Mark Palmer
Tue, 17 Jul 2007 10:47:24 -0500
When most large enterprises engage software technology vendors, they send in the wrong troops: they send in IT. Although IT is an absolutely critical stakeholder in an technology decision, too often the entire decision-making process is delegated to technologists. With BAM, this approach is a recipe for disaster.
Here's a typical approach. When organizations consider looking at BAM, they start by an inventory of all their hardware and software and try to associate business processes to this inventory. Out of the gate, this process is difficult to get right, and requires a lot of estimation and guessing, becuase most infrastructure, in some way, is shared. And, with the introduction of service oriented architecture, it is the goal of IT today to share assets. So allocation schemes and decisions based upon them, begin in a flawed way.
Next, the key performance indicators (KPIs) from an IT point of view usually don't map to the KPIs of the from a business point of view. Technology-oriented KPIs yield technology-oriented BAM dashboards, and technology-oriented views of business information. Too often, a business user wants to see how many orders have been processed, and is shown a tree that displays the technical components supporting the ordering application. To find the answer to a simple question requires 100 clicks to discover an aggregated view of orders. This is not the objective of BAM.
IT-driven software development also tends to be driven by software development methodologies that are designed to build software products, not answer business questions. Successful BAM products utilize a heavy dose of rapid propotyping, high-level description of business processes, and isolation layers between BAM dashboards and the low-level IT infrastructure.
The output of bottom-up BAM is complex requirements expressed in technology terms, wasted time, and mixed results. The output of top-down BAM is an engaged business, an application that fits the need, and the ability to rapidly evolve and expand the system as requirements change.
The first word in BAM is the word "Business" for a reason - projects should begin with, always include, and always be measured by, the business.


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