From Principles to Specific Activities

The three principles of BTM combine to form a solid foundation for aligning business and technology. Without utilizing predictive modeling, instilling collaborative decision-making, and making knowledge and assets reusable, it's impossible to do BTM. This means that the principles of BTM merit a long and careful look before you dive into your next IT project.

Who Should Lead the Drive to Adopt the Principles of BTM?

"Right now, many corporations don't have a BTM hero who has been tasked with leading the drive towards modeling, collaboration, and reuse. And even where those people exist today, they typically don't have the budget to marshal the resources to do it.

Like any important shift in IT planning, embracing predictive modeling starts with the CIO. He or she may assign somebody else to tackle it, but I think it's got to be very high level. I do think, however, that over the next two or three years you'll see process-focused technology people start to play this role by acting as purveyors of modeling concepts to both sides: to the business side to help them understand what technology can do for them; to the IT group to actually get development done right.

It's these same business process/technology leaders who will be the lynchpins for driving collaboration, and putting the right tools and processes in place to make it happen. And I'd also argue, by the way, that it's these same people that have to start looking at reuse and knowledge management because they're the ones who see things on a cross-functional basis, whether it's cross-departmental , or sometimes even across business partners . I think you really must have a group that is looking after the whole development area on reuse, because reuse starts at the process level: if you can't establish shared processes it's going to be difficult to establish component reuse at a technology level.

People are already arguing 'yes' about alignment, but I think we're at the cusp of where we're going to see this discipline become a critical path , enabling better control of IT spending, better management of projects, better prioritization, and viewing the whole thing as a portfolio. I think that you're going to see a much more coordinated effort. In the past, business/technology alignment has been done more on an ad hoc basis. But today, you need a more architected approach: It needs to be more disciplined, and you need to be able to put different areas to work in pursuit of alignment, including modeling, collaboration, and reuse."

” Dale Kutnick, founder, chairman, and CEO, META Group

Despite this enthusiastic endorsement, however, it's important to remember that the principles of BTM are only one piece of a bigger puzzle. Early on in this chapter we defined the principles as prerequisites for performing the activities of BTM. This is a good way to emphasize the importance of these principles and how they fit with the other pieces of business technology management: It's impossible to do successful BTM without utilizing predictive modeling, instilling collaborative decision-making, and making knowledge and assets reusable. But it's also possible to do these things ”to do them well, in fact ”and still not make good on the promise of BTM.