bITa Center

Overview of the bITa Europe Conference, 10-14 March 2003, Sophia Antipolis, Nice
The first day of the Conference the delegates examined different IT frameworks – different methodologies for managing the domains of IT. There was the ITIL framework and also the ITSM framework for the Service Management domain. There were RUP, DSDM, ASL for the Applications Management domain. Then there were PRINCE and PMBOK for the Project Management domain. Finally there was ISPL for the Architecture Management domain.
The list of Domains was not definitive and the frameworks were examples rather than accepted best practices. There was no clarity as to what service management was, as opposed to infrastructure management, as opposed to application management. What was Architecture let alone Architecture Management?
There was no agreement to the scope and purpose of the domains and when it came to the Frameworks there was even more inconsistency, they each had differences of scope and terminology and were not connected to each other.

Was this a Problem?
Well on the face of it no – because three quarters of the delegates operated in just one of the domains, either as a consultant, a supplier, manager or practitioner in that domain. They were happy to operate in their domain which to the other delegates were more like silos. For the people working in the individual domains, if it was a problem it was not their problem, it was one for others to deal with.
So three quarters of the delegates were comfortable with their domain – but they were unhappy that IT was isolated from and not aligned with the business.

As for the other quarter of the audience, who were not individual domain gurus – how did they feel about it? Well that revealed itself in the next day where the conference examined, in a number of round tables, issues on Business and IT alignment.
One of the minority of delegates questioned the other ‘How can IT align cleanly and effectively with the business if it is not aligned internally with itself?’.

The question was almost sacrilegious. Let’s not start criticising IT for the Business Alignment issue appeared to be the feeling of many – IT is a servant of the Enterprise. The enterprise must drive IT.
This was accepted in principle but there was an issue of the enterprise driving down different IT silos. It would work with IT in one solo to find that it then had to work with IT in the next silo. The enterprise had to make IT work. Now many IT functions do have their individual silos linked to the business. This is typified by the relationships built at individual contact points and the processes and procedures that are operated at different contact points in the domain silos.

IT typically has ‘account managers’ who align with the business on the planning level. IT sometimes has ‘architecture analysts’ who align with the business at the concept level. IT usually has ‘project managers’ who align with ‘business project managers’ at a project level. IT nowadays has ‘Service Managers’ who align with the business at the service delivery level and the ‘users’ have the ‘IT Help Desk’ who they align with at the personal level.

The list is not complete, we must not forget the occasional IT Cost Accountant who aligns IT at the financial level, along with of course the CIO who aligns IT with the business at the board level. So with all of these contact points surely IT is aligned with the business?

Yes and No, that is a polite way of really saying Yes in principle but No in reality. The issue is that IT has so many contact points that business has to work through each of these contact points to make IT work. IT operates as many businesses did twenty years ago - the old days. When a client wanted a supplier to develop and deliver products or services, they had to deal with the individual departments within the supplier to make the supplier work, as the supplier was unable to join itself together. The customer would speak to one department to find out whether the supplier could make a product, and then find the next department to find out the cost and timescale and then to another department to agree the logistics and then to another department to organise production and testing, and then to another department about regular procurement and then another department to organise the production schedule and then to another department to organise the delivery logistics and then with another department regarding payment; and then when they got the products to another department to complain that they were wrong and then another department to say the price was wrong and then another department to get the specification corrected and then to the CEO to say that it was all too difficult to deal with them and they were going somewhere else.

Clearly, the customer became tired and angry that the supplier was not joined up. The customer became an expert within the supplier – he knew how the supplier worked (or didn’t work) – more so than anybody else within the supplier.

Familiar? You still find some businesses operate in that model today – a few, not many because their customers have deserted them to work with joined up businesses. The ‘silo enterprises’ have died.
Familiar? Yes and regrettably most IT departments still operate in that model of ‘domain silos’ – not joined up, and so what happens? - they get outsourced and things still do not improve because the outsourced service providers still operate with the same business model IT – not joined up.

At the end of the day I proposed to the audience that the bITa Center should come forward with a business model that the Enterprise and IT should operate within and then examines the effect of cultures on the model to establish best practice for each enterprise’s situation. The next local seminars around Europe are the first steps forward towards that goal.

John Gibert,
research editor,
bITa Center