Question: What are some of the ways that EA is evolving and what changes are EA tool vendors implementing to support those changes?

Answer: In my last blog post, I talked about demonstrating the value of enterprise architecture to the business and the increasing expectation and demand for EA to demonstrate business value. The focus on value is a big part of EA’s evolution. I believe this is a result of both the desire to see a return on the EA investment, which many companies have already made, and the need to identify new ways to drive adaptability into the organization in order to remain competitive.

In this post, I am going to discuss  one of the ways EA tool vendors are  supporting organizations in this evolution through an increased focus on leveraging the information captured about the enterprise to drive more informed decisions. Leading EA tool vendors are increasing their capabilities around the use of the data to support better presentation of the analysis, investment options, and organizational impacts to decision makers throughout the organization. To enable these key stakeholders, architects need to support multiple points of view, different levels of detail and a diverse set of information. This data also needs to be presented to users in a format that can be easily understood and linked back to the objectives that drive each functional area.

For too many organizations, the manipulation of the data remains a highly manual process where strategy, organizational, and process models are rebuilt in spreadsheets, PowerPoint slides and documents. This not only wastes the time of highly skilled analysts, but also creates a maintenance nightmare as requests for additional information, refinements in the assumptions, or other alternatives are requested by business users, which inevitably starts the cycle of manual data manipulation again.

I believe the better approach is to drive the presentation of the information directly from the underlying enterprise data – supporting a combination of information from the architecture teams with relevant data from other systems. Graphical displays and drill-down capabilities deliver better clarity into the information to support more informed decisions. Changing an assumption, resource allocation, business process, or goal in one central location can cascade through all the dependencies and immediately be reflected across the enterprise model or compared to other iterations of the project – without the hassles and headaches of manual rework.

If you’re not working from a central repository, and your current EA toolset doesn’t include the ability to translate your enterprise information and business models into information that can be consumed the business users, you should be demanding more. Unlocking information to enable better decisions is one of the ways that EA delivers value back to the business.

In my next post, I’ll be discussing another trend in EA and EA tool evolution – where analysts fit within the organization and what impact that has on what you need from EA tools.

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Question: What sort of value do organizations achieve from Enterprise Architecture?

Answer: Almost every article, blog post, seminar, and book about enterprise architecture (EA) includes some mention of the need for enterprise architects to demonstrate move value to the business.  The truth is that few architects get much practical, actionable advice on how to do that. Many business leaders don’t really understand the value of various frameworks and taxonomies and have a difficult time understanding the attention to detail that architects focus on when developing their modeling methodologies. Not only do business leaders not understand, but many are unwilling to take the time to learn. I’ve seen business mangers glaze over when architects start talking about something as simple as their modeling assumptions.

The most successful companies embrace architecture as a way to instill a discipline that drives the translation of business strategy and vision into the enterprise to facilitate the change needed to reach the broader business goals. Architecture also defines the path for an organization to evolve as it implements those the necessary changes. In today’s hyper-competitive global economy organizations cannot depend on a few “individuals” to instinctively make the right decisions to manage and execute this type of large-scale change. Especially when companies are focusing on objectives like improving customer experience and consistency across all channels of communication, the focus on individual contributions can actually impede the success of the broader goal.

To expand on this point, take a minute to read a recent blog post by HP’s Terry White, which cites research by Dana Gartner, president and principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and Jeanne Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research. Among other important things it suggests that to fully realize the value of architecture, “there’s a cultural shift that takes place in an organization, when it commits to doing business in a new way, and that cultural shift starts with abandoning a culture of heroes and accepting a culture of discipline.” Organizations have to strive for a higher level of maturity and embrace a new culture of discipline before they can fully realize the value of architecture.

This is not to say that organizations with less maturity don’t derive value from EA. Organizations  have demonstrated millions of dollars in savings with architectural initiatives focused on Application Portfolio Management, IT management, compliance and improving the effectiveness of key processes.  So my answer to this question is the value that organizations can achieve from EA initiatives depends on the business problem you are asking your architecture team to solve. Companies who view EA as an essential discipline for business transformation derive significantly more value than companies who take a more narrow view.

