Be Informed to be measured in Function points

By: Willem Dicou

Function Point Analysis (FPA) is a method for measuring the functional scope of an information system, by looking at relevant user functions and (logical) data collections. The unit of measurement is the Function Point (Fp), which can be used in various ways.

A widely used application of FPA is making estimates for system development. The costs for building a system are related to its size: the larger the system, the more expensive it will be. From past experiences we know how many hours it takes on average to realize a function point: the production standard. Subsequently it is possible to calculate the value of a system and compare it to the price it was paid for.

The NESMA (Dutch Software Metrics Association) developed counting guidelines that in 2003 were certified by ISO as an official ISO standard. Basis for the Standard are the NESMA FPA counting guidelines as expressed in the “Manual of counting guidelines for the definition and application of function point analysis”. The standard is known as NESMA ISO / IEC 24570 and is now used in many countries worldwide.

Based on these standard guidelines, Be Informed created a directive by which systems developed using the Be Informed Business Process Platform can be measured, in both the preliminary stages based on the Be Informed Pattern Engine, and subsequently using the models stored in the repository. This directive has been validated by Galorath, an internationally renowned company in the field of software metrics.

Measurements of actual systems show that it is possible to reach a four to five times better score per function point using Be Informed. These results are already significant, but are even more remarkable when we consider that function points within Be Informed are not only used in building and testing, but in the "full life-cycle" of implementations.

Business and IT Alignment

By: Frank Buytendijk, chief marketing officer

I recently received a promotional email for a "masterclass" on business and IT alignment. The training promised answers on the following questions: "how do you know your IT strategy is aligned with your business strategy?", "how can you put together a governance model that ensures IT follows the business?" and "Pitfalls and success factors".

I checked, the email wasn't from 1983, but seriously from 2009. How can we still have that discussion? Has nothing improved in the last 20 years? And moreover, how can business/IT alignment be so misconceived?

First of all, let's define alignment, this is usually skipped already. From a social-psychological view, a person is aligned when the self, self-perception and external perception closely match. The self-perception is how you look at yourself, and the self is who you really are. If there is a mismatch you could become delusional, frustrated, and generally uncontrolled. You don't understand yourself. If there is a big gap between the self and self-perception, and the external perception, people expect you to be someone that you are really not. This leads to role distance, and unauthentic behavior too. The same can be said of organizations. If there is a big gap between true organizational behavior and who we think we are, we are kidding ourselves. Did you check out your mission statement and values lately? And if there is a big gap between external perception and the organization's true motives, you spend more time figuring out how to spin your strategy externally than actually executing on it. Quite dysfunctional.

Same with business/IT alignment. Like any relationship, it needs to come from both sides. Business perception about value needs to match the IT perspective. But... functional relationships should be based on equality. If both parties agree that IT should follow the business, you're in a dependent, submissive relationship. Not mature.

Business needs to align to IT, as much as IT needs to align with the business. It's a two way street. The nature of technology dictates so, for starters. If you are a carpenter, and you buy one of those circular saw tables (new technology), you'd better organize your process and work around that table, instead of lifting the table to go to the wood. If IT were to follow the business, deleting text on a screen would have to be done with Tipp-ex. The whole point of technology is to not align with the business, but to bring innovation. New, different, better ways of working. If anything, business should align to technology in order to be more successful. In fact, secretly we do so already. It has become a best practice to adapt the business to the processes built into the ERP system and CRM application, and rightly so.

Then, let's discuss Business/Business alignment. How many times is IT struggling with suboptimal business cases, based on budget held by the business, by having to put in a departmental solutions, because each department is "unique"? IT is often found to be "nerdy" and having "no sense of urgency" for talking about architecture and infrastructure. True, IT driven projects are usually not very successful (the business will see to that), but the only thing worse is a business driven project. Short-term successful, but ill-architected, nothing repeatable, and lots of them combined form one big negative ROI in two years down the road. It is the role of IT to see commonality between functional requirements, and take an integrated approach. It would be a lot easier if the business departments would align with, well, the other business departments, instead of IT having that struggle all the time themselves.

And, while I am on the subject, it's a pity if organizations are still discussing business/IT alignment. The real battlefront has moved on already. The name of the game is value chain integration. Aligning all stakeholders around a successful and sustainable business model. Making sure partners, suppliers and channels all benefit from integrated logistical and administrative flows, while taking into account the requirements of investors, regulators, and society at large. This is how alignment contributes to the business strategy.

