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Overview

About

Science of Convergence

Research Paper: BTM Business Agility Index

2009 Baseline/BTM 500

Convergence Index II

Contours of Convergence Research Series

Open Access to the
BTM Exchange

Research Agenda

The BTM Institute's research agenda is an unprecedented, multi-year program involving industry practitioners and academics around the world to address the long-standing need to manage business and technology together. Our goal is to advance the theory of Business Technology Management (BTM) and identify the best practices that translate the theory into action. The research thus becomes a bridge between management study and management practice in such areas as Sustained Innovation, Agile Enterprise, Risk Mitigation, Governance and Organizational Design, Extended Enterprise, and others.

In early 2002, BTM Corporation unveiled the BTM Framework™. In 2004, using the BTM Framework as its foundation, we published the definition of a management standard based on the core processes of business technology decision-making and began to expand our research agenda. The BTM Standard provides a structured approach to decision-making that allows enterprises to align, synchronize and even converge business and technology management, thus ensuring better execution, risk control and profitability. Through primary research, focused around three tracks – Emerging Models, Key Capabilities, and Operational Excellence, the BTM Institute collaborates with leading practitioners and researchers to drive management best practices forward.

To access the full collection of research papers published by the BTM Institute, visit the BTM Exchange.

Media Buzz

BusinessWeek - Next: Innovation Tools & Trends

Mixing Biz with Tech: Profitable Management Mash-Ups

“A new report that recently crossed my desk from the BTM Institute, a four-year-old non-profit think tank, is a thought-provoking look at how many kinds of companies can move beyond simply being innovative and toward becoming more agile, resilient, and profitable by creating a management mash-up of their business and technology teams.”

- Reena Jana, BusinessWeek Innovation Editor
July 05, 2007

Forbes.com - Management

Technology Convergence Adds Value, Data Show

“Want to know more about why companies such as UPS, Wal-Mart and Starwood consistently best their competition?

The BTM Institute, a nonprofit research think tank, has released a research report showing that companies that converge business and technology reap great financial benefit when compared with those who don't.”

- Matthew Kirdahy
July 07, 2007

CIO Magazine - Management

Study Provides Evidence That Technology Execution Leads to Business Performance

“The fundamental problem when businesspeople use trendy phrases like agility, innovation, resilience and adaptability is that their meaning is not clear. Now the BTM Institute, a nonprofit think tank established to study how best to manage business and technology, has come up with a definition: consistent execution, with constant growth that’s tied to financial performance.”

- Thomas Wailgum
July 25, 2007

CIO Insight Magazine

More Evidence Alignment Pays

“The Business Technology Management Institute, a research think tank organized by Faisal Hoque, chairman and CEO of BTM Corporation, and boasting several top IT academics like James Cash, V. Sambamurthy and Robert Zmud, has released a study on the benefits of alignment and what the authors call "convergence," an even higher level of business-IT cooperation and coordination than mere alignment.”

-Allan Alter
July 19, 2007

Definitions

Converging Business and Technology Management

Convergence of business and technology management creates sustained innovation and agile enterprises; mitigate risk and reduce redundancy; enable consistent execution and extended enterprises; and more. Explore key management capabilities such as Governance, Strategic Technology Investments, Strategy and Planning, and Strategic Enterprise Architecture. Organizations must understand and assess management maturity by analyzing their organization, process, information, and technology. This closes the gap between vision and reality by applying Maturity models, case studies, and industry best practices.

Agile Enterprise

By becoming agile, an organization can more quickly take advantage of emerging opportunities in the marketplace. Agile Enterprise examines how you can create flexible organizational designs and behaviors, appropriately inclusive standards for enterprise architecture, and an overall ability to analyze and balance investments among your technology portfolios. It explores the required business and technology architectures needed to be agile.

Consistent Execution and Measurement

To maximize return on investments while minimizing the risk of technology decisions, your organization will learn how to ensure that initiatives originate from an overall business strategy. Consistent Execution and Measurement demonstrates how organizations can establish processes and structures to consistently measure improvements in business capabilities, effectively elevating business and technology to a state of convergence.

Extended Enterprise

Extended Enterprise explores the evolving global knowledge economy and how your organization must adapt to it, by assembling a set of strategic partners in a way that best leverages their distinctive competencies, and positioning yourselves to take advantage of a globally distributed pool of technology and knowledge resources. Your organization will benefit from a greater ability to focus resources and attention on core business initiatives and improve your business strategy development process.

Governance and Organizational Design

In order for a company to establish decision-making bodies, define their scope and responsibilities, and create a strategy-centric decision process, a systemic perspective and oversight of decision-making activities concerning the value and risks of business technology is required. Governance and Organizational Design examines how decision-making processes are developed, managed, communicated and deployed quickly.

Redundancy Reduction

Examine the ways an organization can reduce cost and complexity by creating management processes that prescribe the steps to organize their initiatives and assets, identify and leverage synergies, and conduct effective consolidation and standardization. Among the results: a more efficient technology organization, and increased visibility into technology initiatives and infrastructure.

Risk Mitigation

Risk Mitigation demonstrates how an organization can take a more informed approach to developing strategic risk postures by considering and expressing risks in terms of potential business impacts, while enabling executive involvement across the entire enterprise to ensure the execution of broad risk mitigation strategies. Once achieved, the goal of bringing technology risk postures into better alignment with overall corporate objectives and culture is a key takeaway for all participants.

Shared Services

As companies have become increasingly more complex but at the same time, more integrated, the need for more cross collaboration and leveraging has become increasingly significant. Developing the right service organization, delivery model and offerings are a key determinant for success. By establishing the specific capabilities required to design, implement and optimize a Shared Services Organization, companies will overcome the many people, process, and technology challenges and achieve competitive advantage in today's global economy.

Strategic Enterprise Architecture

Your organization will improve its ability to sense and respond quickly by defining a robust description of business strategy and the technology that supports it, as well as bringing order to your islands of information. This improved visibility into technology resources mapped to specific business capabilities will drive innovative technology solutions. As a result, you will learn to quickly and effectively respond to changes in business strategy with appropriate and reliable technology solutions.

Strategic Technology Investments

To maintain competitive advantage, your company will learn to infuse business strategy into the planning and budgeting process by selecting investment levels and strategically balancing the allocation of budget dollars while gathering, categorizing, analyzing, and monitoring information on corporate assets and activity. This area aims to help organizations gain an increased ability to identify any non-strategic spending, as well as the ability to migrate their technology investments toward competitive differentiators.

Sustained Innovation

At a time when consumers demand better, faster and higher value products and services, organizations must constantly renew and create innovation to stay competitive. The objective of Sustained Innovation is to prove that any organization can be configured to make innovation repeatable. It identifies available resources, provides for organizational structures, information, and processes, and describes the automation necessary to coordinate these activities.