Jim Sinur

I remember when my oldest daughter was first learning to talk. Her first phrase was “Witch Cucumber; the Check In the Egg”. We all, of course, laughed ourselves silly at the meaningless phrase until we realized that she was saying “Which Comes First: the Chicken or the Egg?” Now that IT is realizing that business professionals are starting to encroach on their area, the battle rages around business folks contributing to applications. Others argue that business engaged folks are more interested in processes. I’d like to expose this debate for this blog entry.

Pro Applications:

The business and IT relate better to applications as they have seen legacy applications and packaged applications for decades and that is how organizations do business today. Sure IT is moving away from construct and control responsibilities. IT is giving more and more back to the business folk as they become more skilled and the technologies make it easier for them to do so. It’s just natural to think in terms of applications. Of course applications have processes in them, but they are the packaging of processes that represent best practices that have proven to be the building blocks for business operations today. There is either a cornerstone packaged application or a number of bespoke applications that run the business. Process is just late for dinner and trying to horn into the table set by IT.

Pro Process:

Of course IT types think that the whole organization runs on their applications. IT forced business folks to formulate applications around common best practices. How self serving!! Processes pre-date applications by over one hundred years and include much more than commodity applications and low level applications. Business professionals inherently understand process flows; not applications. Why do you think business folks relate to UIs? UIs represent the way parts of their overall process flow. Processes hold together stove pipe applications into operation processes and applications are the transactional servants of operational processes. Guess what? Operational processes are only a fraction of what an organization does (20-30% maybe).. There are dozens of unstructured activities that only process can support. Applications are way too brittle with fixed and implicit rules, flows and components. It’s a process world; not an application world. .Processes consist of explicit flows, rules, dashboards and services that business people can relate to and change themselves. The propagation of applications is the core of IT survival.

We definitely need both to cooperate to make businesses run just like we need chicken and eggs to survive. See http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/03/03/double-your-pleasure-application-packages-and-bpm-together/

 What do you think?