Responsibility trumps efficiency

Aligning IT with business is not some nebulous virtue, but a down-to-earth principle for designing the details of IT solutions.

One of my many heresies is that I do not believe that IT is a driver of business change. IT can, of course, support a business change, but using the implementation of an IT system to change a business is doomed to failure.

As part of this heresy, I do not believe that it is IT's job to put in better business processes. If a business wants to improve its processes, well and good, and IT can help. But there may be good reasons why a business wants to stay with what seems like a sub-optimal process.

I have been creating a business-to-business portal for a company, details of which I have changed to retain confidentiality. The sales administration department, lead by Jane, gathers details from customers including financial details which are an input for credit scoring. These details need to be checked and updated periodically.

I had put functionality into the sales administration part of the portal to perform these periodic checks, which makes sense because that is where the data is first gathered and other customer information is maintained. I had arranged a meeting with Jane to walk through the functionality and hand it over for user test.

But the meeting was cancelled at the last minute. Apparently we needed to invite Kevin from Finance, who is responsible for the periodic credit reviews, though he has not yet had much to do with the portal.

I had made a classic mistake. I had looked at the solution from a IT perspective. From my viewpoint, it was much easier to add the functionality to the sales administration parts of the system and assume that they will be run by Jane. From a system viewpoint and a data viewpoint, this seems like a natural home. The business process would be most efficient because it could be tacked onto existing sales administration processes. Arguably it would be easier to explain to the customers, too.

But I had not considered alignment. Although I might argue that my approach gives a neater business process, it was not aligned to the real-world split of responsibilities. For good reason, the processes for credit scoring are the responsibility of Kevin, and only Kevin really cares about the data. Responsibility trumps efficiency.

There are lots of options. It could be that everyone decides that it is more efficient to get Jane to do the credit scoring. It could be that Kevin asks Jane to manage the data collection on his behalf. It could be that the data collection responsibility is added to the Finance functionality used by Kevin. It could be we need another solution, separate from both Sales Administration and Finance, just for credit checks that both Jane and Kevin can use.

I do not know the answer - that is why we need a meeting with Kevin. My job is to describe the issues and the options and to listen. Then I can shape a solution that is efficient as it can be, while still aligned with the responsibilities and ways of working that the organisation needs.