Business ecology in the digital ecosystem

For far too long, the function of the Information Technology group has been to track down wild, manual processes and tame them with automation. While the hunting may have been fun, and the whips and chains associated with taming interesting, most IT organizations now spend 70% to 90% of their time updating the whips and chains--maintenance is the primary function of IT these days. Why is it then that ideas like “Business Technology” and “Business Process Management” are now popping up from the management side? Simple: because automation is only one part of the process optimization picture. The CIO and the IT organization know more about the business processes of the entire enterprise than anyone else, but they will be extinct in the near future if they don´t add new optimization tools to their hunting arsenal. Business ecology is about recognizing, precisely defining, capturing, categorizing, reusing and optimizing processes, and making the IT organization focus on information rather than automation. Digital ecosystems are about building open, distributed, loosely-coupled systems of processes, some digital and some human. If we can bring together these ideals, we can build more agile organizations, more flexible systems and more adaptable societies.