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Devil's Advocate: Why business needs IT
It's not just to keep systems up and running...

By Martin Brampton

Published: Tuesday 10 August 2004

Breaking down business processes into something a computer can understand and replicate is no easy task. And it's one that, says Martin Brampton, is often best undertaken by experienced IT staff.

A recurring theme in software is providing the business with what it wants. It sounds reasonable enough. But it raises the question of who knows what the business wants - and that is not always easy to answer.

Sometimes the answer is simple enough. Businesses want their engineers to be able to perform calculations so that they can figure out how to make things work, or design bridges that do not sway around when people walk across them. Long ago, it was found that a tool such as Fortran could be used successfully by engineers.

COBOL was supposed to do the same for accountants, but was much less successful in achieving its goal. By and large, commercial programming became a separate profession. Some accountants became programmers, but most preferred to stay with accounts. The difference has to do with the currently popular topic of business processes.

Science and its practical application through engineering create problems that are typically couched in mathematical terms. Bridges are defined in terms of their dimensions and the loads they are to bear. Solving mathematical problems, even quite difficult ones, is something for which computation is ideally suited.

When it comes to business processes, matters are different. While it might seem that processes must involve rules, the kind of 'rule following' that happens in most walks of life is not the same as the mechanical 'rule following' of the computer.

Take a very simple example. To combat money laundering, banks must know who their customers are. Simple enough, but when it has been translated into a rigid rule, it can become quite unreasonable. For example, my elderly father has no plans to travel, so has no passport. He regards himself as too old to drive safely, so has no driving licence. Without these documents, major banks refuse to accept that he is who he says he is.

It was the FSA that set the original rule about banks knowing their customers. So did the FSA get what it wanted with the mechanical stance adopted by major banks? It says not. For that matter, did the senior executives of the bank want to see this outcome, when the FSA has instructed banks that they should exercise discretion in awkward cases?

Another example of the complexity of business rules is the area of financial advice. When expert systems were all the rage, a number of firms looked at automating financial advice. After all, it must be based on rules. But when the idea was examined closely, everybody got cold feet. Nobody had sufficient confidence in their ability to capture enough of the rules to be sure of avoiding heavy liabilities for wrong advice.

It should now be obvious, if it was not already, that the knowledge of how business processes operate is frequently distributed among a number of people and the processes operate in ways that are rarely well understood. It is exactly this situation that skilled analysts have studied in order to create computer systems to support businesses. Often, analysts have become the people who have the most complete picture of how a process works, combining management's understanding of overall direction with awareness of actions on the ground.

Skill is needed to grasp the business problem and skill is needed to create a mechanical solution that will run on a computer. These are skills that are not easily captured in simple inventories of IT experience. They are not frequently found in business managers, nor are they easy to outsource to some distant location.

So, while it is an excellent idea to provide computer support directly to management where possible, many problems need to be closely studied by talented and experienced IT people. That is not job protection; it is simply the best defence against adopting rules that turn out, in practice, to be silly.