IT for Business (IT4B) E-Book

Brian Johnson

• Herausgeber: Packt Publishing
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 177

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

This book delves into the evolving role of IT in business transformation, covering key strategies for aligning business objectives with digital tools and technologies. It focuses on the importance of governance, efficiency, and risk management in driving IT success. Readers will discover how to build effective IT strategies, manage service delivery, and improve stakeholder engagement in a rapidly changing digital landscape. With practical frameworks and real-world case studies, it provides a roadmap for managing the complexities of digital service design, contract management, and performance. As the book progresses, it highlights the challenges and opportunities IT presents, from governance issues to innovation drivers. It concludes with actionable insights into digital readiness and transformation, equipping readers with the tools to navigate and lead in the digital age.

Leseprobe

IT for Business (IT4B)

From genesis to revolution – a business and ITapproach to digital transformation

IT for Business (IT4B)

From genesis to revolution – a businessand IT approach to digitaltransformation

BRIAN JOHNSONANDWALTER ZONDERVAN

Every possible effort has been made to ensure that the information contained in this book is accurate at the time of going to press, and the publisher and the author cannot accept responsibility for any errors or omissions, however caused. Any opinions expressed in this book are those of the author, not the publisher. Websites identified are for reference only, not endorsement, and any website visits are at the reader’s own risk. No responsibility for loss or damage occasioned to any person acting, or refraining from action, as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by the publisher or the author.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publisher or, in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licenses issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publisher at the following address:

IT Governance Publishing Ltd

Unit 3, Clive Court

Bartholomew’s Walk

Cambridgeshire Business Park

Ely

Cambridgeshire

CB7 4EA

United Kingdom

www.itgovernancepublishing.co.uk

© Brian Johnson and Walter Zondervan 2018

The author has asserted the rights of the author under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

First published in the United Kingdom in 2018 by IT Governance Publishing.

ISBN: 978-1-78778-001-9

FOREWORD

One of this book’s reviewers wrote that in business there are very few, if any, readymade answers. That comment deserves to be placed upfront because this book is based entirely on that point and raises questions and provides insights based on experience.

There are no readymade answers because businesses have different goals and different cultures, and there is no ‘go-to’ list of solutions that can be applied without effort or thought. This book serves to identify many of the common issues that businesses face and provide advice about how they might be solved; it does not promote one framework or method, but illustrates that most frameworks are not designed to be all-encompassing and that many different good practices need to be used to help IT manage changes that impact the way that enterprises carry out business processes.

Myriad ‘IT frameworks’ and ‘methods’ exist that are often applied as a one-stop shop to address any business or IT issue because there is no clear understanding about where the framework is of most use, or where it is of least value. IT4B does not reinvent any of the methods, alter their definitions or claim to do anything radically different except to provide a coherent understanding of your enterprise’s digital readiness.

So, why buy into it if nothing is new? Well, do you really want another variant of ITIL®or COBIT®? Will different definitions of governance or risk really improve the development of new IT-driven services? Or would you like to read about how to order well-known concepts, methods and processes in a way that focuses digital innovation on the business? Business processes drive business change, and automating these business processes is the means to providing IT services that (hopefully) make things more efficient; IT processes simply provide support. This book is intended to focus on the needs of the business first and foremost.

Readiness is a key issue. Readiness is based on capability and the desire to improve business (most often involving eye-watering investment in technology), although a cultural determination is most often the crucial factor in success. As another reviewer pointed out, this approach leads to a clear understanding about how operational goals drive the business direction and impact governance and strategy.

In terms of content, anything you see in a box is stuff you might find interesting but does not directly affect the IT4B approach. And appendices are provided to amplify some issues for those wishing to get to grips with details. Nothing in this book changes or reinvents existing best practices; the IT4B approach identifies common elements and places them in a context that helps you think about dependencies. And the book is a conversation, not a dogma.

To begin with, we want to look at improvement in artistic capabilities over the centuries, which evidence suggests was based on technology, not talent. If that does not convince you that the book is not an ‘IT method’, not much else will!

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Brian Johnson has held a number of key leadership and strategic roles in government and private companies. He was a part of the UK government team that created the ITIL approach. He has written a number of books on ITIL, the software life cycle and the role of IT in business. When he isn’t working or writing, Brian’s passion is playing football.

Walter Zondervan is a digital innovator who is always looking to help organisations reach their full potential. In his 20+ years of experience, he became fascinated with translating business goals into IT strategy. As a digital transformation strategist, he developed a comprehensive approach to this, which has been partially adopted by the BiSL® Next framework for business information management.

