Tinkering with the tenets

While I’m still receiving feedback on a draft of my latest book-in-progress (Are you digitally done?), I’m tinkering around with its backbone: a value stream (probably the best term) that identifies the activities involved in providing an organization with digitized information. The trouble with this kind of tinkering is that you then have to rejig the book to accomodate the changes. It took me 100 hours to write the 100-page draft, and I reckon the Pareto principle is going to prove true.

The tinkering focused on a better high-level description of service provision (design, arrangement, and delivery) and more attention for what happens on the service recipient side of the equation (elicitation and analysis, and preparation and validation - all more assocated with business analysis than with core IT disciplines). You can see the first version in a previous LinkedIn article Are you digitally done?

I like service arrangement as the name for getting all of the people and things necessary for service delivery in place. Not rigidly organized, but available to respond on-the-spot to the individual, dynamic, and subjective nature of service.

I have resisted the tempation to include (software/digital) product management but you can imagine it in stage 1 as define and part of development, in addition to the decision-making about the product. I have ignored decision-making in general, and have focused on the substantive work involved. So I also haven't included service agreement as an activity. Neither does it address relationships, other than the high-level distiction between provider and recipient. As with all design choices, I dare say I'll regret them at a later date and will "have to" write another book.

The model depicts ten high-level domains of activities needed for organizations to benefit from digitized information in the context of their business processes. The activity domains are grouped into five steps within three stages. Each stage can be seen from two perspectives: recipient and provider. The recipient sees the activities in terms of defining what is needed, implementing the solution, and benefitting from the digitized information that it processes and provides. The provider sees the activities in terms of developing the solution based on the requirements, deploying in into the production environment, and delivering the service.

Stage 1: Define and develop

Step 1: Define the need and requirements

• Work demands improved information, which could plausibly be provided by an IT solution
• Elicitation and analysis of what information is needed for the business processes, resulting in requirements for the next stages.

Step 2: Develop the IT solution

• Service design: designing IT services and establishing agreements
• Application development: converting specified requirements into functional software
• Infrastructure engineering: translating infrastructure requirements into tangible components

Stage 2: Implement and deploy

Step 3: Prepare for deployment, operations, and use

• Preparation and validation, where the user organization prepares itself for the introduction of the new or modified IT solution, and where the IT solution is validated, including the readiness of the user organization
• Service arrangement: prepare for IT service delivery by making sure that the necessary service components are in place

Step 4: Deploy the IT system components

• Deployment: moving application and infrastructure increments into a live environment

Stage 3: Deliver and benefit

Step 5: Deliver the IT solution and benefit from it

• IT operations: ensuring that IT systems are usable
• Service delivery: providing accessible and supported IT systems for end-users
• Work and use, in which IT systems are used to process and provide digitized information that, in turn, is used to streamline processes or to take better decisions

In addition to depicting the activities in domains, steps, and stages, the model also shows the artifacts that are involved in providing the digitized information:

• Business processes in which information is used
• Information that is used in the business processes and processed and provided by IT systems
• IT services that provide access to the underlying IT systems, and provide support where needed
• IT systems comprising- Applications, also known as software products, and including data structures- Infrastructure, also known as platforms, for compute, networking, and data storage