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CM Journal Articles What Enterprise SCM is, and What Happens When it is Not
CM Journal Articles What Enterprise SCM is, and What Happens When it is Not
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In the world of corporate information technology the term "Enterprise" means different things to different people. But to me it means products, services, and solutions that are used throughout the entire company in a planned and consistent way to achieve some important strategic goal of the company. The accounting function within almost any company is a good example of this. The company has an important strategic goal to manage their money assets (as mandated by law if nothing else) according to widely accepted accounting principals. As such, everyone who participates in the corporate money game agrees to abide by the rules and regulations of the accounting department. While any one of the rules may not be their cup of tea or may be seen as not providing much value to them, the corporation realizes its larger corporate accounting goals only because individuals are willing to put aside their own wants and desires for the larger corporate good. This principal of “the greater good” underlies the long-standing policies of corporate governance, social engineering, and product regulation that we all take for granted today. And this principal should be at the center of our attention when we design and implement Enterprise SCM solutions. The benefits of SCM are many, but they are different depending who you talk to. A developer in the trenches trying to write code as fast as they can sees SCM as version control and build control but little else. A project manager sees SCM as release management and change control. A tester sees SCM as release identification and bug tracking. Production control sees SCM as release identification and dependency control. For the most part, each group within the software development process sees SCM as providing only those services and benefits that help them get their job done better and they couldn’t care less about the rest of it. This is natural human nature and explains why an SCM system designed, developed or controlled by any one of the interested parties tends to ignore the needs and interest of the other parties. This leads to incompatible silos of software asset information, each controlled by different groups with their own agendas. This leads to chaos where the real looser is the corporation as a whole. The Enterprise, on the other hand, has a vested interest in “the greater good”. For SCM that means having a controlled software development process that treats software as the valuable assets that it is. It means defining a common releasable work product and a repeatable way to move it through the development process. It means eliminating heroes from the process to remove any single point of failure. It means defining an enterprise SCM group responsible for owning the SCM solution and aligning it with stated corporate goals. It means establishing and following an SCM methodology based on sound fundamentals. It means realizing that SCM is a core business process encompassing people, process and technology and actively managing all three. While project or group based SCM may provide some benefits to those for whom it was implemented, SCM is one of those business processes like accounting where the largest benefits come only when implemented as an Enterprise solution. Scott Lehman is a contributing editor for CM Crossroads and CEO of SCM Labs, Inc. You can reach Scott by email at scott@scmlabs.com
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| Last Updated on Sunday, 05 August 2007 17:17 |
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