But perhaps we should start with something else. Remember the definition of alignment. The self, self-perception and external perception need to closely match. Perhaps the real problem is the gap between self and self-perception. IT people sometimes think too little of themselves, and desperately want to be seen as a 'business partner' and considered of strategic importance. Don't worry. You are. Because of the nature of technology. And IT people sometimes think too much of themselves, claiming they understand the business better than the marketing, operations or sales executives. Don't kid yourself. When was the last time you talked to a customer, and constructed a multi-year deal? Think of yourself as who you really are: at the core of business innovation, while at the same time making sure the business runs smoothly.

Thanks for listening. Rant over.

Change you can believe in

By: Rik Hoogenberg, chief executive officer

Be Informed’s case based approach in administrative processes, that are becoming more knowledge-intensive, allows organizations to boost efficiency, agility and customer intimacy. Organizations that do not postpone the inevitable and carefully plan an overhaul of their business processes with Be Informed profit most from these benefits. Yet many IT projects in large organizations fail. How to succeed in changing the way your organization works? It’s simpler than you might think.

First of all, working with Be Informed allows you to change the way you work. Considering that many administrative organizations have organized their work in overcomplicated systems, procedures and applications, this would seem a logical step, right? Then, make sure your transformation is done by people with a ‘can do’, solution oriented approach. This requires critical minds, looking for the simplest solutions. To give you an example; an administrative organization required an ID from citizens to perform certain actions. Many hours of discussions were spent on which type of ID would suffice: passport, drivers licence, or ID card. ID regulations as described in national law proved these discussions to be pointless; use what is needed, instead of what is currently implemented.

An important reason why many IT-projects in large organizations fail, is that traditionally all requirements, functionalities and so forth need to be exhaustively predescribed and, consequently, built. These projects take years, increasing the risk that the eventual outcome will be outdated upon implementation. Simply because too many changes will have taken place: in business, technology, society, et cetera. Also, many organizations fail to benefit from innovative technology by upholding the complicatedness of their systems and processes in new environments. With Be Informed, organizations don’t need to build systems or applications, we model our solutions based on a central business model, using a pragmatic approach that allows business users to see what they get, and reuse what is there already. Working with Be Informed means successful innovation by simplifying systems and processes.

We don’t ask the business users what they want, we interact with them on what they need to do their job. As car manufacturer Henry Ford once said: “If I had asked them what they wanted, they would have said faster horses”.

Within one or two months we present the first application showing the new way of working, discussing functional requirements with business users. This way, enthusiasm for new solutions is gained from the start of the project, which will prove helpful along the way in which an integrated approach, supported by a solution oriented project team consisting of experts from all corners of the organization will guarantee the organizations ability to embrace complexity for years to come.

What is fact-based, anyway?

By: Frank Buytendijk, chief marketing officer

After the series of articles on how Marx predicted the end of Google and Facebook (part 1, part 2, and part 3), I have just finished a new series of articles on the "analytical world". Again, this series has three parts.

In part 1, I argue that although "fact-based management" and "competing on analytics" both sound really cool, the concepts have some serious shortcomings. According to most philosophers, there is not much we can really know for sure. And analytics, as a model of the world, are removed even one step more from reality.

Part 2 discusses the practical consequences of this analysis, taking recent examples such as the outburst of the Eyjafjallajokull volcano in Iceland and the credit crunch. Both cases where people relied too much on analytical models. Part 2 also contains a critique on predictive analytics.

I do realize it is easy to criticize things, so if I do I should present an alternative view. This I have done in part 3, where I will introduce the concept of "messy analytics". We should pay more attention to factors that mess up the model, as they represent this nasty thing called reality. In fact, I propose to mess up models on purpose, just to see if they can handle what is often called "black swans". Messing up model so they become more precise may sound counterintuitive, but I am almost convinced you will agree with the logic I will present.

Another analyst report on Be Informed

By: Frank Buytendijk, chief marketing officer

Two weeks ago, Forrester published an analyst report on Be Informed. I have had a few questions already if there are other analyst reports as well. I think I have found the ultimate analyst report on Be Informed. Even more, it has been out for many years.

