Last time was about processes intended to help you and your colleagues figure out what applications, resources, services, and workflows were most critical to your business, and how well and/or not well IT is supporting them. This time is about tools intended to enable and support said processes.
Regarding tools, well, you've got to start with what you've got, on the assumption that there isn't budget or bandwidth to go out and find, then deploy and manage something new. This is especially true before investing significantly in any particular BPM and/or BI solution, even if it's "free." Free software, as valuable and powerful as it is, still requires time and energy, and sometimes money, to deploy effectively. And it requires just as firm and solid an operational foundation as anything else that's critical to your business.
Fortunately, you can learn a lot about what's working well and what's not by gathering and analyzing any and all available information about the IT and intellectual property (IP) resources people use to do their jobs. This information, coupled with data about things like common support problems and their resolutions, can help tremendously in efforts to identify and prioritize business-critical tasks and resources, and the IT and IP elements that enable them. This is something one can literally begin with little more than sticky notes, spreadsheets, and/or text documents.
However, if there are more sophisticated tools available for infrastructure and/or operational monitoring and/or workflow mapping, this is the time to use'em. In fact, this information-gathering process is so important and potentially valuable, it may justify investing in such tools where they are not already in place. This is particularly true given the growing number of open source and trial software offerings in this ever-evolving space.
Whatever tools are used, it can also be both helpful and illuminating for IT to share the findings of these information-gathering efforts with the users and line-of-business decision-makers those IT people are supporting. This presents the opportunity to refine and enhance those statistical findings and aggregations with anecdotal and/or survey-based "real-life" user input and feedback. This is likely to be much more reliable than the results of the sadly common and commonly ineffective practice of designating IT staffers as user ambassadors or representatives. It is also a way to demonstrate that IT is ready, willing, and able to listen and respond effectively to users, something many users and some IT people seriously doubt, I assure you. Let the users speak for themselves!
With both processes and tools, start small and focused, but start. Gather this information, and develop processes and solutions for gathering, managing, and taking advantage of it in the future. Not only can and should it inform your determinations about what's really critical to your business, it can help begin an effective dialogue among business, IT and senior executive decision-makers. Even if your enterprise is sufficiently compact and flat that those are all the same person.
By the way, there's some very interesting and refreshing additional takes on working with what you've got in a recently published book, by my industry colleague and ebizQ blogmate, decision management expert James Taylor (with co-author Neil Raden). The book is "Smart Enough Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions," and the title only hints at the breadth and depth of common-sense, actionable advice you'll find within. (You can visit Amazon.com to examine some of said advice from the comfort of your Internet-connected computer.) And in an interesting bit of synchronicity, the book came out on June 29, the same date as the iPhone, one of which you can qualify to win by completing the ebizQ event processing survey. See? Good processes really do help tie everything together better!)
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.
