VARBusiness reports on a recent Gartner Symposium led by Neil MacDonald titled "The End of the IT Department" where the following prognostication was made,
"By 2015, 90 percent of the employees in 2004 Global 1000 IT departments will have been automated, outsourced or absorbed by other business units, according to Gartner research. In addition, by 2015, 30 percent of the Global 1000 will no longer carry a CIO position. "
Kind of scary? Or kind of exciting?! If you've been evolving (or sliding head-first) toward a more business process view of your IT job, you're moving in the right direction...
"As IT departments change, there will also be a need for new roles within IT organizations and for the parties that cater to these organizations. MacDonald sees the need for a next-generation sort of "business-process architect," a business systems analyst at the process level to orchestrate the flow of information. He also detailed the role of what he called "an enterprise business-process architect," who can oversee business architecture and business systems engineering -- something for solution providers and resellers to consider for their future IT roles as well.Others also see the need for the role of a business-process architect in IT. During a keynote CIO panel on Tuesday, several leading CIOs assembled for the event said they, too, see the need for such a position inside corporate IT departments. When asked about new roles in the information services area, Tony Cicco, CIO for the General Accounting Office (GAO), who oversees 13 IT teams that address the needs of different parts of the government, said he saw the role of an enterprise architect as a logical step. Cicco also saw the importance of a customer relationship group within IT to service internal clients or employee users.
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I was also happy to find some very relevant information to building out the business process technology stack that I need to find best practices and tools to enable in my new next assignment,
"He sees this being achieved through business processes in XML or Web services, business process management suites and business rule engines, such as workflow, identity and access management. "
Improvise and remain nimble as the end draws near!
As IT departments change, there will also be a need for new roles within IT organizations and for the parties that cater to these organizations. MacDonald sees the need for a next-generation sort of
Attending the MetaGroup Enterprise Planning & Architecture Strategies Workshop for the next couple of days here in beautiful San Diego! I'm the hometown boy, along with one of the instructors from MetaGroup, Robert Handler. It's a group of about 20 taking the workshop.
We'll see how to go about blogging this so it might be of interest to other IT and business folks.
Enterprise Architecture is a planning discipline.
Architects need to have a compeling story as to why EA is needed and what it involves. How to sell it to Executive Management. Economics squeezing IT to must-do only. Utilizing IT as competitive weapon. Regulation, SOX. Dynamic M&A. Need for enterprise agility (enabled by architecture).
Challenge: Business and IT think different things for 'model': Business - spreadsheets, IT - flowcharts / swim lanes.
Challenge: Business has cheap, usable software, so why can't IT deliver cheap usable solutions.
Sell: Direct linkage between business and IT PEOPLE reduces business problem recognition time for the entire enterprise.
A Federal Computer Week (FCW) article from April, 2004, "This year's model: Business process" discusses the different approaches being taken for Business Process Modeling for U.S. Government agencies, with the new kid on the block, Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) getting more than just a nod,
"Those getting back into business process modeling will find an old standby and newer methods. Integrated Computer-aided Manufacturing Definition (IDEF) was the approach of choice in the 1990s and remains the only one compliant with Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS).But joining IDEF now are two other techniques: Unified Modeling Language (UML) and Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN).
UML comes from the object-oriented software design world and has been pressed into process modeling chores. Meanwhile, BPMN is an emerging approach that is gaining traction among software tool vendors. It promises to do what previous approaches have failed to accomplish: integrate systems development from the business process model to actual code generation."
It looks like BPMN is really making some inroads into the market, replacing IDEF. A year or two ago, it seemed like UML extensions for business process would be the holy grail, because UML was already being accepted as a standard for modeling (and then to db schema / code framework generation) on the software engineering side of the architecture (as opposed to the business engineering side...my current concern), but even from my standpoint, UML diagrams don't seem very user-oriented. And, for what it's worth, IMHO, the real mapping to code will now be from BPMN to the code that's going to run closest to the business side of the house, Business Process Execution Language, the scripting language for the next generation business software platform, Business Process Management.
One additional quote about the Department of Homeland Security's transformation office tools helps point out a need to supplement modeling tools with a robust requirements / rules documentation tools,
"The transformation office uses Telelogic AB's Dynamic Object-Oriented Requirements System to assess its requirements and Popkin Software's System Architect, which supports BPMN, for architectural development. "