Business process management/External dependencies - the five-year plan

Summary
A critical notion with BPM implementations is that the processes can coordinate interactions with underlying silo-ed systems. This requires that the necessary interfaces be exposed to match the business process requirements. In reality, this usually means that the interfaces need to be developed for the active process projects since they do not already exist.

In some organizations, it can take several months or years to get a specific interface delivered. At one end of the extreme, the owners of the IT architecture at one organization informed the business process teams that they would have to wait five years. At the end of the five years of IT development, the business could pick from the available catalog of services. Imagine waiting five years only to find out that what was actually required still was not available!

In this conflict situation, it took the Leadership team working with the IT leadership to agree that the business process projects were going to deliver tangible benefit to the organization. The delay of five years with such a high probability that necessary services would not even be available was enough of a risk that priorities were changed.

To reach this level of coordinated correction required escalating beyond the project team, who had no authority to direct the work efforts of the IT system owners. The project team was able to communicate their requirements, and the Leadership team worked out the coordination. Aside from fixing this specific alignment issue, the escalation process was vetted for future project teams.