Business process management (BPM) presents a big opportunity for IT to re-engage business. IT bores business leaders. IT, by its very name, seeks to transform legitimate business activities - activities that require skill, grace, innuendo and even cunning - into digitally enhanced shadows of reality. "Information" is groped and rendered by "technology," and we tell the business that "all can be better" because of our transformative efforts. This positivistic mentality suggests that all human interaction and commerce are best represented by a parallel world of server-based logic acting on our behalf, for our general benefit. IT practitioners are notorious for following frivolity and novelty. Yesterday's "great new technology" is immediately replaced by the "toy du jour," if we in IT are doing our jobs. IT will use a flamethrower when a match would do; it will push voice over IP (VoIP), instant messaging (IM) and videoconferencing when all business wants to do is phone up for a sandwich. IT overkills everything it does with its incessant chase for the next big thing and its naive acceptance of technological determinism. IT needs a new reputation.

In this light, it is risky to propose that IT can benefit business in a big new way, if it will just back down from its hype-induced sales pitch and its technocratic view of reality. However, there is a technology trend emerging from IT that matches a bigger business-level trend. BPM is starting the break the traditional IT organization from its self-centered vision of the corporate future. BPM is appealing to the business side of the house, so much so that its principles are driving the business to knock on IT's door for technological assistance. In some cases, IT is caught off-guard, with no hype and story to promote. Some in IT "get" BPM, but many do not - especially the core of programmers who consider BPM to be a poor man's way to do systems development. Those who do get BPM see in it a new way to justify IT's value to the business. In theory, the business wants to be agile, and at the same time, it wants to be deterministic. In theory, business wants to be able to tune itself to new conditions where competitive situations demand agility, and to apply repeatable best practices in a consistent manner in those cases where they don't need to fix what isn't broken. BPM offers the business a vision of how that new agile and deterministic dyad can coexist, in theory. "In theory" is the operative phrase here because most current uses of BPM are pedantic and minimalist: BPM for simple administrative tasks; BPM for repetitive paper-processing. IT can wake up to the potential power of BPM as a true transformational methodology and paradigm, and IT can lead the business with best practices, competency centers, reference templates and utility-level software infrastructure. The IT outsourcers are not "BPM smart" yet - many of them equate BPM with document workflow in a model mired in the mid-1990s. IT can compete and IT can re-awaken with a new business-ready story. IT has an opportunity to re-engage the business and hush the "Oh, IT…" rumors. Or, IT can let this opportunity pass while it chases frivolity and freshness - just as the pedant chases misplaced commas in a work of art.

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David wrote: "IT will use a flamethrower when a match would do; it will push voice over IP (VoIP), instant messaging (IM) and videoconferencing when all business wants to do is phone up for a sandwich." I concur with his observation and would like to volunteer both an explanation and remedy.

In my opinion, IT projects are anything but agile (match); requiring large numbers of resources to realise change and benefits. A large investment therefore requires a bigger return, which in turn nesseciates feature goldplating (flamethrower).

My hope for agile technologies is that they enable us to deliver solutions that match the size of the problem they seek to solve.

Thank you for your comment to my blog entry. It was spot on. I am not sure if you have had a chance to review it yet, but Daryl Plummer and I just released a 20 piece set of research on Agility.

http://www.gartner.com/rese...

I like your agility-related comment “My hope for agile technologies is that they enable us to deliver solutions that match the size of the problem they seek to solve” and will mention it to Daryl when I speak with him. Thanks again!

I am forever confounded when dealing in consulting engagements that I am consistently having to focus on the "T" and not the "I" of IT. On that basis the message will always be boring to business because IT departments are always interested in the new toy and not what it can do to make the business work better. The next challenge is not just to have IT re-engage with the business, but also to help them with the analysis of their vastly expanded volumes of information.

Having worked with two Fortune 500 IT organizations, I believe the problem is simple, although the solution is not. The problem is that IT is composed of intelligent people that are narrowly focused on technology. They don't have any understanding of the business IT is in. The solution is to formally train and coach them in business process, customer service and finance appropriate to running IT as an internal service delivery business. Often, the arrogance seen in IT organizations prevents them from even understanding how to show value to their company. That means true business engagement with all processes designed to support the constituency with transparency and financial responsibility. IT needs to be led by executives that know how to run a business. IT doesn't need techies without true business process knowledge in management positions. You can institute any number of tools and buzzword standards and still not run IT effectively.