In fact, many of our customers who have taken the time to connect with the business teams have also seen an increase in their penetration and acceptance by the organization. However, keep in mind that this requires constant coaching. Realization of a deeper value of transformation can be accelerated when architects become more skilled at identifying key business leaders that understand the value of leveraging best practices, standardization, process optimization, or other capabilities enabled by good architecture. I recently had a conversation with one of our larger customers, one of the world’s largest financial institutions, who told me that he needed to have 150 conversations with key business leaders to open the door to another 150 conversations that he needed to have to drive the kind of value his team was able to deliver.

What do you think? Stay tuned for our next question in this series and feel free to let us know what questions you’d like answered.

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To bring life to those enterprise aspirations, business and technology leaders should look to 2012 as a year to continue improving their collaborative efforts to achieve business change. There are no indications that the new year will bring any relief from the increasing pace of technology and business change, nor the increasing demands from more educated and socially connected customers. 2011 continued the trend toward business driving IT and 2012 offers the opportunity to make this shift pay off for organizations. Many organizations who are focused on bridging the gap between business and IT groups will achieve far more benefits if they fuse these two groups  into business teams working collaboratively to drive transformations.

So, what does 2012 have in store for EA teams?

In its yearly series, Gartner Inc. recently predicted that many organizations will begin to leverage EA tools to drive business value and impact. According to the report, “Gartner Predicts: Opportunities for EA to Lead Business Transformation in Turbulent Times,” December 1, 2011, Phillip Allega, Betsy Burton, et all. “EA practitioners will begin to shift their focus to begin to think about their role differently and, in many cases, employ a new way of working.” With only 40% of EA programs worldwide reporting to IT, EA’s focus must shift from IT and operations to delivery of demonstrable business value.

As I read through the report, I found the following assumptions particularly interesting.

The managed diversity approach
“By 2015, 25% of Global 1000 organizations will produce cohesive EA artifacts that support the diversity of complex business ecosystems.”

When undergoing a business transformation initiative, organizations must account for global operational diversity. According to the report, “the managed diversity style defines choices or options for what projects or customers can leverage without defining only strict, rigid standards. Managed diversity does not mean that there are no standards, but rather that EA planning achieves a balance between the need for a set of standards that help control costs and the need for a diversity of solutions to increase innovation, business growth and competitive advantage across locations that the organization operates in.”

Properly executed, EA can help organizations achieve the delicate balance of identifying and propagating best practices, maximizing technology investments, ensuring compliance with local regulatory bodies, and risk reduction with the flexibility to adapt business systems to compete in global markets. With flexible but defined guardrails, organizations typically find a significant increased speed in their ability to execute when teams are empowered to leverage the elements they need with the guidance  to avoid critical mistakes.

Working together
“By year-end 2014, 50% of Global 1000 organizations will support EA as a collaborative business and IT effort.”

Successful organizations have already started moving their EA teams  out of IT and into the business. Gartner’s survey results indicate that while 68% of EA programs in the US report to the IT organization this picture is already considerably different worldwide. China, who primarily looks to EA for business transformation initiatives, reports to business leadership 76% of the time. This shift in reporting relationships naturally drives changes in the focus and composition of project teams. The complementary nature of skills, perspectives and insights from enterprise architects and business people  can combine to  produce dramatically better results. Organizations cannot drive business growth without carefully selecting the members of the project team.

I particularly appreciated Gartner’s caution, “do not assume that just because business leaders are collaborating and engaging in EA, the effort will be “business strategy driven.” Executive leadership should be mindful that they have defined a clear business strategy that includes actionable directives to provide the context in which these collaborative teams can drive execution.

Increased focus on the decision process
“Through year-end 2014, 60% of organizations will continue to focus EA on assurance, rather than governance.”

According to the report, there are two key challenges when implementing EA governance: 1) they lack training and critical understanding of the topic, and 2) they focus exclusively on control and assurance. This is a problem because EA practitioners often lack an understanding of how the business uses information to makes business decisions. Quite honestly, it is easier to focus on control and standardization because this space is more comfortable for individuals with a technical background. Increasing collaboration between IT and business can be part of this solution but only if architects dig deeper to understand the decision process, the relative value of investment priorities in the context of the business strategy and which standards provide value to the organization. This level of understanding requires more than collaboration between the groups.  It requires a true respect and commitment to understanding how the organization defines and drives business value and how they can then become a part of driving that change.

What is your take on Gartner’s predictions for EA this year? Do you see your EA team driving or reacting to these predicted trends?  Will this be your year to deliver strategic business value? Leave your comments below and we can discuss.

