Who is Responsible for Automating Technology?

As our simulated case from Rauha Communications illustrates, technology automation isn't the sole responsibility of developers or even technical employees of any sort . This myopic approach, in fact, is one of the key sources of the business/technology disconnect in the first place. To engender a bigger-picture understanding of technology design, project teams should include end-users and beneficiaries of technology as early on in the project as possible. Technology automation, because of its reliance upon models that democratize user input, makes it possible to include a broader array of input and consultation than ever before. The primary drivers of technology automation are the IT analysts and service providers who are tasked with crafting the high-level technology design for the project. To make sure that this design conforms to centrally administered technology standards and reuses existing IT assets, enterprise architects and the PMO should also play a prominent role. The final group that needs to provide input into the technology automation process is domain experts. This includes business managers and process experts who help to ensure that the new technology will effectively support their own areas of expertise; vendor representatives who help to describe how their offerings can contribute to the success of the project; and, most importantly, the prospective end-users of the systems who, by signing off early on to the design of new applications and systems, minimize the cultural and organizational barriers that stand in the way of the new technology being put to good use.

An End, But Also A Beginning

After completing technology automation, selecting a final scenario model for business, process, and technology, and wrapping up the activities of BTM, the IT project team has an end-to-end design to help them create a better business case and get the funding that they need to move on from the design stage to the build, test, and deploy stages ”from "aim" to "fire." However, this doesn't mean that the models produced by business model definition, process optimization, and technology automation become leftover artifacts from a bygone era after the activities of BTM wrap up. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. At this point, the enterprise model becomes an anchor to which the implementation team refers back to time and again to make sure that what they build matches what the project was designed to do.

As inevitable, unforeseen snags pop up along the way and the implementation team is forced to modify the original design, the enterprise model assumes another important role: communicating between technical implementers and the business and IT executives who commissioned the project in the first place. When the design changes, the implementation team can update the model to reflect their workarounds, and then pass these modifications along to the management team to get a final go-ahead and make sure that everyone stays informed of the progress.

Finally, the business, process, and technology models can provide a useful segue into some of the more nuts-and-bolts disciplines that come to the forefront during implementation. For example, the application functionality, interfaces, and flow that are a crucial part of the technology model can provide a starting point for object modeling, a discipline that helps companies develop applications in-house. And similarly, the IT assets in the model ”assets like application software, servers, databases, and networks ”can be linked with asset management, which helps to maximize the long- term value of IT resources.

These and other possible examples of how the models developed during the activities of BTM might be put to work elsewhere highlight a crucial point about business model definition, process optimization, and technology automation: their impact is felt throughout the IT department and enterprise as a whole. Naturally, then, governing BTM to ensure that this impact is positive rather than negative will be crucial to its success.