Linking Information Systems to Business Performance.

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The lack of understanding of the relationship between process and platform is a key contributor to the extreme spending on information management systems and technology in organizations today. Many managers are quick to adopt a technology to solve their organizational needs without clearly understanding the underlying business process beforehand. It is often seen that these systems are installed and cannot accomodate the current workflow. For example, they can create new processes, but not faciliate existing ones.

What advice can you offer on the alignment of information systems and process to achieve business performance?

My Answer

There are many ways to go in the direction of Process improvement and Process/Platform alignment, I have recently blogged about this. (See http://bit.ly/33sHTf ). The point is that you can only align platforms and processes in certain conditions:

• you must have the budget : Quality has a cost. The trend is to outsource non-core business processes to save costs. But even for core business processes, companies tend to choose for Application Packages because for the same budget, the project risk seems lower.

• the platform must give trust and some advantages. A very flexible and generic platform is not what people want to see. They want just something that is easy to use and that optimize their own activities : "What's in it for me to care about the process ?"

• people must be ready for change. Some leaders don't want to have too much transparency about how they conduct business. Some others are just no ready to change: " why change ? we have always done it like that"

• business departments must be ready to collaborate with each other. Silos first exist between people and than between systems. Trying to resolve it at the platform first is a difficult bypass.

To me the best advise for aligning process and platform is to create an open company culture which rewards efficiency and effectiveness changes to better meet business goals. It has to be an decentralized approach otherwise the enterprise architects will become the bottlenecks.

To enable the advantages of technology usage, one must create a governance that is clear for everybody and provide the adequate process tools (Requirements Analysis, BPM, Business Intelligence, Business Rules, Business Activity Monitoring) which will allow to design and measure Process improvements KPIs.