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BPM Addresses Supply Chain Priorities
If your organization competes on the basis of its supply chain then you’ve probably watched with interest the annual Top 25 Supply Chain report from Gartner Research. I follow this report closely each year and have written about it for CMSWire where I’ve shared some case study examples in the past. This year there were a few surprises in the list but it mostly consisted of “old favorites,” including Apple, Dell, P&G, Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Microsoft. Four key themes emerged for this year’s leaders – including how they deal with volatility, their approaches to value chain network integration, their focus on sustainable execution and their abilities to orchestrate. Clearly, BPM and business architecture disciplines and technology are useful to address all of these key supply chain themes.

Supply Chain, Classic
It is no surprise then that one of the stories that interested me and many others at last week’s User Summit was the outstanding presentation by Ted Bozarth, a Business Consultant with Coca-Cola Bottling Company.

Ted is a member of the Enterprise Services Group responsible for development of business transformation methodology, co-leading Coke’s Enterprise Architecture effort and providing business consulting services to the Supply Chain area of the business. Ted has impeccable credentials including Project Management certification, a Six Sigma Blackbelt (in the interests of full disclosure, I am a recovering Greenbelt) and a BS in Supply Chain Management from Michigan State University.

His current focus within ProVision is modeling business strategy and linking it to the business architecture (processes, facilities, metrics, etc.) to enable strategy-driven business transformation. This ProVision activity is critical to Coca-Cola Bottling who owns and operates five production centers and 47 distribution centers throughout nine states, operating a direct store delivery (DSD) supply chain model, and sells four cases of beverages per second, including Coca-Cola Classic in 22 different packages or case sizes. Work to date includes: Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Material Flow to Consumer, Supply Chain Metrics Modeling, Point of Sale Materials Management, Transportation Brokerage Management, and Supply Chain Strategy.

Clearly Ted and his team are using ProVision to improve some classic supply chain areas and for a Classic product! I look forward to hearing more from him as he and his team progress in their transformation efforts.

Supply Chain, Country
Perhaps less expected but equally interesting to me was the conversation I had over breakfast last Wednesday during the User Summit with Cliff Nottingham of the US Army Security Assistance Command – “The Army’s Face to the World.” His eCollaboration business process application is serving the country well in support of the USASAC mission to implement Foreign Military Sales (FMS) of defense articles and services to eligible foreign governments.

And lest we think the supply chain is inconsequential to the mission, keep in mind that USASAC is responsible for life cycle management of FMS cases, from pre-letter of request, development, and execution, to closure. The command manages more than 4,655 FMS cases valued at more than $121 billion. Each sale of equipment to overseas customers comprises the same “total package” of quality materiel, spare parts, training, publications, technical documentation, maintenance support, and other services that AMC provides to U.S. Army units. Additionally, each sale is made in accordance with the policies and strategic interests of the U.S. government and materiel is either shipped from U.S. government stocks or from production – their goal is to field a total package and promote self-sufficiency.

We often hear about the public sector interest in learning from and adopting best commercial practices. I think the USASAC story is a great example of where the private sector could learn much about managing and improving their financial and product supply chain from government!

I’d be interested in hearing more stories about using business process and case management to improve supply chains – whether classic or country. I definitely see this as an area that is only increasing in importance in the face of our current economic and market challenges.

___________________________
About Deb Miller
Deb Miller is Director of Market Development, Business Process Solutions for OpenText. Her work focuses on industry strategies for business process improvement. Her career includes more than 20 years of global industry experience with GE. You can read more of Deb’s writings at http://DebsG360.wordpress.com/ and follow her @DebsG360 on Twitter.

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With multiple applications supporting a variety of systems and processes, information becomes dispersed across several databases, making it extremely difficult for users to access the information that they need in a timely and efficient manner. Organizations often do not know what applications they own, and have little insight into the value they bring to the company, how much they cost to maintain, and who uses them. To further complicate this issue, Gartner reports that by 2015, 60% of new business application purchase decisions will be made outside of IT¹.

As you look to maximize your technology investments, the following guidelines can help you better understand what applications your business owns and needs:

1.  Collect information about your current portfolio
One of the largest problems when building an application portfolio management (APM) repository begins within the initial phases of collecting information. Organizations don’t always know what they have. To get your APM project going, it takes a champion at the executive level to bring together different areas of the business to identify, understand and examine each individual application and what business process and capabilities it supports. According to Gartner, a top-down approach allows you to collect the highest level of information for each application, which allows you to undergo a quick assessment of the balance of value to cost and risk for each application. From there you can group allocations according to their specific characteristics².

