Business Process and Culture

Business Processes mirrors the organisations culture. Long winding and complex manual processes usually reflects a business culture which lacks creativity - if it is not broke then no fix is required. New processes then follow the same template.

Without a change or even a modification in culture poor process will persist. A company may hire an external consultant to provide advice on streamlining processes. In the short to medium term time-frame, these new processes may be maintained. In the long-term as the business evolves and new business requirements need to be satisfied, the company culture will ultimately drive the evolution of new processes. Old ways of doing things will gradually morph the new processes back to the old or a hybrid variant. 

Silo mindset

Silo mindset - The growth of silo centric systems can attributed to the prevalent silo-mindset within the IT departments and leadership.

Business users (stakeholders) within a IT project, are its fundamental participants. They provide requirement to get the job done. They push for solutions which meets their needs and their needs alone - regardless of what's going on in the rest of the organisation. In most cases you can say that Business users have silo mindset. And this is perfectly natural.

As the IT professional within the project , maybe the Project manager, or Business analyst, you have have 2 choices in dealing with with silo-mindsets

Choice 1 - Go along with these business requirements to the letter. They then produce a silo based system with its own data-store and little or no integration

Choice 2- Propose the building of a system with integration as a major additional requirement.

Choice 2 will cost more and probably to take come time to complete , but these short term cost are more than made up by the long term benefits of transparency, lower maintenance cost and many other benefits of integration.

Silos

Organisation allow their data silos to grow due to a short sighted belief of 'if its not broke, then don't fix it' or an unwillingness to make the investment required to create a unified solution. In the mean time more resources are being wasted keeping the silos alive through duplication and fire-fighting. Time is ultimately wasted and no real progress is made.

Synergy and Duplication

Companies which fail to address problems which relate to different teams and functions working and sharing information together usually suffer in their market place. The problem is not the lack of technology, but the lack of on an incentive (or willingness) for teams to work together and share information. Duplication of processes is a wasteful side effect of companies who do not exercise synergy effectively. The collaboration between different complementary functions are not effective which leads to process as well as data silos. Effort is duplicated.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog, the AEblog. This is where I will share my thoughts and ideas on flexible and simple business processes and tools which support that. I will also discuss some the software products which I developing. Lastly I will touch other things which interest me such as technology, music, art and maybe a bit of finance. Thank you for reading.