9780814416952

From technology giants to major airlines to government agencies, the landscape is littered with the shells of once-promising enterprises that failed to do one thing: Converge their impressive technology initiatives with their business strategies. With countless opportunities lost and billions wasted, these examples provide a muchneeded wake up call that it is time to institutionalize a set of repeatable management practices to successfully run an organization. The Power of Convergence makes the case, and lays the groundwork, for a new understanding of the role of technology in business. No technology should be developed or deployed without a full vision of how it advances business goals, addresses customer needs, or both. Beyond that, technology should be so tightly intertwined with strategy that the two drive each other, with each at the ready when market opportunity materializes, however suddenly. With compelling examples of successes and failures at organizations from Ford Motor Company to the FBI, The Power of Convergence provides the framework and mechanisms for uniting business and technology, seeding horizontal collaborations and partnering opportunities, and capturing strategic possibilities created through convergence.

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction	p. xiii
Business/Technology Convergence	p. 1
The Business/Technology Disconnect	p. 3
The Business/Technology Disconnect Phenomenon	p. 4
Why the Business/Technology Disconnect Continues	p. 13
From Alignment to Convergence	p. 17
The Takeaway: Turning Ideas into Action	p. 21
Convergence: Concept to Value	p. 23
The Role of Business Technology Management	p. 25
The BTM Framework	p. 25
The Functional Areas and Capabilities of the BTM Framework	p. 27
The Four Critical Dimensions of BTM	p. 32
Advancing Capability Maturity	p. 36
Realizing Critical BTM Capabilities	p. 41
The Takeaway: Turning Ideas into Action	p. 44
The Financial Value of Business/Technology Convergence	p. 47
Agility, Innovation, and Convergence	p. 49
Constructing the Business Technology Convergence Index	p. 54
The Financial Effects of Convergence	p. 57
The Common Characteristics of Convergence Leader Enterprises	p. 59
The Strategic Roles of Technology	p. 63
The Takeaway: Turning Ideas into Action	p. 65
Convergence in Practice	p. 67
The Nimble Giants: How Converged Business Models Drive Successful Large Enterprises	p. 69
The Innovation Imperative: Adapt or Die	p. 71
Architecting Business Models: A Blueprint for Convergence	p. 72
SEA: Architectures to Action	p. 74
Leadership Starts at the Top	p. 79
Advanced Thinking for Better Business Technology Investments	p. 83
The Takeaway: Turning Ideas into Action	p. 86
The New Face of the Public Sector: How Governance Leads to Greater Government Efficiency	p. 89
Inefficiency: The Government's Claim to Fame	p. 91
Propelling Innovation: The DARPA Way	p. 94
A Process Approach: A Roadmap to Success	p. 98
Governance: Defining Who's in Charge	p. 99
Metrics: A Measure of Success	p. 103
The Takeaway: Turning Ideas into Action	p. 105
Size Doesn't Matter: How Small Enterprises Benefit from Strategic Investment Management	p. 107
Redefining Enterprises	p. 109
Strategic Investment Management	p. 111
The Anatomy of a Portfolio	p. 114
PPM: Ideas into Action	p. 117
Pharmaceutical Startup Prescribes PPM	p. 120
The Takeaway: Turning Ideas into Action	p. 122
The Impact of Transformation	p. 125
The Transformation Triangle	p. 127
Why Transform at All?	p. 130
Transformation Is a Process, Not a Destination	p. 132
The Financial Impact of the Transformation Triangle	p. 136
The Takeaway: Turning Ideas into Action	p. 139
Creating Business Agility	p. 141
Agility is the Essential Competitive Element	p. 143
Agility Introduces New Challenges	p. 147
The Anatomy of Business Agility	p. 148
Processes for Agility	p. 151
Technologies for Agility	p. 153
The Journey Toward Agility	p. 156
The Takeaway: Turning Ideas into Action	p. 158
Sustained Innovation: The Science of Constantly Moving Forward	p. 160
The Anatomy of Sustained Innovation	p. 162
Technology's Strategic Role in Sustained Innovation	p. 166
Calculating the Innovation Benefit	p. 170
The Takeaway: Turning Ideas into Action	p. 173
Driving Operational Excellence	p. 175
The Anatomy of Operational Excellence	p. 178
Underpants Gnomes and the Excellence Journey	p. 183
Modeling the Operational Blueprint	p. 184
Key Steps in the Operational Excellence Journey	p. 188
The Process to Continual Return on Investment	p. 190
The Takeaway: Turning Ideas into Action	p. 193
Let the Journey Begin	p. 195
Becoming a Better Business Technology Leader	p. 197
The Many Faces of Convergence	p. 198
More Than a Seat at the Table	p. 200
Management, Musical Chairs-Style	p. 202
Optimizing Technology Investment Management	p. 204
Redefining Business Strategy with Technology	p. 206
The Who, What, and Where of BTM	p. 207
Governing the Converged Organization	p. 209
The Final Takeaway: Are You Ready?	p. 211
For Further Information	p. 213
Notes	p. 215
Index	p. 221
About the Author and Contributors	p. 229
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