2.  Facilitate collaboration between business and IT
Often, IT drives an APM initiative either for IT chargeback purposes, or to conduct maintenance impact analysis, and may be viewed as having little interest in supporting the business’ interests. On the other hand, the business often advocates for APM to identifying where they could leverage an existing application to save a capital investment required to support a new business capabilities, unaware of the impact it might have on IT. The only way APM will be successful is if the two groups collaborate and work together to meet both requirements and viewpoints. Together, business and IT can take into account their experience and collective knowledge to identify, understand and analyze the value and impact each application has across the business.

3.  Don’t try to boil the ocean
Organizations tend to think that they need to have a complete application portfolio before they can see value from the investment. This is not the case. Companies are more successful if they select a business unit, focus on the applications within that domain, and implement reports and dashboards that illustrate the business value. Your team can leverage early success demonstrating value to the company and then move on to improve other areas of the business. 

4.  Establish visibility into your processes
The best APM solution complements your organization’s enterprise architecture initiatives. Taking a business capabilities-oriented approach allows you to prioritize the various needs of existing applications, such as maintenance, training and cost. Embedding your APM solution into your enterprise architecture framework allows you to establish clear visibility into your process. An excellent APM solution, built on an enterprise architecture platform, gives you the ability to understand – all the way down to the business process level – what it takes to retire a system with minimal disruption to operations.

5.  Build a repository of APM information
As your application portfolio matures, more and more meaningful data should not only be collected, but maintained. A repository of data can be extremely valuable when making large-scale business decisions. With extensive information about your applications in one central location, executives are able to make smart, creative decisions that result in huge bottom line savings.

Enterprise collaboration and executive sponsorship is the foundation for a powerful APM solution. It is essential that you communicate with knowledge workers across your business to really understand the value and role each application brings to the success of your organization. APM needs to be a cooperative effort between both business and IT. A champion from the executive level can help build the case for fostering collaboration between business and IT. 

____________________________

¹Gartner, Predicts 2011: Aligning Enterprise Business Applications to Drive Business Outcomes, November 2010.
²Gartner, Planning for Application Overhauls: Start From the Top With APM, July 2010.

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Now, more than ever, consumers have become highly critical and skeptical of financial services firms. People want assurance and move visibility into the operations, fees and services offered to them. To gain back customer trust and loyalty – while driving greater profitability, growth and agility – you need to focus on how your organization will address three key areas.

Three BIG topics in financial services you need to pay attention to, right now:

The Compliance Challenge
In the world of regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley, Basel II code, MiFID, etc., you need a solid platform in place that supports current regulations – but more importantly, creates an environment in which adaptability is a fundamental component. New, stricter regulations are knocking on the door. To avoid a significant drain on resources, money, and time, it’s critical that you invest in a tool that enables you to achieve compliance on a long-term basis without having to significantly alter your operational systems. Business process management (BPM) can help financial services companies define, automate and standardize processes to be both auditable and consistent. By leveraging the existing underlying systems, and providing a more agile platform that is integrated with them but enables control and automation across systems and departments, you are able to implement changes in a fraction of the time you could with legacy systems. Most regulatory mandates require you to provide a wealth of information and audit trails. With BPM, you can track, monitor, and report on critical processes to not only comply with federal regulations, but better improve current processes to drive enterprise-wide efficiency and profitability.

Better Customer Experience
No new customer wants to spend weeks (and even months) getting their account started. The fact of the matter is, in many financial service companies customers go through a long, rigorous process to open their account – all of which is caused by ineffective, poorly structured new client on-boarding processes. One of our customers, Cornerstone Tax Advisors, had an extensive, paper-based on-boarding process, and as a result the time between the first client interaction and the conclusion of the contract ranged from 11-20 months! However, by using Metastorm BPM, the company was able to control and monitor in-bound workflow with ease, visualize its operational positions, and easily design, model, and change its new client on-boarding processes – radically improving the customer experience, and allowing the company to bring on new clients better and faster.

