Your Own Unique Contribution

No matter which type of infrastructure you use to coordinate between these roles and responsibilities, you should feel free to add as many of your own contributions as it takes to make BTM work in your organization, just like master chefs might add a secret ingredient or two to give a familiar recipe their own unique flair. For example, since business and technology professionals are primarily charged with carrying out the activities of BTM, one of the things that they have to be able to do is predictive modeling. But in describing these two crucial roles and responsibilities, I don't say anything in particular about how they should go about doing this. Should they develop models using dedicated software, a simple drawing program, or old-fashioned pencil and paper? There isn't any right or wrong answer ”this doesn't mean that every choice is equally good, but it does mean that BTM doesn't make the decision for you. Any number of specific approaches could work to meet each of the responsibilities described in this chapter, and each organization's own unique needs should dictate which they choose.

The combination of basic roles and responsibilities with the flexibility of your own unique contribution is the basis for balancing between art and science, and for making BTM make the jump from promise to practice. This balance is one of BTM's primary benefits and at the same time one of the reasons that previous attempts to align business and technology have failed. Translating an idea on paper to a solution in the real world is always complicated, and detailed matrices, frameworks, and methodologies that look brilliant in the classroom often seem rigid and impractical when placed in the context of a real enterprise. But by rejecting a confining, end-to-end procedure for getting started in favor of general roles and responsibilities around which you can fill in the gaps however you see fit, BTM makes it more likely that your IT initiatives will look as good in the real world as they do on paper. And in the end, of course, that's the only thing that matters.