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.

The brave new world

The pressure on IT has always been there to deliver. I recall the 80s when the business-IT alignment was on everybody's lips, the 90s when the IT-facilitated business process re-engineering and kaizan were talk of the town and the new economic order was proclaimed by the web-based companies at the turn of the century. IT was always deemed indispensable in these initiatives but adjudged to be slow to meet the business needs. The bursting of the dotcom bubble and the y2k experience tarnished the IT image but did not abet the pressure on IT to facilitate inter-organisational processes in a globalised world. IT's role was still at the heart of 'making it happen'. One assumed that the ERP systems had taken care of all the transactional needs at the operational level and the datawarehouses and business intelligence tools had enamoured the business executives by adding value to strategy formulation. Now comes the frightening reminder that all is not well in the wake of global financial meltdown.

"Capital expenditure priorities are shifted into IT from other high-payback projects" just to perform necessary ERP changes, claims one executive. Whilst another bemoans: "Change to ERP paralyzes the entire organization in moving forward in other areas that can bring more value."

An Accenture partner sees rising tide of operational flexibility on daily basis and proclaims "strategy, as we knew it, is dead." A paradigm shift in IT's execution is expected and demanded in this new world order. Yet the top priority for 2009 was "modernizing key legacy applications" and the SOA, the pre-requisite for flexibility, seemed fatally wounded.

It is a challenge to all the IT professionals to acquire a mindset attuned with business imperatives and successfully deploy disruptive technologies to make a quantum change. The decade ahead of us is full of potential and we must not fail.