Smart Consolidation
Over the past few years, we have seen a significant amount of consolidation within the financial services industry. The reason for this is simple – companies want to expand their portfolio, gain more market share, increase their customer base and achieve higher profitability. Unfortunately, almost half of the companies that undergo a merger or acquisition do not achieve the original goals. This is largely due to not having clear objectives – that take into account the organizational structure – to meet the strategic goals of the acquisition. An enterprise architecture tool can help you understand the people, processes, systems and technologies within both companies. Taking it a step further, with an enterprise architecture tool you can analyze, model and simulate the optimal way for these processes to merge together – producing the best business structure possible for your organization.

As the world recovers from the economic crisis it is imperative that you have all the resources to make well-informed business decisions. You need to know what capabilities and assets you have and the best way to manage and utilize them to remain a viable competitor in this ever-changing marketplace. To find out more information about Metastorm’s financial services solutions, visit our financial services solution page.

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The conference served to reinforce what we are seeing and what many of you who are involved in enterprise architecture (from the business or IT side) are likely experiencing – that EA continues to transform and that the EA role is becoming a critical part of developing business strategy. In fact, according to Gartner, five years from now, 30% of EA efforts will be supported as a collaboration between business and IT – an increase of more than 20% from early 2011.This evolution demands new approaches to connecting with larger business ecosystems. This is the key to driving improved business performance. 

As EA gains visibility as key a driver of business performance, enterprise architects must be able to demonstrate how EA efforts and initiatives deliver value to the business. According to Gartner analyst Betsy Burton (in her keynote “You’ve Got a Seat at The Table: Now What?”), a common mistake architects and IT people make is to describe the “business value” in terms of the capabilities or results of EA, rather than basing it on a measurable value of EA’s impact to the business (business outcomes). EA teams must be able to articulate both EA capabilities and business outcomes, but measure the value of EA based on the impact to the business. To do this, EA’s must know and reflect the CEO’s top priorities.

To achieve business outcomes and to drive business change, EA value must be collaboratively developed and supported within the context of the business direction, strategy and future vision.

Below are a few conference sessions where IT and the business worked collaboratively to achieve positive and successful business outcomes.

United Airlines Case Study
United Airlines, a Metastorm customer, presented to a packed audience on how business and IT are working together and leveraging enterprise architecture and Metastorm ProVision to identify and streamline critical processes in the wake of the recent United/Continental merger to deliver increased value for both business and IT. 

PG&E Case Study
Another Metastorm customer, Pacific Gas and Electric Company ( PG&E), shared their vision of how a customer-centric capability and process architecture enables projects to deliver holistic enterprise business solutions. The framework is valuable input for their IT partners as they build the infrastructure that supports business processes. The case study discussed PG&E’s framework approach, process management maturity, and how they are using information technology delivery methodologies to work collaboratively with other users.  

BPM – The Catalyst to Deliver Outcomes
In addition to end user case studies, several Gartner analysts presented compelling presentations. One that we found particularly insightful and relevant was Elise Olding’s session on the relationship between BPM and EA. During her presentation, Elise identified where the synergies between BPM and EA lie, and discussed how successful enterprises that understand how EA and BPM work together are achieving powerful results. “BPM delivers proven value and executes on EA strategy. When EA and BPM work together, it is a winning combination that connects strategy with results.”

We were pleased to see many Metastorm customers at the event and hope you found the event worthwhile. Thank you to those of you who stopped by to see us at the Metastorm booth. For those of you who were not able to attend the conference, we will leave you with some words of wisdom and practical advice from Tom Peters:

1.)  Have lunch with your colleagues – it’s often the best way to solve a lot of problems in business.
2.)  Say “thank you” often, it lets people know you value and appreciate their contributions and will make them want to help you in the future.
3.)  Execution is strategy — it’s all about the people and the doing, not the talking and the theory.

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Are you having trouble aligning strategy to execution? Discover how you can establish better visibility across your enterprise to identify and understand the best business improvements for your organization.

In our brand-new Business Transformation Management course, you can learn how to leverage Metastorm ProVision to define and control positive change within your organization. Drive meaningful change across your organization by taking advantage of this webinar and truly understand how you can align your goals, strategies and capabilities with complex business transformation initiatives.

Here are the details for you to register today!
Metastorm Business Transformation Management Course
Date: Thursday, July 14, 2011
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM EDT

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One of Metastorm’s customers is a global aerospace engineering corporation that has several business units responsible for building and supporting its engineering services. This organization is organized by individual project teams, and has several, massive multi-million dollar projects running at any given time. Each project team can have a budget allocation of millions of dollars and is comprised of several engineers who work closely together, but separate from members of other project teams to complete their individual missions. Given the sizable investment for each project, the team focuses solely on what they need to do in order to deliver on time and on budget. As a result, if a team needs a specific application or program that they don’t already own they go ahead and purchase it, without checking if the other teams have the tool.

