Dead end business alignment
Industrialized application development offers a way out
Sauerlach (Munich), September 17, 2009 – When it comes to improving cooperation between IT and business departments, the term “business alignment” is being used more and more frequently to highlight the need for better understanding between the two areas. However, it is doubtful whether this approach solves problems. Rather, they are shifted. “Alignment is a dead end,” says IT mastermind Peter Hinssen(1). And he is right. Because it’s about more than just realigning collaboration. It is about a new way of thinking in the relationship between business, i.e. the specialist department, and IT.
“It’s true: IT and business don’t talk to each other, and when they do, they often don’t understand each other,” explains Ramin Goettlich, Managing Director of Novabit Informationssysteme GmbH. But do they have to? Yes, when it comes to the IT department telling business users which services are available to them within the corporate architecture and what they can do with them. No, when it comes to providing specific specialist applications to optimally support business processes. With their knowledge of the processes, the specialist departments can do this better – and now they can do it on their own.
This is because industrialized application development based on a universal software platform opens up previously unimagined possibilities. It brings a new quality to the collaboration between business and IT. The platform already contains all the building blocks and possible workflows for mapping almost all conceivable business processes, with recurring basic functionalities already prepared for use, while individual business processes and workflows are described with the help of metadata. They can therefore be adapted to specific use cases solely through configuration, i.e. without programming software code. Ultimately, this is done by the specialist users themselves. For example, they intuitively describe a formal process model using graphical editors and thus create executable processes – completely automatically. The model can be executed immediately without further technical design, with the help of an interpreter, checked from a business perspective and adapted if necessary. And even at runtime of the system.
The approach of Novabit and the universal software platform Nucleus Suite goes far beyond business alignment. It enables a completely new form of division of labor between business and IT. IT provides a platform on which the specialist departments can create their own applications. From now on, IT can concentrate on the essentials and is responsible for implementing and operating the universal application landscape, which can also be used, for example, to gradually build a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The motto is therefore not fewer tasks, but more freedom for IT to make real improvements.
Nucleus supports IT service management
At the same time, IT set up in this way also ensures greater compliance within the company. Today, users turn to self-help where existing applications are not sufficient to map the requirements of the specialist departments or cannot be adapted to changing requirements. They are no longer forced to work with in-house developments à la Excel and bridge process breaks by hand. Instead, they develop their applications themselves on a standardized platform that is operated and monitored by IT. Each of these developments also improves structural compliance within the company, as users and their applications operate within a framework defined and monitored by IT. Shadow IT is being dismantled step by step.
(1) Peter Hinssen, Business/IT Fusion: How To Move Beyond Alignment And Transform IT In Your Organization, 2009.
