ESA Bridges the CIO - LOB Divide

By Sam Sliman
President, Optimal Solutions Integration, Inc.

Today, practically every business decision and customer interaction in a company is supported by business technology. To be effective at their job, a CIO must have a solid understanding of the myriad business processes within their company. But according to a recent survey conducted by Optimize Magazine, while 72% of CIOs believe they possess an equal understanding of business processes and technology, only 54% of line-of-business (LOB) managers agree with this assessment. Another survey finding reveals that 72% of CIOs rate themselves as successful at aligning business goals with technology initiatives, compared to a mere 49% of LOBs who believe this to be the case.

These significant gaps in perception bring into clear relief the age-old conflict between IT leadership and the business people who count on IT to produce technology solutions that deliver meaningful results. But why has this CIO – LOB divide persisted so long? And what might be done to finally bring these factions into alignment?

The IT – LOB language barrier

It can be argued that a language barrier is the root cause of the CIO – LOB divide. Technology people have little insight into the pressures, performance metrics and reporting needs business people grapple with on a daily basis; and business professionals typically lack the specialized training by which to evaluate the suitability of any given technology for their operational needs.

Historically, the process for implementing a technology solution begins by translating business process needs into technical language developers can understand. It is precisely during this translation process where things most often go awry. Because the two sides speak fundamentally different languages, the solution--nearly always presented in technical jargon that business people do not fully grasp--too often fails to deliver the needed business process functionality, runs past deadline and over budget or, in the worst-case scenario, misses the mark completely and is scrapped as a complete loss.

ESA enables business language to drive IT initiatives

Improving communication between business and IT is a primary key to closing the CIO – LOB divide. At bottom, this is precisely what Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA), powered by the SAP NetWeaver platform, accomplishes. Because enterprise services, the building block of ESA, are defined at a granularity easily understood by a business manager, there is no need for a developer’s technical translation in the process of developing a solution. With ESA the language of business becomes the language of IT. Equally important, ESA adds a new dimension to the role of the CIO and the IT staff, forcing a deeper, hands-on knowledge of vital business processes, and allowing IT to embrace business process metrics and provide solution recommendations using the language of business rather than that of technology.

In essence, ESA, perhaps for the first time, affords an opportunity to clearly relate the production of a business process solution in an IT environment. The visibility and mutual comprehension that comes with ESA enables business stakeholders, administrators, designers and developers to share a common view of solutions that make sense to all of them.

Following the model-driven approach of ESA and leveraging SAP NetWeaver tools that support the entire life cycle from business process modeling to code generation, business and IT can work together collaboratively to “assemble” enterprise services into composite applications that enable fast and flexible business process innovations and drive efficiency gains, lower total cost of technology ownership, and help their company sustain a competitive edge.