The company realized that these teams were working on similar projects but in siloed teams and there was little communication occurring across the organization. This resulted in multiple teams owning the same programs and resources – creating duplication of effort and financial investment. It also became apparent that there were some projects that could have been leveraged by another group eliminating re-work and lost time. Given the lack of cross-departmental visibility, opportunities to improve overall profitability and efficiency were lost.

Realizing that they would be able to operate more effectively if they had a better understanding of their current applications, systems, programs, and processes, the company looked into implementing an enterprise and business architecture tool. They recognized the need to get a comprehensive blueprint of what assets each of the project teams owned, what they were doing, and how it fit into the bigger picture. After looking at several vendors in the marketplace, the company selected Metastorm ProVision to help consolidate its engineering efforts and build a new system that encompassed the entire organization’s capabilities.

The project started 18 months ago and with the help of Metastorm consultants they built a repository for all of the different components, capabilities and assets that once existed among siloed project teams. With Metastorm ProVision, the company now has an enterprise model that helps them understand the relationships that exist across their organization, what assets they have, and how project teams are leveraging these assets. All the sub-projects roll up into a high level view of all initiatives and are tied back to corporate KPIs. Metastorm ProVision allowed them to create strategy through to execution providing a clear vision to transform their engineering operations.

For many organizations, enterprise architecture has become a critical component for bringing value to the business and integrating IT and business operations. As we have discussed in this series, EA initiatives can start at an executive level, as part of an IT initiative, or in response to a specific business requirement. Regardless of its source, your organization should find a tool that supports the ability to move beyond tactical architecture to allow users of all backgrounds to understand the systems, processes, applications and people that will help your organization maximize its resources and reach its goals.

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With a powerful enterprise architecture system in place, a variety of groups can lead EA initiatives. For instance, one of our customers is a global financial services company who is one of the largest credit card issuers in the United States. To support its global operations, the organization has 10 different mainframes located throughout the world that are responsible for running the company’s complex business applications.

Recognizing the amount of money and time spent maintaining these mainframes, the IT department decided they needed to consolidate and move the mainframes to a more centralized, lower cost location where they could be better managed. The members of the IT team went through a demanding investigative process to analyze the potential to bring the mainframes back to the U.S. At that time, the mainframe systems were outsourced to another company to be hosted and maintained.  After almost four years, the IT team realized that it had not saved any money from this outsourcing initiative.

Realizing the enormous scale of this data and system architecture project and the potential cost savings that the company could achieve, the IT team needed a strong enterprise architecture solution that allowed them to model all of the assets and capabilities of each mainframe in order to better understand the divisions and functions they supported. Using Metastorm ProVision, the team was able to build a portfolio management solution to understand its entire mainframe environment, which includes the hardware, software, applications, communication, support, maintenance and costs.  

The first step was to map out the current environment of its mainframes. During this process, the IT team identified close to 500,000 objects in the repository. After the mapping phase the team built out a consolidated model and was able to reduce the number of mainframes from 10 to four. Additionally, the team was also able to consolidate the subsystems (regions) from 30 to less than 10, which considerably lowered redundant messaging. Working with the Metastorm consulting team, the organization has identified two separate data types within the consolidated mainframes, the customer and the supplier. They have also been able to understand and define specific objects. With the unique data linking supported by Metastorm, if an application is moved the team will know what databases, queue requests, transactions, subsystems, data, file transfers, batch jobs, and software that will be affected.

In this particular example, the IT team led the effort to embark on a full-scale enterprise architecture project. Based on the initial estimates, the company expects to see an estimated $40-100 million savings in the first fully operational year.

Tune in next week as we examine another business case where a totally different group within the organization decided to undertake an EA initiative.

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Of course the answer really depends on the problem you are trying to solve. The reality is that any of these groups can drive an enterprise architecture (EA) initiative when it is supported by a robust enterprise architecture solution.

One of our customers is the largest global discount retail store chain in the world. Rapid global expansion of the customer’s business across North America, Asia, EMEA, and South America, resulted in a significant increase (in the thousands) in the number of applications required to support its growing business demands. Over time, the retailer’s enterprise architects discovered thousands of redundant and overlapping applications that existed in silos, often in largely unknown departments around the world. Not only were these applications redundant, they were costing the organization millions of dollars in maintenance, troubleshooting and licensing fees. Additionally, data was dispersed across dozens of countries, requiring multiple data entry points and different management requirements for individual applications.

