Introduction
THE POWER OF CONVERGENCE is a call to arms; a mandate for enterprises to
place critical importance on a set of fundamental principles, eschewing
the application of technology to business for technology’s sake and putting
business strategy, objectives, and processes at the forefront of enterprise
enablement. This in turn will make them more nimble, more agile,
and better able to build differentiated, innovative, and adaptable processes
that expand their reach and grow revenue even in the most challenging
markets and conditions.
Technology is a part of everything we do. We tend to think of ‘‘technology’’
as something new and digital—state of the art. The reality is
that technology has been a part of everything we have produced since
the first humans turned stone into tools. Technology erected the Egyptian
pyramids. Technology built the Roman aqueducts. Technology invented
Chinese paper and gunpowder. Technology opened the seas to
the Spanish and Portuguese for global exploration and trade. Technology
gave spark to the industrial revolution in the British Midlands. Technology
put the wind under the Wright brothers’ wings. Technology blasted
Neil Armstrong onto the moon. And technology is the engine powering
the information age.
As the previous examples illustrate, technology has played a critical
role throughout history. Achieving success, however, has never been
about the technology itself; it has always been about the business. The
result. The accomplishment of a goal set forth by a plan. Technology is
only as good as the imagination of business leaders who are focused on
customers, markets, business models, threats, and opportunities, and
who can make technology do what they need it to do. Anyone can buy
technology, but no one can go online to order a strategy or new business
model.
The point of technology is not to serve technology itself, but to
serve the products and processes that create benefits to the user and
enterprise employing it. Technology is the means to an end, not a means
to another means. Contemporary enterprises are huge producers and
consumers of technology. Unfortunately, many enterprises fall short on
truly capitalizing on technology because they focus too much of their
resolve on the technology itself and not enough on their business objectives.
Technologists (the crafter of tools) are famous for being enamored
with their technology. They build systems that provide functionality, but
build them from their perspective rather than that of the business, department,
or user. The result is an endless list of underperforming or
failed technology implementations that rob enterprises of scarce financial,
human, and opportunity resources.
Failure to fully realize the potential of technology in business is
not solely the fault of technologists. Their business management counterparts
are equally culpable. While busily drafting plans for their next
venture, product launch, or service offering, they will often turn to their
technologist counterparts with vague concepts for systems to facilitate
the execution of their strategies. Between the two sides is a vacuum of
absent management structure, performance indicators, communication,
and governance that prevents them from truly finding common ground
in the development, adoption, implementation, and optimization of
technology that will produce a true business benefit in the form of optimized
processes, cost reduction, and new revenue opportunity.
Why does this disconnect exist? It’s mostly due to assumption.
Business managers, ignorant of technology functions and capabilities,
assume technologists will appreciate their needs and fulfill their desires
with systems that produce the optimal intent. Technologists, on the
other hand, rarely fully appreciate the business needs of the enterprise,
department, or individual. They develop systems and tools that may address
the stated need, and will add—or omit—functionality that they
assume the end user will—or won’t—need or want. In other words,
business managers assume that they’re communicating when they’re
actually just dictating; technologists assume that business managers will
appreciate their technology when they are often just delivering greater
complexity.
This was essentially the state of technology in the enterprise more
than a decade ago when I was working on my first book, e-Enterprise:
Business Models, Architecture, and Components.1 One of the book’s fundamental
arguments was that technology is meaningless if you don’t
know how to manage it and will certainly never produce a true return
on investment if it is simply used for its intrinsic features. This realization
came from working for large corporations, as well as from being an
entrepreneur and having these corporations as customers. Guidance on
the true value of technology in the enterprise was a genuine and unmet
need, one I wanted to address. I could never have imagined how far that
desire would lead. It has become a decade-long crusade.
In company after company I have witnessed the haphazard manner
in which people managed technology, particularly technology
spending, needlessly putting their entire organization at risk. The business
principles they applied in other areas of operations were not applied
to technology. They would not think of building a new plant
without understanding exactly how it would benefit the business. But
in many firms technology was bought and deployed on a hope and a
prayer. This was the era of dot.com exuberance, of course, and there
was a madness loose in the land, but I had seen this problem in earlier,
quieter years as well.
The disconnect between business management and technology
management is not lost on enterprises. Academics, book authors, and
magazine writers frequently opine on the notion of technologists getting
‘‘a seat at the table’’ to influence management decisions and ‘‘learning
to speak business’’ with their management counterparts. Over the
last decade, management advocates have presented portfolio management,
return on technology investment methodologies, and servicelevel
performance as a means for bridging the gap between technology
and business management. But no one has looked at the problem holistically—
that is, with the understanding that whole entities—enterprises
in this discussion—have an existence other than the mere sum
of their parts. The term has become popular in speech, but is less frequently
found in practice.
The term ‘‘alignment,’’ too, has grown in prominence, but not
many firms know how to realign their operations for optimal technology
performance. Even the emergence of stringent government and industry
governance and regulatory requirements has done little to remedy the
disconnect. I am convinced that business and technology executives,
respectively, still view each other across a chasm, even if they are now
sitting at the same table. They can only succeed if, and only if, they take
off their business or technology hats and work together holistically to
build business.
To move beyond technology and find real business value, a new
framework with concrete practices and procedures to turn the amorphous
concept of alignment into reality was needed. In computing
terms, a completely new set of instructions and a reboot.
In 1999, I founded BTM Corporation with the mission of researching
and developing a set of unified management capabilities, value creation
methods, financial indicators, operational blueprints, and software
applications that create a common language for business and technology
management. We called it the Business Technology Management (BTM)
Framework. After several years we took on a limited number of customers
to test it in practice—if it had no commercial value, then it would
be nothing more than a nice theory. As it turned out, executives around
the world wrestling with real-world problems greeted the Framework
with enthusiasm.
The Framework was a fundamentally different proposition for
them. Every management team has pretty much been creating its own
approach and practices. Sometimes they worked, and sometimes they
didn’t. Now, with the BTM Framework, the haphazard art of managing
business and technology together had a chance to become a science that
would replace the grossly ineffective trial-and-error methodology that
has created inefficiency and failure. The Framework aims to unify decision
making from the boardroom to the project team. It provides a structured
approach to such decisions that enables enterprises to align,
synchronize, and converge technology and business management, thus
ensuring better execution, risk control, and profitability.
Three years after the formation of BTM Corporation we published
a book on Business Technology Management, The Alignment Effect,2
which began to attract attention among university professors who were
teaching the management science. Today more than a dozen universities
use the book in their courses. Enthusiasm among professors and industry
practitioners was strong enough that (CMM), which is a standard for software
engineering and process improvement.
Wow! eBook