The analyst in question is Rene Descartes (1596-1650), a French philosopher, and father of what is now called "rationalism". He validated Be Informed's way of meta-modeling the business, although I must admit I am doubtful whether he was actually aware of this particular use of his philosophy.

Descartes tried to establish a fundamental set of principles of what is true. What cannot be doubted. Like any good philosopher, interested in what is true, he looked at phenomena and the world around him and asked if there were different explanations possible. Testingbe whether the existing explanations were correct. The safest way of asking these questions is to have no preconceptions at all, to doubt absolutely everything. The only way to establish truth is to reach a certain sound foundation, or in Be Informed terms an ontology, of which the rest can be derived.

Descartes eventually reached the conclusion that everything can be doubted, except doubt itself. You cannot doubt your doubt, because that would mean all would be certain, and that is what you are doubting. The thought of doubt itself already proves that doubt cannot be doubted. And because you cannot separate a person from his thoughts, therefore, cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I exist. In fact, you have to exist. If you think you are dead, the fact you are thinking you are dead, proves that you are alive, as thought implies life. Trying to doubt your doubt is a metathought (thinking about thinking).

Still with me? Let's apply this thinking to Be Informed. Basically Descartes said that the only thing that cannot be doubted is the metalevel. The rational and pure thought. Everything real in the world can be doubted. Every process. Every system. Every way of working. What cannot be doubted is your description of your business model, or as Peter Drucker called it, your theory of the business. In fact, it is the only thing you can rely on. Your understanding of the world around you is changing all the time, because of new insights, but it is the only thing you in the end are in control of. The rest is questionable.

This exactly is Be Informed's approach. By building a business process ontology, you shape your world. Any specific process, any specific transaction, any instance of reality is simply derived from it. It is not needed to predefine every single process or exception, the only thing you do is describe the rules that every process instance (or in Be Informed's terminology: case) needs to obey.

Any more questions on the validity of Be Informed's ontological approach, in comparison with the common “best practice” approach of defining concrete processes? I doubt it...

Banging on your door

By: Rik Hoogenberg, chief executive officer

Currently, the need for efficient operations, transparency and building trust are to be considered universal for any administrative organization. Our experiences in the US, the UK and the Netherlands show that both public and private organizations are faced with the same tough challenges: improve performance and earn customer loyalty using resources as efficient as possible.

After years of business process optimization, drastic improvements can only be reached by adopting new principles for these processes. Modern organizations are increasingly abandoning traditional process oriented dogma’s in favour of a case based approach. The essence of this revolutionary idea is based on two key elements: business rules and customer context. These two elements are all you need to reach a decision, and that is precisely what the business process should deliver. The case based approached brings together business rules and customer context in any given situation, rendering yesterdays complicated process schemes obsolete. The catch here, is that anything can be considered and treated as a business rule; even exceptions. This notion is crucial for achieving breakthrough results in modernizing administrative organizations.

Dynamic case management, as analyst firm Forrester coined it, facilitates a tailor made process for any customer case through a generic, standardized path of dynamically assembled activities. And so far, the best of the story is that dynamic case management has a proven track record. The integration of business rules and customer context has proven to save organizations up to 50% in costs of operations and reductions in total cost of ownership which amount to 70%. And recently, Forrester even published a vendor snapshot report on Be Informed which, of course, makes me very proud. Don’t miss out on this one, once the word gets out to any stakeholder, they will be banging on your door.

IT is dead, long live IT!

By: Rik Hoogenberg, chief executive officer

Government organizations worldwide are struggling with ICT. They say it’s complex, so costs soar and the software is not doing what it should do. The point is precisely that many government IT organizations are not necessarily complex, but complicated. That's because they piled all these systems and applications on top of each other over the years. Legacy systems and licenses have become a hydra-headed monster that keeps itself alive.

At a time when government organizations worldwide have to cut costs, it is no longer justifiable to invest in legacy systems. In recent years, IT has developed impressively. Model Driven Architecture principles and 'Goal Oriented Business Process Management' offer opportunities to administrative organizations to be more responsive and agile for a fraction of the costs they are accustomed to.

Would it be risky to adopt a new approach to business processes? On the contrary! Dynamic case management, as analyst firm Forrester calls the new approach, allows organizations to improve customer intimacy and cut costs at the same time. Only semantic solutions like Be Informed can do that trick.