Working together on BiSL® Next, the authors decided to take it a step further and combine their insights to create a practical IT4B approach to digital transformation.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

IT Governance Publishing for being the most helpful publisher on the planet, the anonymous and very helpful IT Governance Publishing reviewers, and Maarten Hillenaar for coming up with the IT4B acronym.

CONTENTS

Technology transforming art

Hockney on IT4B

Hockney and the 15th-century painting transformation

How is IT4B used?

Chapter One: From Genesis to Revolution

Que sera, sera, what will IT4B

Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy)

Chapter Two: It’s a Question of Balance

Expanding the concepts

The camera obscura for business and IT

Chapter Three: The ‘Roman Riding’ of Governance

Governance is not the same as management

Outcome (and output)

Developments & Trends

Identifying strategic themes

Prioritisation and governance

Effectiveness & Efficiency

Effectiveness versus efficiency

Effectiveness and efficiency in the real world

Management reports

The ‘output’ or the ‘outcome’?

Opportunities & Risks

Risk

Opportunity

Chapter Four: The Equilibrium of Strategy

The dynamics of strategy and IT

Gateway guidance

Outcome and output

Architecture & Portfolio

Strategies and the stages of strategy development

Roles & Responsibilities

Roles & Responsibilities

Objectives & Requirements

Managing the relationship with the customer

E-business

Problems

Sourcing & Sponsoring

Chapter Five: The Outer Limits of Improvement

What could possibly go wrong by improving?

Improvement and IT

Output or outcome?

Resources & Activities

Digital service requirements

Design of the digital service

Assembly

Maintain your stakeholder perspectives on IT

Skills & Competences

Understanding capabilities

Design & Realisation

Design phase

Build phase

Review & Validation

Chapter Six: The Challenge of Operation

The front line

Output (and outcome)

Contracts & Agreements

Managing contracts and service performance

What is contract management?

Intelligent/informed customer capability

Managing multiple interfaces

Who is involved?

Critical success factors

Foundations for contract management

Other issues

Implementation & Transition

Deployment & Maintenance

Checklist/activities

Requirements

Design

Build

Deploy

Operate

Service & Support

Service & Support for the business

Supporting the user of digital services

Chapter Seven: Digital Readiness and Innovation

Chapter Eight: Mythical Airlines Case Study

Mythical Airlines Ltd

The IT interaction

Think about service characteristics

Partners

Key points

Transactions

Training and documentation

Chapter Nine: The Bottom Line

Transformation

The key drivers of transformation

Define digital

Appendix A: Theories about organisational change

Why IT4B?

Appendix B: Useful pointers in formulating business and IT strategy

General

Requirement focus

Demand focus

Purchasing approach

Service definition

Current service performance

Degrees of integration

Technology familiarity and maturity

Appendix C: A communications strategy

Appendix D: Skills

Successful delivery skills framework

Possible maturity levels

How the framework could be designed

How to use the framework

Leadership

Finance

Programme and project delivery

Specific responsibilities

Appendix E: Thoughts about testing the design of services

Test management

Appendix F: Performance

Design or procurement details

Effectiveness

Performance

Appendix G: Maintenance

Optimise

People

Business process

Technology

Further Reading

TECHNOLOGY TRANSFORMING ART

Hockney on IT4B

This book is focused on the role of innovation in business and society rather than just the invention of yet another model. The model-centric among you can skip this light entertainment and hold your breath for the chapters when we expand the IT4B elements. That said, if you miss this introduction, you will miss out on discovering how technology has transformed society in the past and how an artist and cultural icon discovered that art might also be a science.

Now, what did David Hockney, said artist and cultural icon, do for us to include his name in a piece about some approach to innovation thrown up by a pair of business analysts who want to make business goals the key to innovation in IT?

Hockney and the 15th-century painting transformation

Hockney wondered if the enormous jumps in clarity and composition (not to say perspective) achieved by European painters after the Middle Ages were brought about by technology, in particular by the use of mirrors and lenses.

In the late Middle Ages (Hockney dated the transformation as 1420) something radical happened to the art of painting. Almost overnight, the appearance of paintings changed from cartoonish to near photographic accuracy.

Figure 1: The 15th-century painting transformation

Science was not exactly popular in the Middle Ages. It was largely considered magic or witchery, and holding any belief where science was the proponent (astronomy, for example) or questioning accepted norms (such as slavery, women’s rights and creationism) led to the inquisition.

