously, each of the detailed working drawings that you've come across has been constructed with a particular one of these specialists in mind; they represent distinct views, will be completed at different stages, and, generally speaking, don't even include the same building blocks. But at the same time, it's obvious that each working drawing needs to fit seamlessly into an integrated whole. They all refer to the same house, after all, and if Willy were to try and install an electrical socket in the same location Tony had planned to put a shower and Emily had sited a support beam, it would be a disaster.
The challenge for Robert (the contractor) is to make sure that the design decisions made from each of these three distinct points of view are compatible. Just like it's up to Robert (the CIO) to make sure that decisions from three analogous perspectives ”business, process, and technology ”all work together in the design of a single IT project.
Just like for your dream house, Robert (the CIO) puts together a team of subject-matter experts that is responsible for detailed design decisions: Tony, a representative from the business unit, focuses on the business decisions for the project, such as customer segments, partners , and strategies; Willy, a process expert, designs processes to support these business objectives during process automation; and Emily, a systems integrator, outlines the applications and systems that will support these processes. All of this happens during business model definition, process optimization, and technology automation ”the three activities of BTM.
In This Part
It's essential both to recognize that business and IT should be aligned and also to identify the underlying principles that help to accomplish that goal. But without concrete activities that you can perform to determine where you are today, to decide where you need to go, and to define how you should go about getting there, there's no guarantee that alignment will finally become a reality. Part III: The Activities of BTM begins by introducing enterprise architecture, which functions as a blueprint for IT projects. Enterprise architecture should be designed using a combination of modeling and impact analysis during the design stage of IT projects. (Just like you shouldn't start drawing up architectural blueprints after you've already dug the foundation, you shouldn't wait to design enterprise architecture until after you're writing code.) Next, it describes the three activities of BTM ” Business Model Definition, Process Optimization, and Technology Automation ”and use a simulated case study to show how they might be put to work in a familiar business environment.
