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November 30, 2005

When Rules are required, Requirements rule

Business has a history of asking for IT to enable new capabilities, and IT has a history of giving the business those things while falling behind itself in the same progression of operational management improvements. So when the "non-expert" business users establish the norms that are acceptable for these capabilities, it is ironic that IT has to learn the capabilities from business.

For many years, consultants have had the capability of explaining the difference between business requirements, implementation requirements, and infrastructure requirements. This set the stage for also explaining the relationship of the three sets of requirements.

But the value of that capability would simply shift around according to who was the most influential sponsor (aka, the client) of the development project the consultant was working on. Meanwhile, the importance of aligning the different requirements was too difficult to prove except where enterprise architecture was taken seriously.

Now, as provided by today's IT, the visibility and control of operations is giving the business experiences and awarenesses that extend more "democratically", enterprise-wide.

As part of this awareness and experience, rules are much more in the foreground as stabilizers and optimizers for decision-making. Basically, rules describe the decisions that have been made and approved about how responsiveness to demand is to be implemented with risk and efficiency already factored in.

But because they are ultimately aimed at demand, rules derive their real significance from how they relate to requirements. So in fact it is requirements management that establishes the environment for effective rules management. Requirements will drive the need for aligning rules, but it will also drive the need to change them. Decisions about requirements themselves are always the most important issues to get right, while technology becomes a critical tactical factor in whether those decisions are actionable and thereby practically meaningful for business value.

Thus, because technology is "globally" increasing direct awareness and the ability to do something about it within the organization, it almost automatically becomes necessary, instead of optional, to manage rules strategically.

Michael Voelker, writing in the November 1, 2005 issue of Intelligent Enterprise, discusses Business-IT alignment in terms of how responsibility for managing business rules is balanced across the organization.

Such responsibility may be presumed even before the capabiity exists to live up to it. But with IT, the business can best help itself by ensuring proper support for IT production.

So, two key thoughts follow on that story. One is about management maturing from a special professional function into a general organizational competency, thanks to IT distributing the opportunity to decide effectively.

The other thought is about how increasing experience, enabled by IT, becomes expertise that loops back to the conception of what IT ought to be doing. When business uses IT to drive "better IT", both parties win.

In the case where IT allows the business to more freely allocate responsibility, the business gets something new, but the business viewpoint on what should be possible then feeds back to IT in ways that will change IT by making it more like a business. What we're seeing, in effect, is a practical iteration of enterprise architecture, with enterprise-wide adoption finally possible through more tangible terms.

Posted by Malcolm Ryder at November 30, 2005 7:19 PM

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