From here to there … AS-IS and TO-BE

All people in ICT have come across projects that will replace a current situation (the AS-IS) with a desired future situation (the TO-BE). At first sight it looks great: you analyze the current situation, including shortcomings and issues, and you document it in an AS-IS document. Then based on the results of this AS-IS and various gathered requirements you design and document the new state: the TO-BE. Looks good right? Not to me …

The drivers for these projects are often the same:

1. an increasing perception that the current system is unable to fulfill the needs the system was created for in the first place.
2. a general feeling that extending the current system, for instance to solve some of the issues, is becoming too expensive or too complex.

Before I would start designing a future TO-BE, I would like to now why the system as it is today, the AS-IS, is not fulfilling it’s goals anymore. Is it because technology has changed significantly during it’s life time? Is it because the people who designed, developed and maintained the system haven’t done a decent enough job? Is it because the system, once a perfect fit for the problem, started to loose alignment with the environment, slowly being rendered obsolete and in need of replacement?

Without proper answers to these questions and without a proper response in the TO-BE, that TO-BE is surely destined to become your next AS-IS. In a few years we will no doubt witness a presentation that explains us how the AS-IS (that TO-BE we are building today) is not good enough anymore and needs to be replaced with something new and more modern.

The world is constantly changing, so is your company and the environment it lives in. Any ICT system that operates as part of your company must realise it needs to change to keep in lign with that changing environment. If you only focus on building a static architecture that is unable to adapt to changes, you are doomed to recreate the system, in the form of a desired TO-BE, every couple of years.

Only during a smaller part of the existence of such a system, it is properly aligned to actual requirements. Most of the time in the lifespan of the system, is spend in either complaining about lack of alignment or promising improvement with the upcoming TO-BE.

I therefore don’t really believe in this AS-IS and TO-BE methodology. When you realize you are lagging behind while the world around you is changing, you won’t solve the problem by desperately catching up to the present. Because when you finally caught up (the TO-BE is delivered) you are already lagging behind again. Even if you went to great lengths to make that TO-BE as flexible as possible, you can never predict the future. If you can, give me a call.

What you want is a process that:

1. periodically measures how well the system is aligned to the environment,
2. identifies those elements of the system that are in danger of losing alignment,
3. proposes gradual changes to the system to improve alignment.

Note how nowhere in this process we propose to redesign and reimplement the system. At a smaller scale this technique is well know in software development: it’s called refactoring. This is exactly what you also want to do at a larger scale with your architecture: refactor mercilessly. Refactoring should not be limited to the development phase but should be an integral part of the entire life cycle of a system.

Given a proper refactoring process and the obvious current, AS-IS, state of a system, I can gradually improve and align that system to an ever changing environment until the need of the very existance of the system itself is disappearing. I should avoid a big bang approach that proposes and develops a brand new TO-BE system.

Building for change is not a new slogan, yet it is not well understood nor implemented. Every day projects are born that are meant to create a new TO-BE and, sadly enough, at the same time the AS-IS of tomorrow.

BlackBerry as a Substitute for Process

The penetration of BlackBerries and alike in enterprises is continuously rising. First an exclusive gadget for the higher management, it is now being distributed to anyone who is supposedly to be non-stop reachable. At the same time, I haven’t seen any improvement in generated business value, efficiency or quality. In fact, if there is anything these devices have accomplished, it is a decrease in all of those: business value, efficiency and quality.

Before I continue, I have to give credit where credit is due. Seasoned blog readers might recognize the title “BlackBerry as a Substitute for Process”. I was inspired by the blog article “Process as a Substitute for Competence” from the Kill The Meeting blog. An excellent article and I strongly encourage everyone to hop over and read it. Secondly, I refer almost solely to “BlackBerry” when in fact I mean any hand held device that allows you to read your email any time in any place.

BlackBerries are sold with the promise you can read and reply to your email whenever you want and wherever you are. I state that this very feature is what makes BlackBerries a liability in your company’s strategy for quality, efficiency and overall improvement. BlackBerries make sure that whatever you have in place that might look like a process, is rapidly turned into a relic of the past.

Let’s consider two opposites. On one side we have a company that is focusing on (business) process improvement on the other side we have a company that doesn’t really care. History has shown us that you want to be working for the first company. Sure, no doubt that second company talks a lot about processes, they probably even have working groups, steering committees and overall projects to get better processes in place. It is however easy to burst that bubble by observing these simple facts:

• Spreadsheet after spreadsheet is introduced to manage those processes.
• Managers are more focused on and spending most of their time in short-term tactical issues instead of long-term process improvement.
• If quality is measured at all, it is done by periodic sampling.
• Your backlog is growing, or at least not reducing.
• Cost reduction is the phrase in meetings.
• Whenever process improvement is mentioned, it is actually about automation, not improvement.

Now, these symptoms would show me that you are not managing the process but you are more into incident management. Managing by incident is a dead end: costs will continue to increase, quality is a distant dream and different departments or business units will slowly start to distrust each other. With managing by incident, you are fixing the past and not creating the future.

The key to sustaining and fueling management by incident is to make it easy to act on incidents. The easier it is to “fix them”, the less pain those incidents will cause. BlackBerries are one key element in this, by giving you immediate access to email and the ability to reply to it almost instantly. You have made fixing incidents easier. Victory? Not at all, you just sank a little deeper in the quick sand incident management really is.

But wait, BlackBerries, a marvelous invention, how could we manage our company without it? How could we survive without email! Those who think email is a key element to success are fools. Don’t forget, we managed to find America, build the Suez canal and put men on the moon without the help of email, let alone BlackBerries. Those people knew the value of proper communication, processes and procedures. They made sure that when they left a meeting everyone knew what they had to do. Simply because each would go their own way and it was time consuming and expensive to communicate afterwards.

Today, people come and go at meetings, not caring about agendas, action lists or meeting minutes. Because they all know that it is so easy to email each other to get the blanks filled in.

My advice: think twice before introducing BlackBerries. They are a fine piece of technology and can be a real value to your company. But they can also fuel management by incident, a dangerous thing to happen.