Thresholds for business transformation
The world around us changes at an increasing pace while governments block the operation by piling up more and more rules and regulations that slow it down. 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...
Business Challenge
So today’s business challenges are:
- Faster changes worldwide at an ever increasing pace
- More rules and regulations
- Competition accelerates
- Need for transformation increases
- Projects take longer
- Flexibility and agility are necessities
- Alignment not in place
- TtM takes ever longer
- Bad fit between Governance and Operations
- No possibility to accelerate change
- Budget overruns
- Competition gets the lead
What’s wrong with traditional approaches
- Nobody oversees the complexity of change
An organization is a very complex collection of components that influence each other in very different ways. To gather all information concerning the interoperability of all components takes a long time that is often not available. It is inefficient when organizations need to collect and understand this interoperability each time change is necessary: the concept of interoperability should be embedded in business knowledge and the transformation approach. In the details organizations differ, but at a conceptual level business transformation is business transformation.
- The path from strategic choice to implementation takes too long
Often it is said that the transformation projects take too long. But when looking at the time it takes from idea to implementation, the projects only are part of the problem. The preparation time also takes a large part of the available time at hand. The complete transformation time should be reduced significantly. With two-digit percentages.
- Contemporary Enterprise Architecture starts in the middle
A good approach is to have a roadmap when traveling from A to B. This is why Enterprise Architecture may be of help. However, contemporary Enterprise Architecture approaches do not start with the essence of any organization: they start in the middle with business processes.
- Wheels are invented constantly
When looking at reusable components and comparing them with the real use of reusable components it’s obvious that most business transformation approaches are not efficient and effective. Knowledge assets, i.e. valuable organizational knowledge, are unnecessarily thrown down the drain during contemporary business transformation approaches.
- Processes are not understood by IT, business does not understand automated systems
Well processes are also often not understood by the business as well. But when IT people come in and start designing business processes as if they were automated information system it really gets out-of-hand.
- IT development takes too long
This is the case with most conventional IT development approaches but even agile approaches still take too long.
- Knowledge Asset Management is not embedded into Business Transformation
A lot of carefully collected knowledge of the organization is embedded in the source code of automated information systems. But other knowledge is also ‘thrown away’ with each business transformation.
What’s needed
Any organization creates value for their stakeholders by delivering their proposition. To excel in this, a management charter concerning core competencies, leadership roles and responsibilities, knowledge management, organizational learning, governance, value performance control and management styles, must be adapted to the strategic choices. This is essential for any organization.
Higher flexibility and agility, better governance, and a completely new transformation approach are needed. For this, first, the change and transformation processes should become faster, cheaper, and delivering results at a higher quality level. Knowledge Asset Management should be embedded in the business transformation approach: why do we need to translate our business knowledge into unreadable IT source code that gets less valuable each year and worthless when new software is bought? Business knowledge should be readable and understandable for business people, letting them change it in an instance and transforming it into actionable knowledge. It’s time to unleash the value of business knowledge in unforeseen ways.
Value creation management should be based on coherent and consistent business value models and control systems should steer on the right value creation measures, not on hundreds of so-called “Key” Performance Indicators. With so many keys no one can unlock all the doors in time to let the winds of change flow through the organizational building.
Finally, it is necessary to have a very flexible proposition model embedded in all relevant parts of the organization enabling the organization to change their proposition and roll out new products instantly.
Therefore organizations need an Enterprise Architecture that enables this, a transformation method that is founded on this architecture, and business & IT transformation, operational and management tools that support and accelerate both change and control.
In this brochure we discuss our view on these three aspects of change and control: proposition, stakeholders, value creation with a well selected management charter that fits in perfectly.
Enterprise Architects is a company focused on delivery of enterprise architecture, advising and delivering methods, techniques and tools to our customers to improve their value creation, accelerate transformation and increasing agility and flexibility to become excellent organizations.