The scope of the project was overwhelming. As they began dissecting the initiative, the architects determined they needed an enterprise and business architecture modeling solution to help them truly understand all of their applications. Specifically, they needed to know which applications supported the key functions of their business operations, which applications caused process breakdowns, which applications supported the core capabilities of specific business functions, and which applications were redundant and unnecessary.

After demonstrating to company executives the critical need for an Application Portfolio Management (APM) solution to solve this problem, the architects turned to Metastorm. Using Metastorm ProVision, the architects now have complete visibility and control into their global applications – giving the organization as a whole increased business agility and dramatically decreased costs. With this APM solution, the retailer expects to retire unnecessary applications and the hardware that supports them, simplify its IT support structure, and significantly reduce maintenance costs.

In this instance, the retailer’s enterprise architects pushed the initiative forward. However, as we will see in Part 2 of this series, EA’s aren’t the only people who drive enterprise and business architecture initiatives within organizations. Tune in next week as we explore another business case where a completely different group within an organization drove the EA initiative.

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We see these top performers in every organization. One division consistently outperforms other divisions. One customer service representative handles more calls per day, producing better customer satisfaction outcomes than their counterparts. One department handles transactions at a 10% lower cost than industry averages.

But why does this happen?

Drawing from the disciplines of Enterprise Architecture, EA practitioners can help organizations not only discover but standardize their best practices to increase overall business performance. If you leverage an EA solution during the business process design phase of your business process management (BPM) projects, you can better discover what your best practices are. More specifically, exactly what the things are that a top performer or department consistently does well that helps them achieve better results. Oftentimes what is really working is not necessarily what the company thinks is working.

What EA disciplines can help draw out best practices? EA practitioners know to sometimes move out of the conference room to observe workers, to see work as it unfolds and inquire about why a particular action was carried out. This observation creates a more detailed picture of actions and interactions that may not be thought of by an expert as they describe their work in a more structured setting. A second technique is to explore the interrelationships of roles that depend on each other to complete work items. In bringing these roles together and developing a better understanding between the teams of each other’s work you can bring more visibility to the entire process. Finally, applying consistency and structure to the definitions of business processes will begin to lay a foundation for how work is understood by the organization.

In addition to approaching the discovery phase with a proven EA methodology, bringing visibility into the process is another critical part of uncovering excellence. For many groups, it isn’t until the current process is fully understood that opportunities for improvement can be identified and shared with other groups. Visibility can often reveal immediate differences and opportunities for better practices. Once processes are visible, additional opportunities for improvement can be discovered through a collaborative process with top performers and departments. During this discovery and design phase it is very important that you include the business users that will be impacted by the proposed changes. In doing this you will have the ability to capture and leverage how these business user’s ideas build upon each other to answer the “what if” questions, like: Why are we doing work this way? What are the best ideas for doing this work in a smarter way?

Uncovering what makes you excellent is the first step in making process excellence possible in your organization.

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Incidents – big or small – can have a huge impact on your business operations and it’s important that when an incident does occur that you are ready to respond. Incident management scenarios span across all industries and incident management solutions enable you to quickly respond to and resolve the issue in a way that minimizes the overall impact to your business operations.

Organizations should seek a solution that is accessible and easy to use to enable recording, reporting and driving a resolution for incidents encountered during routine business operations. Investing in a strong, dynamic incident management solution allows your organization to:

Ensure all incidents are handled the right way by the right people. Categorizing incidents by the situation and defining who responds and what actions they should take eliminates confusion and greatly reduces cost and risk. This gives your organization a consistent, universal response process, allowing for faster issue resolution and better communication across the enterprise.

Adhere to corporate policies and insurance mandates, be prepared in the case of litigation, and manage overall risk. A strong incident management solution will give you the ability to track and audit each case with real-time visibility. For example, London Underground leverages an incident management solution powered by Metastorm to gather all of the information needed for any given incident, reducing the potential for human error in manually filling out forms. By electronically transferring and storing information, London Underground is able to process over 400 incidents each day – ensuring proper escalation and resolution, saving time and money, minimizing unexpected service interruptions, and most importantly maximizing safety.

