System Transformation Portal

Enabling Reuse through Business / IT Collaboration

by William Ulrich

Historically, enterprises have been organized around hierarchical models that discourage communication and collaboration. Stovepipe infrastructures do not facilitate reuse and, in fact, discourage it. If reuse is the goal, collaboration is the means with which to achieve this goal. This will not happen naturally because organizations are not organized around collaborative principles. If an enterprise wants to build a culture where reuse is the norm and not the exception, that enterprise must create a collaborative infrastructure in which reuse can thrive.

A History of Redundancy & Fragmentation

Redundancy and fragmentation are common challenges in most business applications. As a result, organizations have difficulty mobilizing various customer and revenue-driven initiatives. A large bank, for example, had eleven customer databases in use across multiple business units. Each database contained overlapping and unique customer information, which made the task of mobilizing new customer programs almost impossible. This problem was magnified by the fact that different business units could not agree on the definition of a customer.

Application and data redundancy results from mergers, acquisitions or from an inability to coordinate information management activities on an enterprise scale. In many cases, multiple applications address similar aspects of customer service, supply chain management, distribution, procurement, administration and many other functions. Fragmented functions, strewn across the information infrastructure, can complicate simple upgrades and stymie time critical business initiatives.

Segregated business and IT teams are not motivated to address these issues because it would force them to collaborate on an effort that would benefit the enterprise as a whole but disrupt localized activities. Certain Regional Bell Operating Companies, for example, maintain a number of redundant customer resource information systems (CRIS). Redundant applications and customer data increase operating costs because they require multiple application teams and business units to support them. Even more important is the fact that these redundancies curtail the deployment of consolidated customer data and functionality in new business initiatives.

Organizational Infrastructures Discourage Reuse

Most enterprise infrastructures cause people and systems to gravitate towards redundancy and away from reuse. Information architectures were patterned after hierarchical organizational models pioneered during the early part of the 20^th century. Every business unit was stacked side-by-side like stovepipes. Departmental boundaries created walls that discouraged collaboration. When information technology entered business environments in the 1950s and 1960s, applications and data structures were built to support these hierarchical business models. This was the origin of stovepipe applications.

Consider the multi-national corporation that had a dozen component building efforts underway. None of the dozen project teams shared their work with any other team. Each team just kept adding more redundant functionality to existing information architectures. Although the fundamental objective of each project was component reuse, distrust and organizational boundaries prevented this from happening. Component architectures will not address reuse if the culture does not support reuse.

Over the past few years, business and IT executives have begun to conclude that segregated functions hinder business process and information flow across the enterprise and vertically into supply and distribution chains. Some people blame IT for hindering these efforts, but information architectures only reflect a concept - the hierarchical organization - whose time has passed. In The Biology of Business, Andy Clark states[i] that  Markets, companies and various forms of business organizations can all be usefully viewed through the lens of complex adaptive systems. He goes on to say that a market or company is self-organizing where crucial interactions are not controlled or orchestrated by an overseeing executive, a detailed program or any other source of strict hierarchy. Fueled by the e-business revolution, hierarchical models are slowly giving way to organic networks of individuals who need more open, rapid information exchange across and beyond enterprise boundaries. These networks function as a ï"virtual underground" that subverts and supplants hierarchical models. It is this virtual network that should be recognized and leveraged as a way to encourage collaboration and reuse across information architectures.

Collaborative Organizations & Virtual Teams

IT must work with business units and relevant third parties to create an information management infrastructure and philosophy that recognizes virtual information models, encourages collaboration and facilitates the concept of reuse. To that end, IT should:

-         Assess and redefine relationships with customers, business units, distributors and suppliers to remain synchronized within an increasingly organic enterprise infrastructure.

-         Seek ways to improve collaboration among business units and third parties that have been traditionally segregated.

-         Recognize and document virtual networks across business, IT and third party teams. For example, the collective group of IT and business unit professionals who are responsible for customer information management for such a network.

-         Establish a shared purpose for common virtual communities. For example, a common purpose for a virtual CRIS community might be to �Increase the efficiency and effectiveness of all customer and related business activities managed or impacted by CRIS applications across the enterprise.�

-       Create a commonly shared set of operating principles for each virtual community. For example, a principle might say, "Consolidate and reuse application functionality and data in situations where it furthers a critical business requirement."

-         Consider ways in which virtual teams can collaborate with other teams by creating a constitution to guide their collective actions through a collectively agreed upon purpose and set of operating principles.

The last point in this list is a step towards consolidating the resources of multiple virtual teams at a higher level of purpose. The virtual enterprise can coexist along side of the hierarchical organization or replace it. Because management is unlikely to retool management power structures that took a century to build, IT will need to work within a parallel virtual structure based on principles of collaboration. Such a collaborative infrastructure forms an environment where reuse can flourish.

Building a Culture of Reuse

As information teams take on the task of creating a culture of reuse, they will need to address entrenched organizational and architectural obstacles. Overcoming these obstacles requires instilling some common principles across the collaborative infrastructure. Sample principles of reuse can include:

-         Establishing a culture that rewards reuse and creates disincentives for propagation of needless redundancy. An example could involve encouraging and funding business logic extraction and reuse while discouraging new development unless the existing system functionality or data does not exist or is inaccessible.

-         Creating an infrastructure that supports the recognition of redundancy and fragmentation across the information enterprise. This infrastructure includes documenting redundancy and fragmentation in a shared repository.

-       Adopting and leveraging emerging reuse models within component architectures and Web Services. This requires incorporating principles of collaboration and reuse in new development efforts so today�s developer does not continue down the path of their predecessors.

These principles manifest themselves when application teams reuse existing application functionality and data in replacement projects and seek to consolidate redundancies where it can reduce operating expenditures and increase business agility.

No individual or institution is to blame for highly redundant, fragmented information architectures. Today, however, business and application teams have a renewed understanding of how to organize enterprise and information infrastructures. Virtual teams bound by a common purpose and set of principles create the foundation for a collaborative enterprise and a culture of reuse. New development tools and environments support this effort, but in the absence of a collaborative infrastructure widespread patterns of reuse are unlikely to materialize.