======================================================================== REALITY CHECK: EPHRAIM SCHWARTZ http://www.infoworld.com ======================================================================== Tuesday, October 12, 2004
A BREAK WITH TRADITION By Ephraim Schwartz Posted October 08, 2004 3:00 PM Pacific Time If you think of your business as a car and your IT infrastructure as the road it travels on, then your business processes are the tires that let the car move along the road. What we are seeing now, at an ever increasing rate, is CFOs asking CIOs to kick the tires and check the air pressure. Analogies aside, CFOs want CIOs to get more involved in process design across the company. ADVERTISEMENT -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Grid technology - the future face of computing Grid technology is the face of computing moving forward, providing the best implementation for standardizing, consolidating and improving the flexibility of the IT infrastructure. Don't be left behind, watch this new webcast. http://newsletter.infoworld.com/t?ctl=9428E4:2B910B2 -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- Every process flows through three levels, according to C.D. Hobbs, senior vice president at Meta Group. A package like SAP forms the backbone, the first tier. The second tier contains specialized functionality for the industry it serves. And the third tier is often a personal application running on a business analyst's laptop. When processes become more efficient, applications can be consolidated. The fewer the applications needed, the more efficient a company becomes at driving process costs down and the more time there will be left to do other things. Hobbs, a former CIO and CFO, told me that in Meta's latest survey of CIOs, 42 percent reported they have a nontraditional job that encompasses both business functions and IT responsibility. The reason they give is that they are involved in "business transformation accountability" -- another way of saying process redesign. Of course, the fundamental role of a CIO is to make decisions about enterprisewide standards, applications, and infrastructure; to approve the overall IT strategy; and to make sure the information highway is sufficient for all the tasks at hand. And if you are going to have an enterprisewide architecture, it has to be enforced. One business unit cannot use SAP while another uses PeopleSoft. "You may sacrifice some functionality with an enterprisewide standard," Hobbs says, but in the long run it reduces costs and enables a company to leverage technology to increase efficiency. The alternative is to have multiple technology stacks and proprietary architectures, necessitating an increase in IT staff to support the numerous options. If a company is going to grow at a rate of 10 percent, then someone needs to get the internal teams, the business units, to grow at 6 percent, so 4 percent can go to the bottom line. Sapient CIO Don Nelson says you have to attack the problem from a system level and design efficient business processes that, at the same time, ensuring all groups in the company are connected to a companywide strategy. Both Hobbs and Nelson believe that out of this struggle will come a new kind of staff. Nelson calls them "functional experts." Each department would have its own functional expert. For example, the marketing department might have someone whose role is "not quite IT and not quite marketing." This person would focus on trying to drive the highest value in marketing with both deep functional expertise and deep technical expertise: the fusion of a business analyst with a technologist. Hobbs foresees something similar, which he calls a "business integration analyst." This class of worker understands technology as well as process mapping and can leverage both. Savvy companies, those that are leaders not followers, are willing to make dramatic changes in order to meet tough competitors head on. But changing the corporate culture to recognize a new reality is not always easy. Hobbs offers a way out of this dilemma when he says that "culture is process embedded in technology." If you want to change the culture, you have to change the process. Ephraim Schwartz is an editor at large at InfoWorld. ======================================================================== Notes from an Insider Two ways to be an IT know-it-all: do it yourself, or just read "Notes From the Field" by InfoWorld columnist Robert X. Cringely. Read his column and get the latest inside scoop on computer industry gossip, information you can use to dazzle your colleagues and impress your friends. E-mailed to you every Tuesday. 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