By Lisa Dyer
There is no real controversy in the assertion that information should be architected and managed as a strategic business asset. Most organizations acknowledge the benefits of solving the “information problem,” a problem whose solution could deliver significant business value:
- Operational efficiency. People spend up to 35% of their time looking for the information they need. They are successful in finding it less than 50% of the time (Feldman).
- Information-driven revenue opportunities. Companies report that their post-sales information is bringing in over 50% of qualified leads, and helping marketers convert prospects to paying customers (Fulkerson).
So why is it that so many potential solutions are not getting funded? A solid business case that in one organization would easily get funding may not get it in another. Many organizations simply put up with the growing cost of the problem, counting on search engines and other technical quick fixes to mute the pain.
Be that as it may, organizations are funding any number of projects to solve other business problems, and in a large portion of those projects, information plays an integral part. Information is ubiquitous, democratic, and highly mutable; its lifecycle is difficult to manage. In a sense, it involves a component of “voodoo” that is often poorly understood and communicated.
Information architects (IAs) are uniquely equipped to help organizations manage this complexity while increasing their competitive edge in the way information is developed, deployed, discovered, and kept relevant as the frameworks and context around it change and grow in complexity. IAs need to improve their skill at communicating and marketing value in terms that businesses can understand, support, and fund. More often than not, we use a mix of jargon, methodology, intuition, and hand-waving to sell our value propositions. We also talk about tactics when we should be talking about strategy. For the typical executive, the proposition is difficult to parse and therefore sponsor. The purpose of this article is to equip you with new insight and skills for doing just that—selling information initiatives in ways that resonate in the world of business.
Engage your entrepreneurial and methodical thinking
Go out and find those funded projects and programs and partner with them to create better business outcomes. Wherever information is being discovered, developed, and presented, there you'll find opportunities to improve outcomes.
“But I architect information, not businesses,” you might say. I'm not suggesting that you radically change your business model. Your bread-and-butter activities fulfill perennial business needs and requirements. On the contrary, I'm suggesting that you take more control over your organizational destiny by broadening your impact across the organization in a very methodical way. The method that has helped me change and shape my business over the years is Business Process Management.
An Introduction to Business Process Management
Business Process Management (BPM) seeks to transform the way businesses do what they do in order to identify new opportunities, streamline activities, and deliver successful outcomes. In other words, with BPM, “it's not what you do that is so different. It's how you do it. That is the big difference.” IBM gives us a more precise definition:
BPM is a comprehensive management approach to continuously improving your business processes. BPM is more than workflow automation. [It] promotes effectiveness and efficiency in business processes by using measurable business value to align all projects with corporate strategies. BPM relies on an incremental delivery methodology that creates process visibility, which enables process control.
Process visibility also means that your process participants have perspective into the end-to-end process that is not limited to the activities assigned to them. This perspective, now coupled with a common language and taxonomy, enables conversations that create new business opportunities.
BPM enables you to manage your processes and support corporate initiatives such as improving product quality, reducing time to market, expanding to new markets, raising customer satisfaction, and increasing profit margins.
Why is BPM such a good fit for our purposes? Because a business process always involves information, and information always involves a business process. And both are everywhere. Embracing the fundamental idea that BPM and information are inseparable enables you to impact the value chain of your organization in innovative ways, to get better business outcomes, and to raise the profile of yourself and the people who collaborate with you. (Remember, whoever collaborates and partners with you is motivated by the promise of measurable benefits that are rewarded.)
If you're still not drawing the parallel between your business and BPM, consider Figure 1, the business process life cycle. Does it look familiar?
Figure 1. The life cycle phases of a managed process (Dyer et al.)
As you can see, the lifecycle phases of a managed business process are very similar to the information architecture and development lifecycle. Let's explore three different case studies of successful solutions in which the information architect applied a BPM approach and reaped the reward.
Business Process Management case studies
Developing reusable RFPs collaboratively
The opportunity: The pre-sales team needed their Request for Proposals (RFP) process to scale in order to help close more deals faster. However, only a few people were enabled to preside over the content. Compiling RFPs was an arduous exercise in cut-and-paste and massaging in order to arrive at the required content and format. Information evolved constantly, but was not revisited regularly (or at all). The workforce at client sites needed fast turnaround on new question-and-answer pairs for their RFP responses—often via mobile devices due to firewall issues—but turnaround was bottlenecked by the review process and technology.
The solution: The IA working in this space saw a process, a problem, and an opportunity. Using classic information architecture skills, the IA drove the following solution (see Figure 2):
- Created reusable structured templates for the RFP information
- Identified information components and taxonomy for reuse, leaving room for variable content in each RFP
- Leveraged an online collaboration framework for developing and sharing draft question-and-answer pairs while waiting for the review process to warrant the information
- Built an open-source tool chain to produce the necessary outputs (wiki, PDF, XHTML)
- Identified and used a process application to orchestrate all activities and report on key performance indicators such as request-to-submit times
Figure 2. The process definition for managing the lifecycle of RFP content
Prosperous partnering
The opportunity: Through conversation between the teams developing product documentation and the teams developing product code, both teams discovered a shared business process problem. Information needed to flow between the teams throughout the process of manufacturing the product, but the two proprietary source formats were incompatible. The two teams were using a very high-touch and costly process to bridge the information flow. A customer, dissatisfied with the resulting information product, escalated the situation until it got the attention of senior management and put a spotlight on the root causes. The information team had a solution in mind, and they successfully lobbied for funding to deliver the solution.
