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May 4, 2005

Revisiting the Operations Trinity - People, Process and Technology

The "holy trinity" of operational effectiveness has, and will go on having, a long tenure. Getting people, process and technology working together is the goal and advice of nearly every expert on business systems; and it's one of the most familiar mantras of management.

The conventional advice about coordinating this triplet is the kind of expertise that is more recounted experience than it is privileged knowledge. What it describes is predictable "common sense" from the point of view that effective business action results from careful process designs being operationalized by the right people using technology appropriately. This is a familiar line of sight.

But in an alternative and somewhat more formalized view, people, processes and technology are each considered "business assets" that need to be managed. Company departments want to "own" stuff. Their logic for dividing responsibilities and authorities into sub-units of the organization presses forward a requirement to control the internal distribution of enabling assets -- even moreso than effective business action calls for the integration of the assets. Ironically, this "control" creates inconsistencies and silos that frustrate enterprise visibility of resources. Additionally, it leads to duplication of efforts to integrate them as described above.

Although those "component" integrations and "asset" allocations each have a loose end of their own, they are often believed to be resolved with each other in settling the question: "how do we get 'finance' to support 'engineering' ?" This kind of reconciliation produces some number of agreements indicating what to worry about no further or what need not be fought over. A balance of political and economical concerns might be struck. But that doesn't instruct on how to align our famous triplets for successfully driving business value...

Mixing Apples and Oranges

Thus, despite the easy rhythm of the mantra, its suggested coordination can't be taken for granted.

Here's a third problem: processes are complex constructions created by the business, that institutionalize certain behavioral characteristics of the business.Unlike people and technology, processes do not simply arrive autonomously intact into the business action scenario. So, to "align" them with people and technology, how do we proceed? What transformations are necessary in order to blend them together?

These days, thanks to ASPs and "built-in best practices", we're tempted to think and even say that most processes actually are selected off the rack and then tailored to the business. In that way, it appears that processes are in an asset class that also includes already-skilled people and pre-formulated technology. The idea is that the business doesn't design people or technology, and increasingly it really doesn't design the process either -- rather, it chooses, customizes and "implements" all three of them.

But to hold that position, it's necessary to be fairly explicit about what is covered by each term. For example, is "technology" supposed to include homegrown applications, printers from HP and hammers from Sears? With that breadth, talking about coordinating technology with processes and people doesn't advance any particular idea very much in the direction of better management. Instead, it just reiterates the common-sense awareness of a need -- namely, to somehow organize their interaction in an accountable way.

Ordinarily, the advice regarding blending these items does specify what form of each one is in question, and go on from there to promote a coordination methodology. The point is that we have to decide what each term of the holy trinity really is or really means, before we can know what to do about it.

We know that each term attempts to identify an essential building block of a capacity to operate (on business requirements). Each term of the triplet is at least a placeholder for some fundamental item.

What if we logically "normalize" the people/process/technology triplets, so that the scope of each placeholder is inherently comparable to that of each other's? Wouldn't that generally help clarify what kinds of management will be called on to guide and sustain their coordination? Let's try.

Processes are actually complex constructions of choreographed events. In effect, processes are a description of how to use events based mainly on where and when they should occur.

Likewise, the choreography of people describes how their positions relative to each other are "prefigured" to support certain interactions. Assignments create this arrangement.

Choreographing technology means deploying it in a way that its on-demand availability gives real-time support for functions. Configuration prescribes this situation.

Coordinating levels of management

Those observations give a new version of the triplet to use: People/Events/Technology is the new component-level triplet. Once we start this, we can follow suit as in the chart below, which summarizes the overall business view of the architecture for operational business value:

Assignments/Processes/Configurations become infrastructure-level identifiers related to the more "atomic" elements of people/events/technology.

A key outcome of that "normalization" is that it clarifies the management coordination steps up to the necessary levels of value, such as a third level -- a production level -- where Relationships, Operations and Resources live. This is the level on which the business starts defining the conditions that strategically support the type of opportunities it deems "valuable" (or literally, value enabling). But stepping up to this level is not just a simple matter of promoting "assignments" as relationships, "processes" as operations, or "configurations" as resources.

Instead, relationships, operations and resources are each perspectives, with each given perspective addressing all three of the elements on the level below. Relationships present requirements to the coordination of assignments, processes and configurations. Likewise, Operations present requirements, and Resources yet another set of requirements.

The requirements are generated from objectives that have been established for each of the perspectives. The objectives represent the business's idea of how it can develop and sustain advantaged positions for growing and changing -- or in other words to benefit from competing, from producing, and from consuming or exchanging assets. This points to one even higher level of consideration.

At the fourth and higher level of concern, we find the business defining itself as an entity, through identifying Accounts, Services and Portfolios -- managing them separately and in relation to each other, for bridging market-level demand and supply.

Here again, each higher level item is a perspective on all of the items in the level below. Accounts establishes an agenda for relationships, for operations, and for resources. Likewise, the Services and Portfolios perspectives establish their respective agendas for each item in the level below.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at May 4, 2005 10:35 PM

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