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12.11.06
Value Chain Approach To IT
 By
Charles Betz
One of the major sections in my book is the development of a unified process framework.
The reader might well ask: with such breadth and depth available in COBIT, CMMI, and ITIL, why spend any time developing a new framework? As Jeff Kaplan notes in his excellent Strategic IT Portfolio Management,
The last thing the IT industry needs is another proprietary framework. The best thing that could happen would be if all the disparate IT associations (ITIL, SEI, COBIT, etc.), as well as academics who study and teach IT management, were to consolidate their frameworks into one definitive, comprehensive, public-domain reference model that would align industry terminology and create a single blueprint for IT managers.
Well stated. However, the primary reason for YAFW (Yet Another Framework) is that, even though all these frameworks are (to varying degrees) seen as process-oriented, none have a true value chain orientation. They do not define what the core value-add process is for the IT organization, and it is very easy in reading them in all their detail to lose perspective as to what is primary and what is supporting in enterprise IT.
This is in part due to the fact that IT has been somewhat weak in understanding and leveraging supporting processes. Enterprise architecture, project management office, capacity planning, data administration, quality assurance, and other such teams are perpetually at risk in many organizations where they are viewed as bureaucratic distractions. The core imperative is :
Build the thing and deploy it!
The COBIT/CMM/ITIL frameworks recognize this mentality as a problem, but overcompensate through exhaustive coverage of supporting processes to the point that the reader starts to wonder, "where's the beef"? For example, in CMMI, Engineering is only one of the four process area categories, and within Engineering, the Technical Solution process area ("design, develop, and implement solutions to requirements") is only one of six process areas.
Click here to resume reading this article.
About the Author:
Charles Betz is a Senior Enterprise Architect, and chief architect for IT
Service Management strategy for a US-based Fortune 50 enterprise. He is author of the forthcoming Architecture and Patterns for IT Service
Management, Resource Planning, and Governance: Making Shoes for the Cobbler's Children (Morgan Kaufman/Elsevier, 2006, ISBN 0123705932). He is the sole author of the popular www.erp4it.com weblog.
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