JUMP - Joint Up Means Payback

Yesterday I attended the joint meeting of British Computer Society and Chartered Institute of Management Accountants at the premises of BCS in London. The agenda was to review what business-IT alignment and business intelligence means from the perspective of these two organisations.

IT is a world with a bewildering array of technologies - Java, .net, c++, sql, ITIL, CMS, databases, Joomla!, XML, CSS, HTML, PHP, TCP/IP, SMTP, HTTP, Unix, Firefox, agile, SCRUM and one can go on. To harness these successfully for business has been the dream for last twenty-five years. In fact, I cannot remember a single year over the last two decades when one or other management consultancy did not emerge with a framework for successfully aligning IT with business. Historically, many organisations have moved their IT personnel into business departments or encouraged their IT people to acquire CIMA/MBA qualification to bridge the chasm between these two worlds. Yet it was sobering to discover that business perceptions remains that these two world are far apart and bridging them is still a burning issue. A framework was presented to bridge this divide by Dr James Bacon based upon system-thinking and Genuine Action Learning. The claim was that joint-up thinking leads to dramatic increase in profitability (JUMP).

Also I remember that in the early 90s the BI systems were called Executive Information Systems (EIS). In the mid-90s I remember dubbing EIS as Everybody's Information System as the technology was becoming ubiquitous and affordable for lower tiers in the organisation. Interestingly CIMA sees this shift now and believes that analytical processing will move from the hands of accountants to become more pervasive. This redefines the role to become more focused on planning and control rather than analysis.

The moral of the story is that we are still grappling with old problems and trying to find better solutions to them.