Business is the land of the panacea, and IT is its capital. Sensible people … people who would never ask, “What do you think — should I take tetracycline, Vitamin D, or have surgery?” before undergoing the minor inconvenience of a medical diagnosis to determine (a) if they are ill; and (b) if so, with what … ask whether they should undertake CMM, ITIL or COBiT without first having any idea of what is and isn’t working well.

Let’s dispose of something right now: Ignore CMM (the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model).

That, more or less, is the advice given by Capers Jones, one of CMM’s strongest advocates.

CMM is waterfall application development methodology taken off a cliff. (Come to think of it, waterfalls always go off a cliff, by definition. Oh, never mind.) Had everyone followed CMM, the World Wide Web would never have happened. By the time the first few thousand websites had been deployed … with maybe one tenth the content and functionality of the ones that actually happened … everyone would have lost interest.

According to Capers Jones, CMM is essential for just about any run-of-the-mill IT shop that employs more than 1,000 developers and undertakes 10,000+ function point projects. He has solid evidence that this is the case.

So if you lead more than a thousand developers, it’s just barely possible that you really do need CMM. Probably not, though, because even if you do, you rarely have a reason to charter a 10,000+ function point development project, for two reasons.

The first: You’re almost always better off chunking your projects down into a succession of small projects instead. Risk goes down, success is more reliable, and business value happens faster. And, (he said, never passing up an opportunity to plug his books and seminars) you can employ the Bare Bones methodology instead of something bulkier.

The second: Most business IT groups spend the majority of their applications effort integrating, configuring, maintaining and upgrading commercial software packages rather than developing from scratch. The square peg of development methodologies has limited relevance when it comes to the round hole of integration and configuration, despite decades of attempts to pound one into the other.

But I digress.

Four major factors determine the success of any IT organization: Business alignment, process maturity, technical architecture, and human performance.

Which of the four is most important? Human performance, without a doubt. As mentioned here in recent columns, the proof is easy, and geometrical in its rigor: Great employees routinely overcome bad or non-existent process, ineffective leadership and governance, and messy technical architecture. Bad employees just as routinely cause even the best process designs to fail while turning elegant architecture into a tangle of spaghetti, and efficient governance into meaningless committee meetings as projects become eternal.

Bad employees don’t routinely fail in the face of excellent leadership for the simple reason that excellent leaders hire bad employees less often, and when they do either coach them to success, reassign them to more suitable roles, or terminate them. Strong leaders don’t tolerate weak employees.

That doesn’t stop us (us being IT Catalysts, my consulting company) from advising clients on how to make their processes more effective. Far from it. One of the questions we often ask struggling managers is how (but really whether) they know if the processes they’re responsible for are healthy.

Am I speaking out of both sides of my mouth?

Not at all. Here’s the distinction: Effective leaders place their emphasis on people. Effective managers insist on delivery, and recognize the importance of process in achieving that end.

If you are responsible for a business function you have to be effective at both leadership and management, and they aren’t independent topics.

Effective management depends on effective leadership for all the reasons enumerated here over the past few weeks and summarized above: Effective leadership puts motivated employees with the right skills, attitude and focus in the right roles, allowing processes to be effective.

Effective leadership is equally dependent on effective management, although the reason is more subtle: Because effective managers know how to monitor and manage processes, they can know what’s going on without having to micromanage.

One other reason for the dependency: If you are in charge of a business function, you have to know how to manage first, because results … process outputs … are what you’re paid for.

Fail to deliver them and your own manager might insist you spend less time leading and more time closely supervising the work.

Process has dominated the consulting world, at least since Michael Hammer and James Champy published Reengineering the Corporation in 1994.

Keep the Joint Running and its InfoWorld predecessor, Survival Guide, have been contrarian about process for nearly as long.

The process perspective isn’t wrong. It is, however, subordinate to other, more important perspectives. As evidence:

• Jim Collins’ Good to Great (2001) isolated five factors common to the high-performance companies he and his team analyzed. Process improvement or reengineering initiatives weren’t among them. High-quality leadership, a culture of discipline, and strategic focus were.

• William Joyce, Nitin Nohria, and Bruce Roberson published the results of their “Evergreen Project” in What Really Works (2004). Their formulation is a bit more complicated than Collins’, but similar in most respects. Their evidence was, if anything, more compelling.

Over the ten years examined in the study, companies that followed the “formula” increased sales by 415 percent and operating income by 326 percent. Companies that didn’t increased sales by just 83 percent and operating income by 22 percent.

• Regular correspondent Noah Wollner pointed me to an older study by John Kotter and James Heskitt. Titled Corporate Culture and Performance (1992), it contrasted companies that fostered a “performance enhancing culture” with others that didn’t. Defined as promoting risk taking and innovation, being receptive to change, valuing entrepreneurship, and encouraging mutual support in identifying and solving problems, the impact was, to say the least, significant:

Over an eleven year span, organizations with performance-enhancing cultures experienced 682 percent revenue growth and 746 percent net income growth. Those that didn’t grew revenue by only 166 percent and net income by just 1 percent over the same period of time.

• And, as mentioned my last column, every time anyone looks at what drives customer satisfaction, employee attitude is the most important underlying factor.

So far as I can tell, there is no reliable published evidence, other than the anecdotal, that process change is a primary driver of business success.

Does this mean process has no value in a modern corporation? That would be a false inference. The question isn’t whether process matters. The question is how it matters.

Those who view companies as collections of processes end up looking at companies as mechanisms — collections of gears, cogs, buttons, and wheels. From this perspective, employees occupy some but not all roles in a process. Done right, everyone is replaceable, and when replaced, nothing changes.

Those who view companies as collections of people end up in a different place. For us, businesses are, first and foremost, societies. While not the lead story, process still has important roles to play.

First, process encourages consistency where consistency matters — usually when the company has to produce a large number of very similar items; sometimes when failing to undertake work in a very specific way can lead to dangerous situations or legal liability.

Second, having well-defined processes lets employees focus on getting work done instead of on figuring out how to do it. Just as important, well-defined processes (and procedures) make collaboration easier because everyone involved shares a common understanding of how we do things around here.

And finally, well-defined processes create a framework for constant, steady improvement (“continuous improvement” is the now-cliched, preferred buzz-phrase). Without a well-defined process to provide a baseline, the enterprise has to constantly start over — the getting-work-done equivalent of software that never progresses beyond the alpha-testing release.

In human-centered enterprises, process also has clear boundaries. The most important is this: Everyone understands that the business exists to take care of customers; that taking care of customers is something employees do; and that employees rely on trustworthy processes to help them do it, when the processes fit the situation.

When a company’s processes don’t fit the situation, the company has to make a choice. It can, with complete validity, decide that what the customer wants isn’t something the company does. If you run a travel agency and a customer wants you to replace a broken axle in the family minivan, “Sorry but we don’t do that,” is a reasonable response.

“We haven’t done that before, but we’ll figure out a way to do it for you,” is often an even more reasonable response: The company can decide that when its standard processes don’t fit a customer’s request, the customer has just revealed an opportunity, or something that should be fixed.

Companies that only do what they do eventually do too much of what customers don’t need any more. Those that figure out how to handle unexpected requests, on the other hand, sometimes find whole new profitable lines of business in the process.

As it were.