Lounge - Business process/Business service and IT process / IT service?

Asked By karur krishna madhu on 07-Mar-14 12:57 AM

What is the difference among the below 4 terminologies?

Business process
Business service
IT process
and IT service?

Present flaw is Business process is not falling in line with the IT process and this gap is filled by SOA. My question is why the business process of an organization has to be in sync with that of the IT process of the same organization?

Niz Niz replied to karur krishna madhu on 07-Mar-14 01:17 AM

Hi Krishna,

It all depends on the organization's strategy. These days, organizations are getting driven by technology. I personally do not agree with it. As always, business must be the driving force. IT must be aligned to business processes. Organizations are gradually changing their strategy and even renaming IT to BT (Business Technology) which is the right way. Technology is nothing but a service to serve the business of the organization and hence certainly the technology processes must be aligned to the business processes rather than the other way round.

Not exactly sure if it has answered your question. But this is a big topic and most organizations are revising their technology strategies.

Regards,

Niz Niz

karur krishna madhu replied to Niz Niz on 07-Mar-14 02:24 AM

Hi Nissar,
Thanks for the reply.I certainly do agree with you. It is the business which is the driving force for the technology. If there is no business then to whom the IT companies will provide their services and solutions to?

Business process: End to End process flow of a particular business.

Business service: The owner of the business has to provide some services for the products purchased by the consumers/users/distributors/channel partners(Email/chat/support for example)

IT service: In order to provide the business services they need IT (To be swift in service)and for this they use the services of the IT company to develop the applications that are used for the respective business interactions.

IT process: Every IT org has its own Process flow how to develop an application /IT product etc. The process followed to develop an IT service application is IT process.

Please add your inputs if any. If the above mentioned points are correct. then why the organizations are trying to mix Business process and IT process ? In what way it is going to be beneficial?

Also could you please throw some light on your saying "renaming IT to BT (Business Technology) which is the right way".

Niz Niz replied to karur krishna madhu on 09-Mar-14 03:00 PM

Hi Krishna,

Renaming is perhaps a new trend. It is basically realigning Information Technology to serve the business. Ensuring/forcing application support and application developers learn/understand business rather than forcing business users to start learn/understand technology. It's like you said, who else does technology users work for?

Renaming Information Technology departments to Business Technology Departments makes it more sensible thereby developing a culture and habit for the technology users to be more associated with business users and talk their language, terminologies. Rather than technology users go to a meeting to collect the business requirements and start talking - we can integrate systems using SOA architecture, Java API, XML, blah blah and the business users go blistering barnacles...:)

On the other item you queried, (mix Business process and IT process), it possibly is not mixing; rather realigning IT processes that do not meet a business need. Obviously, there are quite a lot of IT processes that cannot be done without. However, the ultimate aim of an IT process should be to deliver a business need. If not, that IT process needs to be revisited and possibly made redundant as it shouldn't even exist.

Good luck...Nissar

karur krishna madhu replied to Niz Niz on 10-Mar-14 10:19 AM

Thanks a lot Nissar. For the information. I got a clear picture of IT to BT.