As I've been prattling on about recently, it's critical to start down the path toward BPM, BI, and related goals by focusing first on some basics. By my lights, one of the first and most important of these is to find, identify, repair, and report on anything and everything that's broken in the IT and/or business infrastructure.
This is as critical as ensuring that you've got a firm and sturdy foundation underneath you before attempting to build anything substantial and stable. And to achieve this goal effectively, you're going to need documented, effective, enforced, and proven processes, just like you need for everything else. Otherwise, every break or failure becomes a fire drill, and every effort to address every problem will likely end up reinventing wheels that already exist. This ad hoc approach works sometimes, but only inconsistently. It also opens up your enterprise to the risk that what fixes Problem A breaks the fix that was implemented to resolve Problem B. Or vice-versa.
You've probably already seen this happen, when a software "update" meant to patch or fix a previous problem creates a new one. Well, imagine the same thing happening dozens or hundreds of times a week or month, depending on the size of your enterprise, and you can begin to see the true scope of the problem. Without processes focused on finding, fixing, and ultimately avoiding infrastructure problems, those problems will consume precious resources that should be focused on helping people do more work better, and refining the processes underlying that work.
Process-driven infrastructure problem-solving is also the only way I've seen to achieve real, sustainable reduction of problems that hinder operations and drag down technological and user performance. Once there are processes in place for addressing problems effectively, those processes themselves can be expanded and refined to reduce or eliminate problems that stubbornly recur.
Of course, to find and fix problems in your infrastructure, you need knowledge about said infrastructure. This is where tools for monitoring, alarms, and alerts can be very useful on the IT side of things. When combined with input from businesspeople about the frequency and relative severity recurring problems, such tools can be focused on those problems, in ways that lead to effective problem-solving processes. These can then be adapted and applied to other tools and other problems, leading eventually to a consistent, enterprise-wide, process-driven approach to finding and fixing problems across entire IT and business infrastructures.
At least, that's what I think. More on both relevant processes and tools coming up shortly. Meanwhile, do let me know your thoughts on this important matter, and how effectively or ineffectively it's being addressed where you work. Maybe together, we can implement more effective, consistent processes for talking about this particular challenge, here and at your workplace.
Michael Dortch has been an analyst, 'information entrepreneur,' speaker, and writer about IT and 'the real world" for the past 30 years. After almost 10 years at the Robert Frances Group (RFG), Michael begins a new position with Aberdeen Group in September.
Dennis Byron is an analyst with ebizQ, focusing on Open Source Software as well as Business Process Management technologies.
