Divided Loyalties No LongerThe old dichotomy pitting business needs against IT needs is going the way of the punch cardContinued from Page 1 Businesspeople Need Tech SavvyIronically, the opposite shift is happening to business users. The increasing drive to automate very complex or arcane business processes, many of which cross traditional software domains such as CRM and SCM, has begun placing a major technology burden on the allegedly technophobic business user. Much of this requirement comes from the fact that technologists cannot begin to understand the specifics of how a given process — whether it's a megaprocess such as order-to-cash or a simpler process like purchase-order approval — actually needs to unfold. The input of the business user is essential to the increasing automation of the enterprise. Without that input, automation simply cannot proceed. But that input must come from a business user with at least some technology savvy. The danger of keeping business and technology knowledge too far apart is evident in how one hospital I know tried to deal with a regulation in the new Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) guidelines. The regulation requires hospitals to be able to trace which doctors or departments have seen a given patient's record over a period of five years, a rather simple database problem, if you know anything about databases. If you don't, you can end up with the following solution, developed by a committee of techno-ignorant users. Their solution forced all records to move from a central record repository (remember, these are still largely paper records) to a given department. The main advantage was that centralization put an end to the practice of moving records between departments directly — a practice that made it hard to trace where a given set of records actually had been. Problem solved? Not on your life. This new process also meant that a patient sitting in front of a doctor looking over a new blood-test result couldn't actually ask that doctor for a copy. The request had to go through central records. Unfortunately, central records could take days or even weeks to cough up a patient's records, and that put the hospital in violation of another HIPAA mandate: Patients must have rapid and easy access to their records. In trying to create a new process to comply with one part of HIPAA, the business users actually put themselves in a position of noncompliance with another requirement. What no one in the room understood was how easy this problem is to solve with a database that checks the records in and out of the individual departments or doctor's offices. A good database can function like a virtual central records office, if only someone knew what a good database was. Granted, we're talking about a hospital, one of the last great bastions of techno-ignorance. But this hospital, like most other hospitals, is hemorrhaging money left and right — and it can ill-afford the wasted cycles from bad decision-making or the greater risk of repercussions from noncompliance. And where was the hospital's CIO in all of this? Let's just say that with all the cost-cutting going on, he was a little too busy to attend every meeting, particularly one that no one identified as having an IT component. Role Play Is Bad for BusinessThe moral of the story is that it's simply inefficient and ineffective for companies to continue to split IT and business decision-making, and it's a bad idea for business management and IT management to continue to play out these outdated roles. What will never go away is the growing need to make a business case before making a software investment. What will have to change is the separate job descriptions that wrongly make these goals two entirely different responsibilities. Joshua Greenbaum [josh@eaconsult.com] is a principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting. He researches enterprise applications and e-business.
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