<html><head></head><body>Introduction THE POWER OF CONVERGENCE is a call to arms; a mandate for enterprises to place critical importance on a set of fundamental principles, eschewing the application of technology to business for technology’s sake and putting business strategy, objectives, and processes at the forefront of enterprise enablement. This in turn will make them more nimble, more agile, and better able to build differentiated, innovative, and adaptable processes that expand their reach and grow revenue even in the most challenging markets and conditions. Technology is a part of everything we do. We tend to think of ‘‘technology’’ as something new and digital—state of the art. The reality is that technology has been a part of everything we have produced since the first humans turned stone into tools. Technology erected the Egyptian pyramids. Technology built the Roman aqueducts. Technology invented Chinese paper and gunpowder. Technology opened the seas to the Spanish and Portuguese for global exploration and trade. Technology gave spark to the industrial revolution in the British Midlands. Technology put the wind under the Wright brothers’ wings. Technology blasted Neil Armstrong onto the moon. And technology is the engine powering the information age. As the previous examples illustrate, technology has played a critical role throughout history. Achieving success, however, has never been about the technology itself; it has always been about the business. The result. The accomplishment of a goal set forth by a plan. Technology is only as good as the imagination of business leaders who are focused on customers, markets, business models, threats, and opportunities, and who can make technology do what they need it to do. Anyone can buy technology, but no one can go online to order a strategy or new business model. The point of technology is not to serve technology itself, but to serve the products and processes that create benefits to the user and enterprise employing it. Technology is the means to an end, not a means to another means. Contemporary enterprises are huge producers and consumers of technology. Unfortunately, many enterprises fall short on truly capitalizing on technology because they focus too much of their resolve on the technology itself and not enough on their business objectives. Technologists (the crafter of tools) are famous for being enamored with their technology. They build systems that provide functionality, but build them from their perspective rather than that of the business, department, or user. The result is an endless list of underperforming or failed technology implementations that rob enterprises of scarce financial, human, and opportunity resources. Failure to fully realize the potential of technology in business is not solely the fault of technologists. Their business management counterparts are equally culpable. While busily drafting plans for their next venture, product launch, or service offering, they will often turn to their technologist counterparts with vague concepts for systems to facilitate the execution of their strategies. Between the two sides is a vacuum of absent management structure, performance indicators, communication, and governance that prevents them from truly finding common ground in the development, adoption, implementation, and optimization of technology that will produce a true business benefit in the form of optimized processes, cost reduction, and new revenue opportunity. Why does this disconnect exist? It’s mostly due to assumption. Business managers, ignorant of technology functions and capabilities, assume technologists will appreciate their needs and fulfill their desires with systems that produce the optimal intent. Technologists, on the other hand, rarely fully appreciate the business needs of the enterprise, department, or individual. They develop systems and tools that may address the stated need, and will add—or omit—functionality that they assume the end user will—or won’t—need or want. In other words, business managers assume that they’re communicating when they’re actually just dictating; technologists assume that business managers will appreciate their technology when they are often just delivering greater complexity. This was essentially the state of technology in the enterprise more than a decade ago when I was working on my first book, e-Enterprise: Business Models, Architecture, and Components.1 One of the book’s fundamental arguments was that technology is meaningless if you don’t know how to manage it and will certainly never produce a true return on investment if it is simply used for its intrinsic features. This