According to the Theory of Else, IT’s job is done when the software runs. It’s up to others in the business to make sure useful business results follow.

As last week’s column explained, the Theory of Else is a good way to make sure IT gets the blame when projects fail to deliver their expected value. The alternative, the Theory of Everything Else, is what will see you through to success: IT has to take on whatever tasks nobody else in the company is willing to do — not because it’s IT’s responsibility, not because it’s “the right thing to do,” but for the simple and unavoidable reason that your other alternatives are worse.

One of the most frequent items in the everything else list is the redesign of one or more business processes. And while it might seem counterintuitive, IT is a logical home for the discipline of business process redesign, for two very different reasons.

The first is that since IT is involved in every business change — something that isn’t true for any individual business division — placing the discipline inside IT means its practitioners will have the opportunity to practice their craft more than once, letting them deepen and perfect their skills (the same, by the way, is true of project management).

That’s the organizational logic. There’s also the knowledge of the process design discipline that already exists inside IT. No, I’m not talking about your business analysts, although some of them might have built some abilities along these lines. It’s your network engineers who really understand the subject, because everything you ever needed to know about business process design is already built into TCP/IP.

What TCP/IP does is break a message into chunks, send them into an intrinsically unreliable network built out of a collection of store-and-forward queues, to a defined destination where they’re reassembled into the original message. Ignore the break-a-message-into-chunks bit and what’s left?

A pretty good representation of most business processes, that’s what. Business processes consist of work queues. A piece of work is pushed onto a queue where it waits its turn. When its turn arrives, the queue manager does whatever is required, then forwards its completed to the next queue, where it’s worked on in its turn.

That isn’t very different from the routers that make up a TCP/IP network, although the routers don’t do much to each packet other than check it for errors and then either forward or discard it.

Any given link or router can lose a packet, which is to say, the network is intrinsically unreliable. That’s the IP part. The responsibility of the TCP part is to detect when that happens and correct the problem.

In a work process, work can get lost moving from queue to queue, too. A well-designed business process includes error checks to make sure work doesn’t get lost, assuming that from time to time something will go wrong along the way. Same thing.

Network engineers understand they have to deal with two different measures of speed: Latency and bandwidth, which is to say the end-to-end transmission delay for a single packet, and the total amount of information the network can handle in a given period of time.

Business process designers need to consider both cycle time and throughput — same ideas, different words.

To improve network latency and end-to-end bandwidth, network engineers find and speed up bottlenecks. Speeding up a part of the network that isn’t a bottleneck achieves nothing — installing faster routers is pointless if the ones you have already outpace the speed of the connection that links them. Business process designers also need to look for process bottlenecks instead of just speeding up whatever process step is most easily accelerated.

Network engineers are accustomed to the concept of a management console — a display that lets them know, at a glance, the health of the network. Manageability is built into the design of every router to make network management possible.

How many business process designers have the same understanding? Yes, it’s easier to manage a router than an employee. It still isn’t all that hard to build manageability into the queues that make up a business process, and construct a dashboard so the process manager can tell, at a glance, the health of the process.

Can a network engineer really succeed as a business process engineer?

Beats me. It sure would be fun to facilitate the design sessions, though, don’t you think?