Charles

In your last email, you talk about the lack of Enterprise Resource Planning tools. I spent 2 years raising awareness with the Australian Govt on:

1. each of the Agencies (called Departments) is just that - a Department in a single organisation and the single organisation needs top down planning tools.
2. vendors can sell a product 237 times (once to each agency) for 237 installs (at $1m each) for no additional benefit, or they can spend $5m on one install and have all departments use a common web interface with their data partitioned from other agencies (but not from cabinet).
3. that most IT should not be owned by IT, even ERP and Finance systems belong to the business, IT is just hosting, maintaining and managing them.
4. that PPM tools (like CA’s Clarity, Primavera, SAP), can offer Enterprise Information Management capability to the whole organisation.
5. PPM tools implemented top down (when sold to the CEO) capture strategy, architecture, portfolios, programs/services, investments/projects, resources, finances.
6. PPM tools implemented bottom up– usually when sold to IT (at $1m/time), capture projects, people, finances, programs and sometimes portfolios and sometimes extend into business projects but rarely look at the services the organisation delivers and the investments that a service owner wants to make.
7. Organisations invest a lot in developing Architectural frameworks, look at the Australian Govt Architecture (the AGA on www.agimo.gov.au) and then provide a PDF for departments to use (if they want to). Alternatively implementing the AGA in a EIM (or ERP) requires all users to align their services to that framework.
8. So I suggest ERP tools exist, they should be implemented top down after a basic framework has been developed. Services and their operation should be captured before investments, and those investments that result in projects may have an IT component. Then resource and skills management is possible as part of the organisation’s service delivery.
9. Note that they have the potential to capture requests (the demand), evaluation and benefits, investment approvals, project initiation, resource allocation and usage (to timesheet) and project closure and benefit realisation, all in one tool.

Sure, an ERP or EIM is an IT application but it is a business tool and needs business-aware people not IT people to drive it. So I suggest lets drop the IT from all these:  ‘Other emerging terms are Integrated IT Management (Forrester Research), IT Business Management (Gartner Research), IT Lifecycle Management (IBM) and Systematic Technology Management (DiamondCluster).’ And get back to talking about supporting the business demand for better services. We don’t hear people talking about the HR Business divide or the Finance Business boundary – why do people talk about the IT business boundary.

I suggest that if IT moves from being an area of unique skills (20 years ago) to be a corporate support facility like HR, finance and stationery supplies, and moves the many skilled resources into the business to support the business, then IT should become the hosting, maintenance and management of some technology assets under an IT manager. The rest of us – architects, business analysts, project managers, developers, and service desk staff are all part of business teams identifying and delivering service improvements and investments, using those formerly unique skills.

If we remove IT from our vocabulary, guess what, everything we talk about makes sense to the business, email, word processing, resource management, project management, enterprise architecture (or corporate planning). Of course, we will still have vendors trying to differentiate themselves and if they only know IT …..

Sorry about the diatribe, but PPM technology has been out there for 20 years and IT is not offering the business the opportunity to develop an Enterprise Information Management capability to manage its business better.   

Ross McConnell

Architect/Organisation planner

Canberra Australia