It's All About Process

As long ago as 1931, the distinguished American economist, William Edwards Deming said that "If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing!"

In IT today it is still difficult to describe how a business requirement ends up as part of a functioning business service. This is almost never written down as a single contiguous process. At best we seek to articulate this across several different process methodologies, at worst we recognize no process methodology at all and re-invent the wheel with each new business development.

In IT it is essential that we should know what we are doing. It is equally essential that we should know, record and understand what we have done and how we did it. This is the essence of balanced control with good governance and to achieve this we need to ensure that we follow a defined, consistent and repeatable process.

Process is there to help people and it has some very important attributes that are essential to the delivery of quality IT Services.

A most significant attribute of good process is that it is measurable against industry accepted criteria or standards. When a process methodology refers to certification at a given level, or to compliance with an industry standard then this is usually a result of independent audit and assessment.