Page 112 - Performance Leadership

Chapter 7 Business Interfaces Drive Collaboration • 101

the same paradigm of ownership of targets, will always lead to a situa-
tion where the only thing that counts is what you achieve yourself. But
what about what you enable for others? Doesn’t that add to business
performance as well? Or, sometimes even more. The answer is not in
how the target ownership is translated in an organizational structure,
but the structure of target ownership itself. We need an alternative.

Business Interfaces

There is an alternative approach. As measurement drives behavior, we
can design specific metrics designed to drive optimization and collab-
oration. If we apply the idea of horizontal alignment, we should not
create only metrics and targets that describe the performance of the
various business domains, but also metrics that measure the effective-
ness of business interfaces.
A business interface is the point where one business domain’s activ-
ities and processes interact, bordering with activities and processes in
another business domain. A business interface is where work gets
handed over from one activity to another, from one process to another,
from one department to another, or even from one organization to
another. It is where managers need to collaborate with each other as
peers and where, in practice, most of the efficiency and effectiveness
of work is lost.
Most of the quality problems in a process are caused by a handover.
If this is an administrative process, there may be different interpreta-
tions of the information that is part of the document or transaction
that is handed over. Or due to unintegrated processes and/or systems,
data needs to be reentered into a different system, which is an impor-
tant cause of data quality issues. It also leads to rework, meaning pro-
cessing the transaction or the document again until it is right. That is
only the case if the mistake is detected. Quality problems cost time,
as they require fixing. But the handover of the activity itself costs time
as well: passing on the document or transaction to the next step and
receiving it. And that doesn’t even include the waiting time between
two activities, which delays the overall process. Loss of time and qual-
ity introduce additional cost. If there is rework, there is cost of labor.
The later in the process that the issue is detected and fixed, the more