For the executive and
management layers of the modern company to become efficient agents of
beneficial change, software has to capture the evolving best practices
of all business process and all decision-making process.
The
worker layer receives great empowerment from today’s new software
tools, which opens up daily procedures to new functionality. Executives
also are receiving new tools, and we can expect from this to see
similar revolutions, at the executive and management levels, in the
ways of doing things.
One piece of the executive
change-management toolbox is the discipline of business process
management (BPM), which can be defined as both a business and a
technical process.
“BPM for Business can be defined as a way of thinking
and an approach which allows the organization to focus and manage its
business processes with the aim of deriving efficiency and excellence
in its way of working across multiple levels of business to achieve
defined corporate objectives
“BPM from Technology Perspective – Simple Definition
: A combination of techniques and technology to allow a process to be
defined, analyzed, deployed, automated/executed and monitored in a
closed loop allowing continuous process improvements.” See more from
this excellent overview at ITtoolbox: BPM - Where Art Thou?
Business process management is on the rise, and BPM
software is expected to be among the fastest growing segments of the
software market over the next half-decade, according to Gartner. The
reasons for this are simply that executives are starting to get the
messages pounded into their analytical summaries every day, all of
which combine to spell out A-G-I-L-I-T-Y in the enterprise, or die.
“Today’s more collaborative, iterative style of software development requires a unified environment, provided by BPMS,
according to the study. Market requirements are shifting from pure-play
business process management products that address human-to-human or
system-to-system workflow to BPMS that
support process management practices in a more consistent and unified
manner across the entire process life cycle. ‘The technology helps
business leaders to work together more collaboratively and seamlessly
by sharing common tools and artifacts,’ Hill says.” See BPM’s Evolution
Software can embody best practice in ways
that human memory, good intentions, and limited training cannot. Given
strong sponsorship or enthusiastic adoption, software can cut through
the social culture, and effectively provide an influence for change in
the culture. In the realm of CRM alone, this effect can be seen countless times at the worker level – the power of software that liberates.
The task of running a big corporation requires supreme skill. From the CEO on down, ultimately to the lowliest employee, explicit knowledge and tacit knowledge
must all be coherent, and bound within knowledge management systems and
software. Good instinct and judgment are priceless, but every executive
impulse has to translate into an airtight case and a seamless execution
across a myriad small details. All the details must jibe, and operate
together.
Thus, executive conservatism, from fear of
unbalancing the great machine. Thus, the great need for data,
information, feedback. And thus also, the ensuing tragedy when vision
and instinct are held in disregard of the facts coming in. Thus, in the
end, software as the great tool to help keep everything on track –
including change, which has become the necessary constant.
“Unfortunately, executive planning is pretty
conservative when it comes to this. Rather than letting the
organization see the entire queue, and letting them decide what to take
on, planning committees usually just pick the requirements that
‘should’ get done, and then dump them on the organization and say ‘make
it so.’ They have an arbitrary date (one year hence) to make it happen.
“Unfortunately, this idea is just as ineffective in
business as it is in IT. It is time that we, in IT, take our ideas of
Agility, and share them with our friends in the business side. This is
happening in some very agile corporations, including Microsoft, but not
in enough places. We, in IT, can help share this notion.” – An Agile Business Planning Model
Indeed. The future of IT is often clouded. While Nicholas Carr asks the question, Does IT Matter?, and as the IT department is encouraged to operate IT like a business,
the possibility remains that the most beneficial tools for change that
the executive and management layers could receive, will be handed to
them as gifts by their own IT people.
