8. What do all of these complexities have to do with re-engineering IT processes?

Stakeholders in multi-national organizations need to communicate one with another to coordinate changes and make comments to questions. Communication is the main source for the stakeholders to collaborate in today’s modern organization. If the communication is unclear because of the complexities explained, then communication quality would decrease. And because IT-driven processes manage communication today to the most part, IT either makes or breaks the communication quality between people.

If IT is an enhancer of communication, it does little benefit to relationship building and everything communicated within the IT processes is magnified as well. The poor communication gets to its destination faster and so does the great one. If emails are of lesser value because people do not read their correspondence as frequently as they would actually listen to a phone conversation, then that would mean that a great letter written by the president is understood less or even miss-communicated. And the poorly written correspondence is also little understood.

A miss-communication of a poorly written letter may not be as bad as a miss-understood high-quality letter.  But that put in question, it is suggested that IT might speed up and organize communication processes when traveling from one end to its destination. Emails can be organized as answered, unanswered, flagged for a follow up correspondence, or pointed to a task-assignment. And because multiple stakeholders are involved on a multi-national organizational level, the time differences from one location to another cause delays. Email chains can be organized keeping all pertinent email-chain information together all the way from its origin to all questions answered.

But the more people contribute multiple times and carbon-copying in all other stakeholders, the more complex the process of change management gets. More stakeholders are easier joining the team of complex email chain forwarding. It is literally as easy as a push of a button and someone else is copied in with the request to respond to issues “below”, simply with a “FYI” on to the top.

And of course IT is involved. It is not necessarily that IT is at fault of the complexities. But in today’s business organization email correspondence is part of the daily business activities. While one correspondence motion appears to move forward in greater speed and swifter, it also can lead to delays that would not arise if the phone could be picked up. But having to communicate on a global scale, waiting for an email correspondence answer back in 2 to 3 days is still better than having to use the ancient postal way via air mail.