Section 2.8. What is ESA s long-range impact on corporations?

2.8. What is ESA's long-range impact on corporations?

We won't walk you through all of the organizational and cultural issues involved in making ESA a reality within the enterprise (that's what the rest of the book is for, especially Chapter 3), but we will wrap up this chapter by using the figure of the business analyst to explore ESA's long-range impact on corporations.

The business analyst isn't, in fact, a power user by another name, nor is she an IT administrator or a financial analyst. Tomorrow's business analyst is today's operations personthe line managers in every business unit with a thorough understanding of both the financial performance of their unit and the day-to-day business processes driving that performance.

By handing over the keys to the company's enterprise services in the form of the business process modeling tools resting atop ESA, two major shifts in the organizational structure are about to occur:

• The dismantling of IT as a roadblock to change, and a transformation of IT into a strategic weapon, has begun.

• Henceforth, processes will increasingly dominate corporate organization charts and hierarchies as the company reorganizes itself to reflect real-world concerns. In this role, ESA and the business analyst are enablers of cultural changebecause they're able to render formerly obscure and ad hoc business logic visible and transparent, they're able to drive organizational change and break down false barriers between IT and business.

Taking them in order, let's first pause to consider the current model for custom application design in which the nascent business analyst is responsible only for creating the process model that a succession of consultants and developers attempt to map onto the application they are struggling to build with varying degrees of success. They're often starting from blank slates, laboriously writing code from scratch because recomposing code from existing applications is just as costly as and maybe even more difficult than just typing away.

This picture changes dramatically once ESA is in place. In this vision, the business analyst has the modeling tools and the authority to create and adapt UIs using a business-oriented process model and services to support them, and adding insight collected by embedded analytical tools. Then he begins building new scenarios by selecting services from the Enterprise Services Repository, configuring role-based interfaces for employees, and drawing inspiration from user expectations with which he is personally familiar. Only near the end of the process, when IT developers tweak the dynamically generated code created by the modeling tool, does the scenario pass out of the analyst's hands. (For a more detailed description of this process, consult Chapter 17.) The virtues of this model are obvious:

• Application design is decentralized, passing out of the hands of specialists and into those of managers and knowledge workers on the front lines, reducing delays and communication disconnects.

• Modeling tools and a decentralized development process dramatically expand the pool of "developers" to include appropriate business analysts and knowledge workers across the enterprise. And IT's resources are freed to consolidate noncore systems while supporting the organic development efforts of the business analysts. Instead of struggling with standalone applications or fragile integration efforts, IT transforms into an enabler of changeone that supports process innovation occurring on the edge of the enterprise. The chief information officer swaps her title for a new one, chief process innovation officer, because the job is ultimately less about IT than it is about enabling technologies.

This dovetails neatly with the second point from earlier: ESA and its human faces must become the drivers for a larger cultural and institutional shift away from business-as-usual organization charts and more toward a process-oriented structure. Everyone within the organization must be ready, able, and willing to recognize when and how a business process is ripe for optimization, or how a new one might open up a brand-new market opportunity, or steal a competitor's best customers.

ESA can spark a corporate refocusing on process innovation, but the danger exists that ESA will be seen internally as just another doomed initiative by IT, and not what effectively amounts to a corporate cultural revolution. It's impossible to develop pattern-based modeling if employees refuse to understand those patterns and then act upon them. Without widespread sign-on, ESA will fail.

We'll conclude this chapter with that thought. ESA is more than just a path forward for an IT architecture that has otherwise been rendered painfully obsolete. It's a catalyst for the cultural and business process change necessary to create a lasting competitive advantage in a business landscape becoming more complex and more brutal every day.