Collaborative Workbench

Most CEOs and board members accept that investing in business technology is necessary and beneficial—the evidence is in their budgets. Most importantly, executives need evidence that business technology investments have a positive relationship to their firm’s performance. They have had difficulty finding reliable evidence that shows how business technology investments return genuine value. To find their way through this fog, executives need a collaborative decision support system along with a prescriptive management framework – a Business Technology Workbench. This workbench must describe the linkage between strategy, planning, governance, business models, technology architectures, measurement metrics, asset utilization, financials – and the decisions and executives that make them.

BTM Works 360™ drives the value of business technology investments by allowing decision-makers to Sense and Respond to their environment by establishing a cross-functional, cross-disciplinary analytical environment through a process-centric collaborative decision-making platform. BTM Corporation has released several versions of this platform since 1999 and first published the concepts of collaborative decision-making for BTM in the book The Alignment Effect (Faisal Hoque, Financial Times Prentice Hall) in 2002.

The concept of collaborative decision-making is frequently employed as a catchall that includes everything from face-to-face communication to knowledge management to coordinating partnerships. The idea of collaborative decision-making for BTM is a descendent of the broader concept of a virtual workspace, where disparate teams can come together to access a common work environment, post and share supporting information, and communicate to solve problems.

Collaborative decision-making problems can be addressed through structured discourse and reciprocity among the users involved. Consensus is achieved through the process of collaboratively considering alternative understandings of the problem, competing interests, priorities and constraints. The role of BTM Works 360 is to provide the decision support environment of choice for executives by bringing together information dashboards, enterprise models, a wide range of investment management capabilities, performance score-cards, and knowledge management in a system that leverages existing desktop applications.

Structured and rational decision-making is an important part of all science-based professions, where specialists apply their knowledge in a given area to make informed decisions. BTM Works 360 is the workbench that supports executives, BTM knowledge workers and managers with the information, defined management processes, analytics and collaboration tools that bring business and technology together to create new levels of value for their organizations.