Human beings will be at the heart of any business IT project. They will be the working capital that ensures it is commissioned and at the end that it is used for the purpose for which it was commissioned. They will bring their own judgments, skills and failings to the project and could ultimately bring it down.

There is no way of controlling human influence in a comprehensive manner. What managers tend to do is to attempt influence employee action using the various management incentives and sanctions available to them. However this does not always work and could ultimately push the employees even further away from their managers. The basic tenets of good management practice can still apply here. Things such as supervision and reward schemes can counter some of the more negative reactions to new technology.

Where the project has been outsourced, the personnel issues are compounded by the fact the in-house managers really have very limited control on external staff. They will have entered binding contracts with their parent organizations and will really be free to do as they please. They also bring with them their own way of working that may not fit in with the company philosophy. Furthermore they do not bear direct responsibility for things when they go wrong and they have to use faulty technology. This means that they have even less incentive to get it right the first time.

This leads us on to the issue of accountability. This is particularly the case where there is a large organization with different people working on different projects all feeding into one big IT group. This can lead people to view themselves as separate parts of an entity leading to isolation and inconsistencies in practice. Even where problems are being resolved there is no one person who coordinates strategy. Any attempts to get some type of responsibility descend into a blame game. People start going off sick with stress and avoiding the senior managers.

However the biggest cause of failure has to be planning. Many failing organizations have a conceptual idea of what they would like out of their IT project but they will not have detailed plans as to how they are going to achieve the objectives. Commissioning will often be based on the personal whims of a particular manager rather than being an overall long term business strategy. Issues will be simplified with the attitude that they can deal with whatever problems arise on an adhoc basis. Therefore without proper planning the project is almost certainly doomed to fail.

If you have a particularly small business which employs less than 10 people and is primarily based locally, then chances are that you know a lot about your business or if not, just enough to make sure that it doesn’t go under. However if you are running a larger show, you may never be able to understand what goes on in your company and surely that is a recipe for disaster.

It is surprising what can be discovered about your business when you explore the rich world of business process discovery. A tool of the business intelligence model, this process enables you to map the activities of your business and you may even be able to make some improvements. In this article we will highlight some of the basic processes and outcomes involved in the business discovery process (BPD). It is possible to automate the whole BPD process so that seasonal or process variations can quite easily be identified and responsive action implemented with the minimum of fuss.

BPD more often than not is primarily based on the examination of existing data/information gleaned through structured interviews with frontline staff followed by evidence-based verification via management information systems. The latter aspect can be automated depending on the resources available. At this point it is crucial to account for human subjectivity when responding to structured or even unstructured interviews as well as the frailties of memory and bias. Verification via an independent information system will provide an estimate of the reliability of the information that is being gathered.

One school of thought is that the ultimate aim of BPD is to standardize all processes, thereby eliminating the inconsistencies of human influence. Those that believe in this approach argue that computerized processed are less likely to be subject to inaccuracy and what some call noise. Whereas standardization is generally a peripatetic business objective not least because it enables proper performance management, it is also worth noting that without human influence in operations most businesses lose customer service.

The two business resources are complementary particularly when the ultimate goal is good business intelligence. It also adds to other information resources by providing data that is well sourced and subject to referrals as well as revisits of the original data sources.

What happens then when you effectively know about your company or organization? The logical step is to move on to embedding the reports from the BPD into the business intelligence model. A fringe benefit of this is that wastage and duplication is quite easily picked up and management action would presumably follow. It also facilitates the construction of business plans and bids for funding or contracts given the fact that it is actually a detailed description of what the organization actually does. So, challenge yourself and understand your business. You never know you might like it.