Hockney’s Secret Knowledge presents a theory (backed up by illustrations from artists in the Middle Ages) that suggests everyone who painted before, say, 1450 was in control of the local torture chamber, thereby ensuring that no one laughed aloud and pointed out that the artist had the talent of a precataract surgery chimp. Hockney’s Secret Knowledge presents a theory (backed up by illustrations from artists in the Middle Ages) that suggests everyone who painted before, say, 1450 was in control of the local torture chamber, thereby ensuring that no one laughed aloud and pointed out that the artist had the talent of a pre-cataract surgery chimp (or that the general public would accept any tripe so long as it was created by somebody featured in whatever passed for Twitter. Probably everyone gave the town crier a piece of parchment with one very large gilt character on it and 139 small ones…).

After 1450, the quality of paintings vastly improved, and it is likely that optical devices to project images were to thank. David Hockney1 and physicist Charles M. Falco2 claim that the advances in realism3 and accuracy were primarily the result of optical instruments4, such as the camera obscura5, camera lucida6 and curved mirrors7, rather than solely due to the development of artistic8 technique and skill. Hockney analysed the work of the Old Masters9 and argued that their level of accuracy is impossible to create by plein air painting.

Caravaggio was most likely the first to use a camera obscura (Hockney cites a lot of evidence in support) and Vermeer clearly used optics extensively. The art world was turned upside down (though it remained flat to avoid stake-burning episodes). In fact at one point, the images projected would have been upside down; at one time even reversed (another proof-point for Hockney in that an astonishing number of artistic models appear to be left handed in many works. True, being left handed might have been more common in 1300, but given that left handed people could very easily be taken to be witches or warlocks, it seems a bit unlikely).

New ideas, methods and technologies were focused in a way that had not been considered before. After 1600 or so, the photographic level of detail is astonishing in many works (see Figure 2).

Figure 2: Photograph or painting?

We think this illustrates that technology leaps do promote innovation. If the Hockney–Falco thesis is true, what lessons can be learned from this medieval “digital transformation” that disrupted the art of painting six centuries ago? First, it is an example of how new technology found its application in an existing field. What followed was a revolutionary change in the production process of paintings, a revolutionary increase in production speed and a revolutionary decrease in production cost, which made paintings available to a broader audience than the usual priests and kings. Andy Warhol, eat your heart out.

For us, IT4B is not of itself an innovation. Like a drawing on paper or a painting on canvas, it is an instantiation of something at a given point – IT4B provides a snapshot of ‘where are you now’ in relation to your enterprise’s digital aspirations. The IT4B concepts and methods can be used as a ‘successful delivery toolkit’; think of it as a 21st-century camera obscura that can be used to focus new ideas and technologies to help the business achieve goals more rapidly and efficiently.

How is IT4B used?

The icon on the left of Figure 3 represents operational services, the central icon represents the ‘IT4B lens through which current business is assessed for ‘readiness’’ and the colourful projection on the right illustrates the outputs from using the ‘lens’. These outputs are assessments of the enterprise capability in 16 key elements that you will find discussed in just about every IT method known. So, Figure 3 shows the basic parameters for the IT4B model. Throughout the book, we will expand on the elements and on the capabilities needed in the enterprise to achieve digital goals.

Figure 3: The IT4B camera obscura

IT4B provides an assessment of readiness based on identifying necessary capabilities and the degree to which they exist in the enterprise. Capabilities may need to exist at different levels of expertise depending on the nature of business transformations, and a simple ‘high, medium, low’ stratification is used to assist in visualising results.

Sceptics can check out more information on the Hockney–Falco thesis on Wikipedia10.

Lessons learned from the 15th-century painting transformation:

•New technology applied in existing field.

•Revolutionary change in process.

•Revolutionary increase in speed.

•Revolutionary decrease in cost.

•Availability to a broader audience.

Do any of these ring a bell in the 21st century?

Figure 4: The next revolution – Robert Cornelius’ Self-Portrait: The First Ever “Selfie” (1839)

1https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hockney

2https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_M._Falco

3https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Realism_(arts)

4https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_instrument

5https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_obscura

6https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camera_lucida

7https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curved_mirror

8https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist

9https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Master

10https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2%80%93Falco_thesis

CHAPTER ONE: FROM GENESIS TO REVOLUTION

Que sera, sera, what will IT4B…

What is IT4B? It sounds like another acronym designed by IT to fool the business into thinking IT is of vague interest to the business community. Well, this is IT for business, to help the business side of the house determine whether IT is ‘aligned’ or ‘integrated’, and what is missing (and something will always be missing). Of course, when it comes to the digitisation of information services, IT will be in the driver’s seat, meaning IT4B becomes a tool for both parties to determine gaps in requirements, competence, capabilities and even knowledge of the various methods needed to move from business-designed objectives to IT-delivered services.

