On June 28, I will have the honor of joining Rob Young, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Astound and former lead IT service management (ITSM) analyst at IDC, for a webcast. We’ll be discussing the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced automation on IT. I think it will be a lively and provocative 45 minutes with a focus on collaboration and communication.
You can read more about it and register to attend, live or on demand. (For those of you who don’t trust shortened links, that’s http://astound-4499063.hs-sites.com/june-webinar?utm_campaign=June%20Campaign&utm_source=michaeldortch.)
In preparation for this discussion, I began recalling some relevant posts I’d written previously. The 12 sentences below are updated from musings I originally posted in July 2010. As always, your thoughts and reactions welcome, as are any specific questions or ideas you’d like me to consider for the June 28 event.
- Every business relies on collaboration and communication to do business.
- Almost all business collaboration and communication is supported by some form(s) of information technology (IT), whether e-mail, social media, telephone, or even fax.
- To win consistently and thrive competitively, businesses need to be able to consistently do the right things for customers, partners, and prospects, and respond to changing requirements or conditions in a timely, agile fashion. (See “Your ‘ART-ful’ Enterprise: Agility.” And no, you sticklers – neither that citation nor this sentence are included in the sentence count in this post’s title.)
- Ad hoc, inconsistent collaboration and communication practices make it unlikely to impossible for businesses to do what they need to do to win consistently or thrive competitively.
- The key difference between collaboration and communication practices that help a business to win and those that don’t are consistent, business-driven processes, implemented and enforced across all business-critical activities and actors.
- Processes that are crafted, documented, and enforced well and consistently help to ensure that all important actions contribute to customer, partner, and prospect satisfaction, and to overall business success.
- At most businesses, critical processes are often inconsistently and poorly crafted, documented, and/or enforced, when they exist, are documented, or are enforced at all.
- The businesses best able to capture, define, implement, enforce, integrate, and manage critical processes are those best positioned to win and to thrive competitively.
- A potentially powerful way to achieve these goals is to process-enable the collaboration and communication solutions upon which the business already relies and with which users are already familiar.
- Fortunately, there are tools available to help even non-technical business decision makers capture, define, implement, enforce, and manage business processes effectively and consistently, and integrate processes with key collaboration and communication solutions.
- Tools and processes that intelligently automate discovery and documentation of your IT environment can help to surface actual IT workflows and their alignment with, deviations from, and impediments to support of critical business processes.
- Your business needs to begin by capturing, analyzing, and optimizing all critical incumbent processes, evaluating and prioritizing key collaboration and communication solutions, and mapping out how best to process-enable these.
I’ll be updating some additional posts from my archives between now and June 28. Hope to hear from you about these, and to connect with you at the event (or afterwards, if you can’t attend live).
