It's a syndrome whereby executives, considering any
upgrade, spend months and months examining every aspect, before they
take any action.
By Ross O. Storey
02 Sep 2008
There is an old children’s joke which asks ‘How do you eat an elephant’. The answer is ‘one bite at a time’ (pause for laughter). This corny gem crossed my mind at an MIS Asia magazine roundtable, sponsored by business integration and process management software firm TIBCO, that I recently moderated in Singapore. The title of the discussion was ‘Achieving Profitable Growth in Insurance’ which was a fascinating subject in itself, but what caught my imagination was a point raised during our conversation.
The issue being discussed was complexity, particularly the increasingly intricacy of IT systems today. TIBCO’s Chief Global Architect, Nick Lincoln, who had flown halfway across the planet from London just the day before, sparked my imagination with his sound advice on where to start with Business Process Management (BPM). I love TIBCO’s branding slogan, which is ‘The Power Of Now’, which echoes in my mind with how I believe people should live their lives, but that’s another story.
Anyway, a concern around the table was that many IT systems today are so integrated, complex and enmeshed, it is difficult to know where to start when upgrading legacy infrastructure, in this specific case, when considering how to apply BPM and SOA. Nick’s response was enlightening. He said the key was to ‘pick a winner’ where you know you will likely achieve some impressive results, within a reasonably short time frame. Focus on this one element, get it right, quantify your success, package your argument and you are well placed to pitch your success story to the board.
Someone wise once said that ‘Success has a thousand fathers, while failure is an orphan’. By outlining your small success, you are much more likely to entice the board to proceed with a broader scale revamp of your bigger system. And, Nick told our group of esteemed insurance IT executives, the timeframe for any BPM project to deliver results should be between three to six months, or otherwise it was taking too long.
This TIBCO evangelist also coined another term which stuck in my head – ‘analysis paralysis’. He said this was the syndrome whereby executives, considering any upgrade, spend months and months examining every aspect, before they take any action. They fail to realize the opportunity cost of such intense self assessment, perhaps appropriately called ‘navel gazing’. They could have more valuably used this time to apply action to one targeted system, and potentially could have realized the positive results long before ‘analysis paralysis’ had set in. Why am I suddenly thinking about the famous Nike marketing slogan ‘Just do it?’.
Ross O. Storey, currently the Managing Editor of Fairfax Business Media Asia, is responsible for the editorial content and production of MIS Asia, CIO Asia, Computerworld Singapore and Computerworld Malaysia magazines.
