Business Processes & IT

Back to some daily business topics but also thoughts on company & even somehow social organizations...

Earlier this year (here), we have seen that a success factor for Quality of data, is the existence of clear, simple, acknowledged and known business processes (who is doing what when). This is however quite an interesting challenge in industrial companies: large enterprises have detailed procedures with many actors, exceptions, and de-standardized situations, for which the governing rules are not always defined. The knowledge looks there very empiric and unequally distributed.

There, it often happens that Information Technology (IT) actors know as much (or even more than -) of the business processes in a given area as the business people themselves. There are many reasons; let us go through some of the important one to understand the situation to handle it the best way:
- IT is a transversal function, which often deals with most of the actors of the corporate main processes. It has now reached a fair maturity in a lot of companies.
- IT teams are outside of the daily business, so they can manage and follow activities with step back and integrate them through their work with the different actors.
- IT people are trained to analyze daily requirements and transform them into IT processes. As Business people are more trained to practice business.
- The IT function is dedicated to handle processes and to integrate them into systems, they focus their effort there and free up time for that.
- IT actors have different point of views, that are often less subjective than actors involved on a daily basis.

Also the IT community has understood that successful projects nowadays are managed by teams integrating technical and functional expertise and there has managed to capitalize good knowledge of business processes in most areas of the Industry. Therefore, clarifying business processes with Sales, Engineering, Purchasing, Accounting, Logistics or Manufacturing people in plants or even in headquarters can be an nightmare without involving the IT specialists in the related domains. Moreover, as the Master Data Management activities (here) are directly connected with Technology, it even appears easier to work with IT teams for an initializing standpoint and leave closed questions to Business actors.

Afterall IT is a structuring way to facilitate and control the business, and its specialists are sometimes still not really recognized in companies at the right level for that.
On the other side, IT can gain on efficiency by improving the open mindset and somehow loose itself from the tight control from Finance. Especially in Europe.

And I can state such as I was IT and have been working globally and on daily basis between IT and Business functions for almost 5 years.

Ciao
MfS