"Building a Process Driven Technology Roadmap"
By Stephen R. Jester, Director of Technology Resources, SJester@clientadvocatenetwork.com
When was the last time you stopped to take stock of your business? I am not speaking about your inventory or your assets. I am speaking about your business processes and the systems that support them. Most likely it last occurred when you first started your business or possibly after suffering a significant setback or in response to a compliance requirement. Most of us just don't like to think about the effort necessary to re-visit and re-engineer our business processes. As Information Technology has grown so has the misconception of an apparent "easier way" to address the pains of failing processes and cost reductions - throw some technology at it.
Business Process Reengineering (BPR) was rocketed into our business acumen during the early 90's as pioneers such as Michael Hammer recognized the need to remove work that did not add any value for customers rather than automating that work through the use of technology¹. I have often made the remark to my clients who seek to implement barcode scanners: "Before you start scanning maybe you should consider the process to ensure the data you collect is useful and necessary. Otherwise, you are just accelerating the collection of bad data". Hammer was making the same point in a broader sense relating to the acceleration of bad processes by using technology to automate them rather than eliminate them.
Another BPR pioneer of the 90's with a similar view was Thomas Davenport. Davenport, along with J. Short, published a paper in the Sloan Management Review the same year as Hammer entitled "The New Industrial Engineering: Information Technology and Business Process Redesign"². However, it was Davenport who was quick to critique his own concepts just 5 years later recognizing that BPR had become a justification for downsizing rather than redesigning.
" When I wrote about "business process redesign" in 1990, I explicitly said that using it for cost reduction alone was not a sensible goal.But the fact is, once out of the bottle, the reengineering genie quickly turned ugly."³
Hammer himself was later quoted that his premise of BPR was lacking one important element: the Human element.
" I wasn't smart enough about that. I was reflecting on my engineering background and was insufficiently appreciative of the human dimension. I've learned that's critical."(4)
Here are some practical steps an emerging business can take to ensure they are not throwing technology at a bad process in the name of efficiency, but are instead planning their technology roadmap to enable refined, efficient processes to take shape as the business grows:
1. Revisit with the Startup
If you have ever started a business or even a business division, one of the first things you did was imagine how you would deliver your product or service. This led to a checklist, one of many, itemizing the systems you would need to support your delivery processes. As simple as this may seem, you can start by thinking about your future processes around product or service delivery and what systems (phones, computers, email, etc.) are needed to support those process in the most efficient manner.
2. Build Around Organizational Roles Another exercise that you should undertake is to map out your future organizational chart as you achieve your growth milestones. It is easier to determine the people you will need to add as you increase customers, production units, offices, etc. Then you can plan the incremental additions to software licenses, hardware and software modules necessary to support the new personnel and their respective roles in the organization.
3. Stay Proactive, Not Reactive
Don't fall into the trap of not building out your systems in anticipation of growth by clinging to claims such as "I'm stretching my investment in the hardware" or "I don't want to re-train my staff on that new version of software". This sets the stage for reactionary behavior to broken processes by patching them with technology. It is commonly manifested during new software implementations where the overriding objective is to "do things the way we did it in the old system". Stay proactive by establishing technology trigger points based on growth performance metrics that signal when you should make an investment in a new system. When you implement, be sure to focus on the new processes you envisioned, not the old.
4. Budget for Execution
If you have taken the time to complete the first three steps then you should have a clear understanding of your future business processes needed to support product or service delivery, the people you will need to put in place to execute these processes and the performance metrics you need to track that will signal when it is time to invest in your systems to make the people more efficient at the processes. With this in hand you should actively budget and execute your process driven technology roadmap.
5. Monitor, Measure & Diagnose
The last step is to monitor your processes and continually measure them for performance improvements. Then you can start the cycle over by diagnosing how your will deliver your product or services as the business continues to grow. One of the best measurements to track that signals a system or process change is due is the number of employees that are using a spreadsheet, desktop database program or manual process to augment the primary business systems.
Sources:
1 Hammer, Michael (1990). Reengineering Work: Don't' automate, obliterate, Harvard Business Review, Jul/Aug 1990, pp 104-112.
2 Davenport, Thomas & Short, J. (1990), The New Industrial Engineering: Information Technology and Business Process Redesign, Sloan Management Review, Summer 1990, pp 11-27.
3 Davenport, Thomas (1995), Reengineering - The Fad That Forgot People, Fast Company, November 1995.
4 White, JB (1996), Wall Street Journal. New York, N.Y.: November 26th, 1996. pg. A.1.
Business process reengineering. (2008, May 23). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 08:52, June 2, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Business_process_reengineering&oldid=214452761
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