"Important principles may, and must, be inflexible ."
” Abraham Lincoln
The design for your imaginary dream house is finally complete. Over the course of several meetings, you, Janet (the architect), and Robert (the contractor) have collaborated to draw up plans for your new home that live up to everybody's exacting standards. As your last meeting wraps up, you walk both Janet and Robert to the door, shake each of their hands, and thank them for a job well-done. Once they have gone, you return to the kitchen table, where the plans are still spread out.
Even though the three of you spent hours poring through the details of the design ”details that fall far outside your own architectural comfort zone ”the entire process went off without a hitch. You couldn't possibly hope to understand most of the decisions that Janet and Robert grappled with, but thanks to their expert approach they were still able to tell a simple and concise story about what it will be like to live in the house when it's done, which is exactly what you needed to know to help get the design right. Obviously, this method wasn't just the result of good fortune : Both Janet and Robert are highly trained professionals who have spent years honing their crafts in academic and professional environments.
Only by mastering a set of underlying principles can professionals like Janet and Robert ensure that their approach runs as smoothly as it did in your dream house project. These principles provide the basic building blocks that are necessary for professionals to design buildings that deliver the most value to their clients . Three examples of the underlying principles that are necessary for designing a home are drafting (including subjects like orthographic, axonometric, and oblique drawing systems; dimensioning, and the alphabet of lines), structural engineering (trade math; properties of materials; and designing the skeleton that supports the building, including beams, joints, walls, and so on), and standard blueprint notation (including recognized symbols for plumbing and electricity, as well as architecture and engineering elements in the blueprint).
Without their expertise in areas like these, Janet (the architect) and Robert (the contractor) wouldn't have the tools that they need to bridge the gap between their specialties and your demands as a client. Similarly, Janet (the consultant) and Robert (the CIO) need to adhere to certain principles before they can use BTM to bridge the gap between business and technology. No architect or contractor who expects to get a commission would approach a potential client without an encyclopedic knowledge of drafting, structural engineering, and standard blueprint notation. And no CIO or consultant should expect to align business and technology if they can't apply the three principles of BTM: Utilize Predictive Modeling, Instill Collaborative Decision-Making, and Make Knowledge and Assets Reusable.
In This Part
Part II: The Principles of BTM introduces the principles that provide a solid underpinning for aligning business and technology. The first principle, to utilize predictive modeling, enables companies to preview decisions and designs before beginning costly implementation. At the same time, it helps the team to embrace impact analysis ”a technique that replaces myopic decisions with a holistic view of the IT project. The second principle of BTM, instill collaborative decision-making, applies to both vertical collaboration between members of the same project team, and horizontal collaboration, where amorphous "great ideas" are communicated across departmental and project team boundaries. Finally, the last principle, making knowledge and assets reusable, encompasses knowledge management, where companies capture documents and relationships that can be targeted to relevant employees , and create a reusable repository of model designs, which helps to establish standards and minimize rework .
