The world around us changes at an increasing pace while governments block operations by piling up more and more rules and regulations. Competition accelerates leading to the rising need to fulfill the necessary internal transformations. Projects seem to take longer time, with higher costs, and lower quality results. The perception of management rises that flexibility and agility are no meaningless buzz words but are essential for survival.

 

However, the alignment between strategy and business, and business and ICT are completely unsatisfactory. The Time-to-Market seems to take longer and longer every year, thus giving competition an even greater advance. With that, the governance model of organizations is partial, incomplete, and not aligned with the value creation model resulting in unnecessary risks.

 

Business transformation and ICT developments are not able to accelerate but are actually slowing down. Change projects overrun their budgets resulting in decreasing opportunities for other necessary changes: much too much money goes down the drain... While the organization struggles with slow changes competitors get the lead and organizations seem to lose the battle for the market. The losses pile up, governance seems to get out of control, the financial situation is worsening...

 

What is needed is increasing much higher flexibility and agility, better governance, and a completely new transformation approach. Change should be delivered instantaneously. For this, first, it is necessary to have a very flexible proposition model embedded in all relevant parts of the organization that delivers fast time-to-market results.

 

Next, value creation management should be based on coherent and consistent Business Value Models and control systems should steer on the right measures. Finally, the change and transformation processes should become much faster, cheaper, and delivering results at top quality level.

 

Therefore organizations need an Enterprise Architecture that enables this, a transformation method that is founded on this architecture, and business & ICT transformation, operational, and management tools that support and accelerate both change and control.

 

The challenges organizations are confronted with, are too severe and never come as a single challenge. The metaphor of severe weather conditions come into place and the challenges can be subscribed as a Squall Line of thunderstorms that are ahead of a deep cold front. Or even the Supercell metaphor can be used in which a thunderstorm is characterized by the presence of a mesocyclone.

 

These metaphors point at what can happen to our own organization, but the real challenge is to change the organization in such a way that it creates supercells and squall lines in the organization’s market place itself.