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Strategic Aspects 53

The sustainability of an IT system can be measured via
the materialization of its IS assets, following the order
defined by the ACMS.

When a company has a bank of processes, which have
come from a BPM approach, this will have no value if at the
same time, there is no bank of business rules.

This statement can destabilize many managers convinced
of the benefits of taking only a BPM approach. Such
managers only look at it from the point of view of a quality
that is meant to improve the IT system by normalizing,
documenting and automating company processes. In reality,
they are only maintaining non quality by creating an
additional layer, and leaving the situation unchanged. IT
still suffers as the BPM task lists continue to use business
rules and reference/master data scattered throughout the IT
system, poorly documented, of poor quality and insufficiently
transparent for business.

Sustainable IT Architecture requires that control
management of IT extends to control management of the
Information System, with an analytical accounting that is
based on ACMS, i.e. a bank of reference/master data,
business rules and processes. This accounting must evaluate
these stocks of data from a quantitative, qualitative and
financial point of view. This is achievable, and an entire book
should be dedicated to it. Companies begin to perceive the
strategic interest of such a viewpoint in favor of the
transformation of IS and IT systems. There are multiple
advantages to analytical accounting and it helps IS
transformation.

Even though, at first, the intangible asset stocks are low,
a comparison of these stocks at different points in time
allows us to judge whether or not the transformation is
headed in the right direction. These objectives can be fixed
by managers, forcing businesses and IT to collaborate, on