The primary goal is to assess the readiness of the business and its IT support to achieve business goals. Business goals are supported by business processes; in regulated markets that depend on IT for efficiency, there is not a lot of point in implementing an IT method before identifying what needs to be achieved by the business.

Figure 1.1: The IT4B lens

Figure 1.1 illustrates the subject areas covered by this way of thinking. IT4B is a structured way of thinking, supported by detailed examination of the most common attributes in an enterprise. As described in the introduction, this is the lens, a model through which we examine business and IT readiness. Three linked components – the Benefit Model, the Enterprise Architecture and the Operating Model – are used to focus the issues illustrated around the circumference of the model. In the centre, the icons we use to describe elements that always need attention are shown; these elements will be identified later. For now, this chapter introduces the model and the reason we built it, and outlines what will be discussed later.

Providing the necessary structure to facilitate digital innovation is often a challenge. Based on our more than 20 years of research and experience at the interface of business and IT, an approach emerged that helps translate business goals into digital ‘ambitions’ and a roadmap in a practical (non-technical) manner. Using a set of simple canvasses, you gain insight into the steps you can take to transform your organisation into a digital enterprise.

As we mentioned it is not a ‘new’ IT method; existing good practice methods are referenced, not altered, and we explain how they can work more effectively when used together.

The focus is the realisation of the opportunity that IT presents. If only your IT ‘innovation’ was focused on the future of the business and the business market in which it operates rather than implementing the latest method, software or technology.

More often than not, your IT people expect you to understand their language and claim that it is impossible for the business to articulate what they need or want. Most, if not all, of the IT frameworks and models don’t help with ‘translation’ of business requirements. The result is that a rapid response to a business problem is most often based on finding help in one of the IT best practices familiar to the enterprise.

In these circumstances, IT is a roadblock to innovation. Instead of examining the principles of, say, efficiency and effectiveness in relation to how quickly they can respond to the business when new services are needed or in times of crisis, the default response is to examine their various models of best practices to see where they fit into a process they understand.

The philosophy behind IT4B is that the full potential of digital innovation (Figure 1.2) can only be achieved if it is successfully embedded within a benefit model, an enterprise architecture and your enterprise’s operating model. On the other hand, the true power of digital innovation can only be fully enjoyed if your enterprise has reached a certain level of digital readiness. The foundation of successful digital transformation is constructed when there is equilibrium between digital readiness and digital innovation. The IT4B framework and canvasses enable enterprises to discover the opportunities for digital innovation and create a digital profile of their specific enterprise. The goal is to illustrate how to use the model and the myriad methods that exist in IT to reach the appropriate level of digital readiness.

Figure 1.2: Digital innovation

No one in IT ever tries to do a bad job or provide poor customer service; the issue is that IT professionals are most often directly recruited and are therefore intrinsically IT-centric – they have no experience of the business in which they operate and thus seem distanced from understanding what is going on. Consider again the issue of regulated markets: who would you expect to be the subject-matter expert? It certainly would not be the people running the data centre.

Discovering the missing pieces is often a navel-gazing IT exercise, which arrives at a number of fairly standard responses. We need our IT people to be certified in architecture, or a development method, or a programming method, or a method to manage projects. Often the result requires significant management attention and the entire enterprise is said to be in need of some form of recognised external audit badge, or sometimes more money to buy more ‘tools’.

It is not focused on making sure IT understands business.

Figure 1.3: Using both halves of the brain for business and IT

Just as the focus for healthcare should be the health of the population, the focus of every digital innovation should be ‘business first’.

Business-first approaches require insight into the enterprise and its processes. It can be helpful to take a bimodal approach to the business processes by discerning two distinctive categories: ‘left-brain’ processes (logic, analytic, linear, mathematical, facts) and ‘right-brain’ processes (creative, imagination, holistic, visual, experience). This is shown in Figure 1.3, which illustrates having to keep opposing and often contradictory arguments at the same time in different parts of the brain.

In the early days of IT, the focus was almost entirely on supporting ‘left-brain’ processes. Nowadays, ‘right-brain’ solutions are being hyped. However, both types of processes deserve equal attention to achieve a well-balanced functional fit.

Business first also should mean that discussions about IT should take place after the business requirement is fully understood.

Figure 1.4: Balancing the high-level concerns