Our application register is genuinely good. Two hundred and forty entries, each with a business owner, a technical owner, a criticality rating and a review date, and the owners are real people who answer when contacted. It took two years to build and I have defended it in front of auditors more than once.
It was no use whatsoever the week an order took eleven days to reach a customer.
The order had passed through three systems. Capture, credit checking, and dispatch. Each behaved exactly as designed and each owner could demonstrate it. Capture accepted the order and marked it pending credit. Credit checking held it, correctly, because the customer's limit had been reduced by a rule change that department had made for sound reasons. Dispatch never saw it, because dispatch only reads approved orders and nobody had specified what should happen to one that sits unapproved for more than a day. There was no defect. There was no owner of the space between the three, and so the escalation came to IT, because we were the only function that could see all three at once.
That happens constantly and I no longer think it is a technology problem. We had mapped the estate as a set of applications, which is how IT sees the world, and the business runs as a set of end to end processes that cut across them. Anything falling between two systems therefore fell between two departments, and the arbiter of business rules disputes became the department with the diagram.
We now name an owner for each of the twelve end to end processes that matter, and they are business people with the authority to settle a disagreement between two departments. Changes to a rule that another step depends on need that person's agreement, not just the application owner's. And we report process measures, orders from capture to dispatch, exceptions that stall for more than a day, next to the availability numbers that used to stand alone.
It is imperfect. Two of the owners are nominal and the meetings are dull. It is still the single change that most reduced the number of arguments arriving at my desk with no rightful home.
– Serguey Shinder
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