The solution: The product development team committed to using a standards-based XML template and process developed by the information team, while the information team committed to maintaining the framework and serving as process owner. The solution shortened time-to-market, prevented errors in the end products (at least once saving over a million dollars in manufacturing costs), and reduced the amount of human effort required overall. Executives are now asking for monthly updates on this work; they are engaged like never before, and dreaming up new opportunities. The solution team now has momentum and opportunity to deliver more successful projects, ultimately leading to a full-fledged business program.
Tip: Of course, it's painful to get your executive's attention because a customer complained that “the docs suck,” and it's easy to get on the defensive. The entrepreneurial IA will leverage this situation as opportunity—proof for your business case that the business process needs to change. Don't let the opportunity pass you by even if you don't feel well versed enough in business issues. Partner with those who do, and ask them to stand up and testify about the value your solution will create for them.
Building an “app store” for solution developers
The opportunity: Stakeholders agreed—product samples were valuable, but the current ad-hoc model of producing, maintaining, and delivering the samples was inefficient, underfunded, and incapable of meeting the demand. Teams were asked to provide tutorials and samples, but the teams were not enabled with access to subject matter experts and working code early enough in the release cycle—particularly challenging given the Agile development process. In addition, samples were governed with a splintered approach: everyone in their silos tried manage the problem, creating problems with coherency, predictability, currency, reusability, and captive subject matter experts. This team needed a fundamentally different solution.
The solution: This problem practically diagnosed itself for the IA, and the solution involved a blend of process savvy and classic skills in scenario-based design. The new solution involved the product team developing key scenarios that help users get started with the product and adopt new features, while other samples would be developed by the worldwide practitioner community and hosted on a community-enabled site. The solution involved a handful of additional elements:
- The team decoupled samples from the product installer. This decreased the risk to schedule and quality as a result of late code changes. It also freed up developers to collaborate on key samples after completing the bulk of their product-release work.
- The team implemented direct links from the product to the community site from a visible location. They began to track incoming traffic in order to know where users were coming in to the site. This data helped the team determine how best to integrate community assets into the user's context in using the product.
- The team measured the relevancy of the samples through downloads and page visits. Non-relevant samples were archived or updated. Relevant samples were promoted.
Tip: Talk to customers and partners. What assets—like samples or other special content—do they need to be more self-sufficient? Would they be interested in co-developing those assets? Under what conditions would customers be willing to pay for those assets? (Some people have an aversion to using and sharing non-warranted community assets.) You might create new revenue.
Lessons learned
If you've read this far, hopefully you're thinking that perhaps there's something to this idea. But you still might file it away because you just don't have the time to put the idea to work—at least not without assurances (to your boss, for one) that it's really going to pay off.
To that end, I offer this short recipe of actionable steps you can take that will help you jump ahead of the learning curve and immediately start testing a BPM approach—with no tooling investment. You just need a reasonable time investment and your entrepreneurial thinking. I recommend these steps:
- Learn the basic concepts of BPM! Read chapters 1, 2 and 3 of Scaling BPM Adoption from Project to Program with IBM Business Process Manager (IBM Redbooks). The book describes how to manage BPM solutions with a specific product, but the core message is product-agnostic.
- Find someone in the organization that is business-savvy and a seasoned negotiator, and ask that person to coach you.
- Find out if there is a BPM initiative in your organization. If yes, great; tell the program manager that you are looking to adopt BPM for your work and ask how you can get plugged in. If your question draws blank stares, great: you have the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring BPM to your organization!
- Run a process discovery and documentation workshop:
- Pick a partner whose business processes you know, even if just a little. Ask if they have information flowing through their core business processes (usually the answer is yes), and if they would participate in a discovery workshop with you. Your shared goal is to discover opportunities for improvement.
- Together, document the “as-is” process and define what the “to-be” process should be. (Even if it ends here, you have already added value by creating a process inventory that is yielding new wisdom and enabling decisions for improvement.)
- Pick a project to deliver with your partner.
- Run your first successful project, then market it in every way you can. Enable as many influencers as you can to sponsor it—this is best done if you engage them in the process from the very beginning.
- Keep it simple and iterate in “bursts” of value. Don't build or measure what you don't really need right now.
- Create a plan for measuring the business value and marketing that value. Create the simplest meaningful report that can reveal bottlenecks and opportunities, and share the report regularly with stakeholders.
- Use testimonials to illustrate impact on the daily routines of process participants.
- Keep building on the momentum, and your business will grow.
I hope these stories inspire you to embark on a BPM journey of your own. If you do, you will expand your horizons, connect to new opportunities and people, and have fun in the process. I'll leave you with a thought represented in a process diagram I have taped to my office door.
Figure 3. Process for happiness
Lisa Dyer (lisa.dyer@gmail.com) works as a community strategist. She finds the intersection of information and business processes endlessly fascinating and rewarding. Her focus is to obliterate knowledge silos and enable rich, effective, and collaborative information experiences that drive new revenue, methodologies, and best practices for businesses and industries of all stripes. You can connect with Lisa on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/lisadyer, learn more about her work at www.slideshare.net/lisa.dyer, and follow her on Twitter @lisajoydyer.
REFERENCES
Feldman, Susan. 2004. “The high cost of not finding information.” KMWorld Magazine, www.kmworld.com/articles/readarticle.aspx?articleid=9534.
Fulkerson, Aaron. 2010. “The evolution of user manuals.” Forbes, www.forbes.com/2010/08/07/customer-service-fulkerson-technology-documentation.html.
Dyer, Lisa, et al. 2011. Scaling BPM Adoption from Project to Program with IBM Business Process Manager, SG24-7973. IBM Redbooks, www.redbooks.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedbookAbstracts/sg247973.html.
