Business Technology is not about Technology
Discussion regarding a recent article declaring the death of SOA has been making the blog rounds lately. SOA stands for Services Oriented Architecture. As a marketing term is might be dead. But as a way to develop and deploy technology that supports the enterprise it is certainly healthy. What makes it dead is that many businesses that invested in what was sold as SOA didn’t get the business benefit they expected. So we can’t call building enterprise systems around services SOA anymore.
The problem is that we spend our time talking about business technology as if the important part of the discussion was about technology. There is no sense in a business investing in technology at all. Just in case that doesn’t sound right to you, let me clarify. Unless a business creates value for its customers by developing new technologies, businesses should not invest in technology.
Businesses need to invest in improving their ability to profitably deliver value to their customers. One of the big reasons money has been wasted in technology is that no one needs ERP, CRM, SOA, or MDM. They don’t even generally need to improve resource planning, customer management, technology integration or have more consistent data. Businesses need to specifically identify the capabilities within their value creating work streams they need to perform differently in order to achieve their strategy. Then they need to leverage technology to improve those capabilities. ERP may help with that, but unless a specific definition of how ERP helps a business implement its strategy – the ERP solution is in danger from the start.
Responsible business technology discussions start with the business strategy and flow into short-term operating objectives and improvement projects. New technologies may create new opportunities for profitably delivering value to your customer’s. But the discussion is a business discussion around specifically which capabilities will be added or performed differently to achieve the strategy.
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I couldn’t agree more. I know a mid-sized company that spent months trying to enact an ERP simply because they thought they needed it to keep up with their peers.
The consultants they hired talked about the technology to the exclusion of everything else. The consultants were sold on “integration.”
To their credit, the company finally told them to get lost.
The sad part, the elements of a new ERP that they did need they now will not get. They recognized that most of the system wasn’t giving them value – but didn’t go off and get someone to implement the areas that would give them value.
They killed it all because they couldn’t distinguish the waste from the value.