realization came from working for large corporations, as well as from being an entrepreneur and having these corporations as customers. Guidance on the true value of technology in the enterprise was a genuine and unmet need, one I wanted to address. I could never have imagined how far that desire would lead. It has become a decade-long crusade. In company after company I have witnessed the haphazard manner in which people managed technology, particularly technology spending, needlessly putting their entire organization at risk. The business principles they applied in other areas of operations were not applied to technology. They would not think of building a new plant without understanding exactly how it would benefit the business. But in many firms technology was bought and deployed on a hope and a prayer. This was the era of dot.com exuberance, of course, and there was a madness loose in the land, but I had seen this problem in earlier, quieter years as well. The disconnect between business management and technology management is not lost on enterprises. Academics, book authors, and magazine writers frequently opine on the notion of technologists getting ‘‘a seat at the table’’ to influence management decisions and ‘‘learning to speak business’’ with their management counterparts. Over the last decade, management advocates have presented portfolio management, return on technology investment methodologies, and servicelevel performance as a means for bridging the gap between technology and business management. But no one has looked at the problem holistically— that is, with the understanding that whole entities—enterprises in this discussion—have an existence other than the mere sum of their parts. The term has become popular in speech, but is less frequently found in practice. The term ‘‘alignment,’’ too, has grown in prominence, but not many firms know how to realign their operations for optimal technology performance. Even the emergence of stringent government and industry governance and regulatory requirements has done little to remedy the disconnect. I am convinced that business and technology executives, respectively, still view each other across a chasm, even if they are now sitting at the same table. They can only succeed if, and only if, they take off their business or technology hats and work together holistically to build business. To move beyond technology and find real business value, a new framework with concrete practices and procedures to turn the amorphous concept of alignment into reality was needed. In computing terms, a completely new set of instructions and a reboot. In 1999, I founded BTM Corporation with the mission of researching and developing a set of unified management capabilities, value creation methods, financial indicators, operational blueprints, and software applications that create a common language for business and technology management. We called it the Business Technology Management (BTM) Framework. After several years we took on a limited number of customers to test it in practice—if it had no commercial value, then it would be nothing more than a nice theory. As it turned out, executives around the world wrestling with real-world problems greeted the Framework with enthusiasm. The Framework was a fundamentally different proposition for them. Every management team has pretty much been creating its own approach and practices. Sometimes they worked, and sometimes they didn’t. Now, with the BTM Framework, the haphazard art of managing business and technology together had a chance to become a science that would replace the grossly ineffective trial-and-error methodology that has created inefficiency and failure. The Framework aims to unify decision making from the boardroom to the project team. It provides a structured approach to such decisions that enables enterprises to align, synchronize, and converge technology and business management, thus ensuring better execution, risk control, and profitability. Three years after the formation of BTM Corporation we published a book on Business Technology Management, The Alignment Effect,2 which began to attract attention among university professors who were teaching the management science. Today more than a dozen universities use the book in their courses. Enthusiasm among professors and industry practitioners was strong enough that (CMM), which is a standard for software engineering and process improvement. </body></html>

Amazon no longer offers textbook rentals. We do!

The Power of Convergence

The Power of Convergence

0814416950

Summary

Table of Contents

Supplemental Materials

Excerpts

Write a Review