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The pressure on an organisation to respond to change continues to increase at an alarming rate. With the internet enabling new competition to spring up and challenge existing business models through lean practices, the need to be able to demonstrate flexibility to external pressures cannot be overlooked. In addition, merger and acquisition activity continues to be a major force in the market, and time spent internally in bringing together different cultures and systems is time not spent on responding to the main external market pressures. Further, legal and other governance and audit requirements mean that events and changes within an organisation have to be monitored, measured, time stamped and stored such that an accurate record of how a business process has been conducted can be demonstrated at a future date if and when required. Finally, much has been discovered through research that shows that organisations are looking to innovation to provide the major springboard for growth over the next few years – and yet Quocirca finds that few companies have the capabilities to create the flexible underpinnings for true innovation to be enabled and managed successfully across an organisation’s internal and external constituents. However, many IT functions embedded in today’s organisations are increasingly unfit for purpose. These functions may well have been adequate when first created, but times have changed, and the monolithic applications of the past have often proven incapable of moving with the times. In many cases, IT is now seen as a constraint to effective business, rather than a facilitator. It is now time to look at how changes to the IT function can be carried out to free up the organisation from having to work against existing IT infrastructures; instead, being able to call upon specific capabilities within the IT function as required to enable and facilitate dynamic business processes. IT has to accept that change is inevitable, and that many existing applications and tools will need to be updated or replaced to more effectively service the needs of the business. Attempting to argue any case for or against this constant change does not work – IT has to start talking the business’s language to talk about how the consequences of such change need handling by IT processes. This paper looks at how the changing processes and market conditions within an organisation can be augmented through the use of a Business Service Management (BSM) approach, creating a flexible and responsive technology infrastructure aimed at supporting a rapidly changing commercial landscape and enabling greater competitiveness in the markets. It also provides pointers as to how BSM can be presented to the business to gain acceptance of the need for change, and how bridging the gap between the business and the IT department can be beneficial to all involved. The paper should be of interest to CIOs, IT directors and others involved in the technical decision making processes within an organisation, as well as line of business people who need to interact with IT functions on a regular basis.
Historically, organisations have tended to take an approach towards technology based around islands of functionality leading to an application mentality. For example, in the 1990s, the basic approach was for a business to realise that they had a problem with inventory or warehousing and to search for an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, or to deal with perceived problems in dealing with prospects and customers by acquiring a customer relationship management (CRM) application. This approach, although valid at the time due to the lack of adequate inter-application standards, the need for high performance through tightly coupled application code and a lack of alternatives in the mainstream market, has led to many business models being predicated on how well their business processes can fit with the capabilities of the underlying application, rather than how well the underlying application can support the business processes.
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