Consciously competent

In an animated ASL BiSL Foundation session on 22 Feb we discussed the competences that are needed for business information management (BIM) activities (based on BiSL). Some of my conclusions:

• The question "which process is most important?" was difficult to answer.
• Most processes are connected in a chain so all processes should have the same degree of maturity. Therefore if one particular processes is lagging behind, that is the process that deserves the most attention.
• If you look at processes fro a business perspective and if operational business continuity is your highest priority, then the 'use management' processes are very important, and the 'review and testing' process because that prevents the deployment of low quality functionality into production.
• On the other hand, if the organization needs agility to survive and is prepared to take some operational risks, then other processes will be more important.
• In other words, "it depends".

You could sum it up by saying that competences depend to a degree on the activities and processes but also on the characteristics of:

1. The business (e.g. stable/dynamic, simple/complex)
2. The business goals (e.g. costs cutting or growth)
3. The user organisation (e.g. maturity, culture, size, politics)
4. The information systems (in the broadest sense)
5. The IT organisation
6. The relationship between business and IT
7. The BIM organisation
8. The content of the work (e.g. small changes or large projects)

In other words, when deciding on the most important competences for a job profile, by all means start with the generic competences such as communication, analysis, judgement, accuracy, organizational awareness, structured way of working, but also take a good look at the other eight factors.