Todd Biske: Outside the Box

I’m sitting here watching the New York Giants and the Indianapolis Colts and I thought of Fantasy Football. I’ve never had a fantasy football team, but I do understand how it works. It’s part simulation and part reality. The simulation part is your role. You’re the GM of the team and you draft your players, make trades, etc. The reality part of it is that how well your team does is based on how the players you drafted actually perform in their NFL games that week.

So, I starting thinking about this, and wondering if there are any parallels that could be applied to IT. Sure enough, there are. First off, in the BPM world, a common feature that many vendors are working toward is the ability to run process simulations. Just as with Fantasy Football, these simulations need to take in actual production statistics to give an accurate portrayal. Sounds great, right? What’s missing, however, is the statistics. Football, and virtually every other professional sport, with baseball being the king, has statistics on just about anything interesting to any individual, from the guy who tivo’s every single game to watch them the rest of the week, to the person who doesn’t know the difference between a touchdown and a touchback.

What would our IT systems be like if we had the same level of statistics on them? Besides making a new career for the IT statistician, I think we’d have a far greater understanding of how IT makes the business successful (or unsuccessful).