The first time published on DECEMBER 10, 2017
FOR PEOPLE WHO CURIOUS WHY BUSINESS AND TECHNOLOGY DO NOT UNDERSTAND EACH OTHER…
One of the major problems that separate corporate business from corporate technology is not only in functions they represent in the corporate structure, but also in the languages these two realms use. Several years ago, Information Technology (IT) Departments tried to teach technical terms to business. They failed because technical terms did not have enough business values to be adopted among business operational specialists. An IT got the lesson and started using “business words” mapping them to what made sense to IT specialists though still outside the business meaning. That was the way how a pseudo-business technical language appeared.
An IT assume that the status quo has been reached, but on many occasions, we have heard that technical expressions that sounded like a set of right words put in a wrong order – in the order that did not make sense to business people while technologists had no problems comprehending them. Such Babylon slang, unfortunately, is not that harmless. In this article, we will discuss two technology terms: “Business Architecture” and “Business Capability Mapping” to demonstrate that communication between business and IT in this slang is at the level of “you know what I mean” while collocutors actually do not know what each of them means. Arising confusions result in problems.
In IT, a variety of knowledge may be split into two categories – abstract and concrete. For example, writing code or programming is quite concrete while reasons and purposes why the code is written may be of different level of abstraction. A term “architecture” in IT belongs to abstract category; it may be described via more or less abstract elements. Let’s review one of the widely used explanation [BIZBOK Guide 5.1] of “Business Architecture”:
- <<Business architecture represents “the business”: Business does not necessarily begin or end at boundaries of the enterprise. May also include portions of business that have been outsourced or managed by partners. >> – From the corporate business perspectives (CBP), the statement does not make much sense, but from the perspectives of IT (PIT), the meaning of “the business” is clear – it is everything that is not IT, inside or outside enterprise boundaries;
- <<Includes various aspects of real world represented by “abstractions”. Describe who, what, where, when, why, and how known as “blueprints[1]”>> – from CBP, who, what, where, when, why are quite concrete roles, tasks, locations, scenarios and reasons/motivations, but since all enumerated elements situate in the business realm of the company, from PIT they can appear somehow abstract. As a consequence, IT sees business as an abstract plan that “allows” deviations in IT outcomes up to the level of “we did the best we could” instead what we were asked (in the abstract blueprints);
- <<Supports higher levels of business transparency>> – well, possibly, but transparent to whom? Corporate business does not know what “Business Architecture” means, therefore this transparency can be recognised only from <<Streamline planning, evaluate the value of funded initiatives, craft more effective transformation roadmaps>> – while “roadmaps” is simply a foreign term in business, planning and valuing initiatives before funding is a natural activity of corporate business that does not need any “Business Architecture”;
- <<Based on common vocabulary, standardized framework, and shared business knowledge base. All stakeholders view business through a common set of lenses>> – the only we can say about these statements that they do not relate CBP; and finally
- <<[“Business Architecture” is] a blueprint of the enterprise that provides a common understanding of the organization and is used to align strategic objectives and tactical demands>> – in translation from pseudo-business technology language, this expression means: our “Business Architecture” is a plan that abstractly describes the world of business inside and across enterprise boundaries, provides understanding of the enterprise to all, and aligns whatever tactical demands with the strategy. So, if people in the business realm of the company do not know and use “Business Architecture”, they know about an abstract plan of the world of business neither inside nor outside corporate boundaries, they do not use a common understanding of the enterprise, and they do not align tactical demands with the corporate strategy. The only what we can say with this regard is “You know what we mean”.
Conclusion #1: a term “Business Architecture” is an IT’s aggregated view on or perception of the corporate business, which has appeared that far from the reality so that a special “business agility” campaign needed to be started in the industry.
One of the most popular methods used by those who work in IT with “Business Architecture” is a “Business Capability Mapping”. In essence, a business capability is an ability of a business unit or organisation to create/build/deliver particular business value/outcome in the certain business execution context. Each business capability comprises concrete business functionality and all resources needed for its execution. If there are no resources, there is no capability.
The fact that a business unit does something today does not necessarily mean it has a business capability of doing it going on. This is why: if the business execution context changes, the resources required for the given functionality might appear unavailable and a yesterday capability vanishes today. Thus, understanding of what a business capability is and what it depends on is crucial for any types of mapping
In business, we know that capabilities may be more or less granular, as well as that coarse-granular capability can usually be split/decomposed in the set of finer-granular capabilities. It is exactly the same as when we can represent a complex function via an ordered set of simpler functions. We are also familiar with compositions or models of capabilities that can contain capabilities of different granularity.
Business Capabilities are the substances that business executives and managers operate with. It is the reality that the IT realm is usually not familiar with. No doubts that specially trained people form IT can review business structure, activities, processes and adaptive cases within business realm, but such information is habitually known to the business management at different levels. According to Dictionary, “A Business Capability Map is an analysis of an organization’s structure and resources, aimed at identifying its inherent abilities and potential.” So, if business, in general, is aware of its structure and resources, what a Business Capability Mapping method is needed?
Jeff Scott, the think-tank in architecture of business, said, “From an IT perspective, capability models provide a stable overarching view of what is important to business leaders that can link business and IT initiatives together. These relatively simple views of the business provide the foundation for complex discussions on strategy and resource allocation”. We think that the business organisation needs real business solutions, e.g. capability models, instead of “complex discussions”. It also looks that IT needs capability models to be stable to guess preferences (abstract plans?) of business leaders and plan IT work.
However, the models are the more stable the more coarse-granular they are. What is a purpose for IT of knowing that a company wants to have one of the most coarse-granular capability such as HR? What particular systems and applications IT can offer and why they would address exactly the business vision about its HR? An abstraction level of coarse-granular capability does not enough to deliver against business expectations from IT. The uniqueness of the business is in the finer-granular capabilities, which are not necessarily stable, especially if the changes in the surrounding economic environment accelerate. Nevertheless, IT specialists generally do not draw business capability mapping to the finer-granular capabilities, which could be helpful in managing business operations.
We think that the following description provides the real meaning of the Business Capability Mapping method, “Business capability mapping is a useful tool for documenting the relationships between a businesses’ core function and software applications, computing systems and components in the enterprise architecture. The goal of capability mapping is not only to align technology with business, but to discover waste and streamline operations” in IT.
If we return to the structure of a business capability, it is not difficult to note that IT’s “software applications, computing systems and components” should be nothing else than the capabilities’ resources identified when the business capabilities are defined. The problems with IT are in that some of its “systems and components“ do not relate to particular business capabilities (we exclude compulsory technology utilities) or, on a contrary, couple several independent (in business mind) capabilities together. This creates undesirable interdependencies between business capabilities and prolongs time to market when one of the coupled capabilities has to be changed.
Conclusion #2: a method of Business Capability Mapping is an IT’s tool that helps to find relationships between business capabilities and technology elements that were lost earlier, as well as to identify such existing technology elements that cause problems to the business consumers.
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[1] A blueprint for something is a plan or set of proposals that shows how it is expected to work.
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