Why don’t existing categories of solutions provide a breakthrough?

Briefly, free-form collaboration does not have sufficient analytic power or direction, decision support produces too narrow a perspective, process modeling is too rigid and analytic, and project planning requires too many un-affirmed assumptions and pre-buy-in commitments.

A hypothetical option is to combine pre-existing tools from among these different categories. However, in terms of net impact on the bottleneck in the market today, this is largely a consultant’s dream and a customer’s nightmare.

At the center of the problem is the fact that the activity of bridging the above gap is effectively the same activity as “people communicating to agree on what to do together”. In everyday situations of relatively low complexity, this activity uses a natural fusion of natural human abilities for “collaboration”, “decision support”, “process modeling” and “project planning”. That’s where this work is done.

Simply put, the work is -knowledge- processing, not information processing. Knowledge is the result of that fusion of collaboration (peer confirmation and interest gauging), decision support (analytic review of the facts), process modeling (context and flow logic), and project planning (understanding what actions can be taken).

What a person “knows” about the external world, they know through a fusion of all of these cognitive modes at the same time.

To test this assertion, find something not entirely personal that you feel that you strongly “know” that does not include one of these modes.

In the current business environment, when a situation becomes more complicated, this natural human activity is sub-divided into the separate activities of “collaboration”, “decision support”, “process modeling” and “project planning”, and supported with predominantly non-overlapping “information” tools.

These tools work effectively in their own domains. However, by virtue of specialization, they have lost the ability to fully support the natural ability of people to “communicate to agree on what to do together”.

As a result, when people use these tools in group meetings, they don’t end up “knowing”. And when they don’t “know” they don’t produce alignment on detailed processes and plans. Instead, they produce the conclusion: “Let’s look at it again a next week”. Or for better or worse, “Let’s go ahead with what we’ve got”.

Business / IT Alignment is fundamentally a challenge of moving targets: technical innovation and business change. Accordingly, better Business / IT Alignment depends primarily on more/better/faster on-going planning between business and IT.

The core challenge in Business / IT Alignment is that this planning must focus on business/technology processes, ranging from division-wide operations models to detailed training and implementation plans.

Because of this, the primary bottleneck activity in Business / IT Alignment is collaborative solutions development.  And The bottleneck resource in this activity is “collaborative solutions development capability”.  That is, the ability to lead, contribute to and participate in group process knowledge sharing, design, implementation planning and consensus-building.

There is no substitute for these human activities, capabilities and results: where this capability is lacking, Business / IT Alignment falters.

A Major Bottleneck in IT Value Delivery

The focus of collaborative solutions development is bridging the gap between separate knowledge and interests and agreed upon activities, models and plans.

This is a major bottleneck in innovation and IT in general.

The main symptom of this bottleneck is long cycles of meetings and communications in which information and consensus are gradually and often painfully and incompletely assembled.

The overall impact of this bottleneck is billions of dollars a year in cost, risk, error and delay in IT projects, along with matching frustration, conflict and stress, stalled innovation and progress, and lost opportunity.

And, failed Business / IT Alignment.

An Opportunity for the Seriously Ambitious

The challenge here is four part:

1) “collaborative solutions development” is such a widely used activity that it lacks a focus for improving its performance.

2) there are no highly effective, widely distributed solutions for supporting collaborative solutions development. (”What is the name of the market leader?”)

3) The capabilities of particularly talented individuals or high performance teams are generally not highly transportable, flexible or scalable.

4) Market attention is diffused and distracted by a myriad of solutions in the categories of collaboration, decision-support, process modeling and project planning that only partly address the above gap without significantly shortening the long cycles of meetings and communications.

The Need for a New Solutions Category

In my weblog article at http://blog.actionmap.com/, I make the case that “collaborative sooutions development” needs to be a new product and service category. That’s what it’s going to take to focus attention on the need for better tools for collaborative solutions development.

The Action Point

Why is Business / IT Aligment so difficult? Because it is largely a matter of matter of hard work. However, if it’s truly important, it’s time to identify and bear down on the right work.

My assertion is that the best action point for improved Business/IT Alignment is increasing collaborative solutions development capability.

In my weblog article I describe why this is a matter of strategic competitive importance and offer starting points for accomplishing it.

A Scorecard for Readiness

One of these starting points is a scorecard for evaluating your organization’s (and your personal) readiness to increase capability for collaborative solutions development. The scorecard is located at: http://www.actionmap.com/050_ScoreSumm.html.

Conclusion

Business / IT Alignment is primarily a challenge of moving targets, that involve business/technology processes.

The only way to keep up with this work is more/better/faster collaborative planning.

The critical constraining resource for this work is collaborative solutions development capability.

The market currently has no highly effective, widely used solution to support this capability.

Organizations that want to increase Business/IT Alignment need to demand and/or build better solutions for this capability.

The starting point is to get clear about the strategic importance of collaborative solutions development. The case for this is made at http://blog.actionmap.com/cpd_ovr/cpd_strategic/.

A scorecard for your organization’s readiness to do this work is available at http://www.actionmap.com/050_ScoreSumm.html.

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