Prepare and prevent future incidents. With automation, process integration and trend analysis capabilities, it’s much easier to proactively prevent future incidents from happening. Incident management solutions allow you to fully understand and track how you manage and respond to unexpected events. This way, you can go back and organize the process for continuous organizational improvement.

You know that incidents are going to happen. Do you know how you’ll ensure their handled in a better way? Move beyond reactive incident management and transform the way your business reacts.

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When I asked the attendees to describe their ability to handle major and ongoing changes within their organization in a poll, 63% of participants indicated that it was “slow, painful and expensive” and 31% said that efforts were “disjointed and siloed.”  Meaning only 6% of the 83 participants who responded believed that their organization “could be an industry model for business transformation.”

I’m not surprised.  Often, organizations struggle to manage change because they lack a consistent approach to business transformations.  Determining the end goal of a transformation (whether it be upgrading to a new technology, seeking operational efficiency, or staying ahead of competitor innovation) is one thing, but trying to figure out a successful, cost effective way to roll out the transformation takes deep insight into the day in and day out activities and processes within the organization.  

What organizations need to do is figure out how to communicate and collaborate across the enterprise so they can break down the obstacles to change. One way to achieve this is to align the organizational structures against a framework that enables organizations to prioritize and manage transformation initiatives – while also providing visibility into key organizational practices and providing vehicles to help people in cross-functional roles communicate and work together more effectively.      

Today, Metastorm announced a new Business Transformation Practices Framework that is designed to do just that.  The framework helps organizations eliminate the competing practices and communication barriers that prevent change and help them prioritize and manage transformation initiatives to achieve consistent and repeatable processes across current and future transformation activities.  The framework is complementary to and integrated with the Metastorm ProVision® and Metastorm BPM® software – ensuring that multiple, business transformation initiatives can be tracked, monitored,  implemented and fine-tuned through business architecture and business process adjustments on an ongoing basis.

If you’d like more information about the Business Transformation Practices Framework, you can contact me or go to www.metastorm.com/transform to read white papers, download solution sheets and register for upcoming business transformation webinars. An onDemand video of The Power of Business Transformation webinar from last week is also available here. 

I also encourage you to join me for my next webinar – How to Manage Industry-Specific Change Using a Business Transformation Practices Framework – on Tuesday, March 15^th at 11:00 am EST, register here.

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But without a clear, well defined plan in place—one that allows you to see and understand all of your business capabilities and determine the best possible transformation strategy—your organization won’t be in a good position to effectively implement and manage change.  

Why invest in a business transformation strategy?  Here are three business reasons to create a formal business transformation strategy and implement a consistent framework for managing change: 

1. Eliminate siloed departments and competing practices

Executives and senior managers often don’t realize how many complex, competing practices exist within their organization.  Siloed departments cause huge communication barriers, which end up preventing any sort of meaningful change, while also stifling innovation and blocking agility.  A business transformation strategy will give you ability to identify and remove these redundant practices, and help you map out a more effective and strategic way to establish consistency, repeatability and measurability across business transformation activities to better manage change and foster innovation.

2. Gain visibility and control into business operations

If you can’t see how your organization operates on a day-to-day basis, how can you determine the right change and manage it once it has taken place? Investing in a business transformation framework solution will allow you to drill down in the daily operations to see exactly how people and processes work together and simulate potential business transformations to deliver ongoing improvements and remain competitive.

3. Establish collaboration and a common vocabulary across all business practices

Communication is the key to success.  Organizations need to figure out how to establish a common vocabulary and enhance communication between people from various departments and locations.  By mapping out each role and responsibility within the organization and having a tool that establishes an effective form of communication, you can remove the communication barriers that keep your organization from being able to keep up with and positively contribute to change. Real-time chat and model viewing capabilities across multiple users allows organizations to model, discuss, and improve their business operations, making it easier to execute and manage a business transformation.

To remain successful and competitive, your business has to change.  The best approach to managing any change is being prepared for the unknown.  Metastorm offers a business transformation practices framework that can be implemented directly with our complete software portfolio, to give your organization broad understanding and visibility into your practices and allow you to prepare and respond more quickly and effectively to environmental, technological, or regulatory changes.   

If you’re interested in learning more about how a business transformation framework can help your organization manage change, I encourage you to participate in Metastorm’s upcoming webinar The Power of Business Transformation on February 8^th at 11:00am EST.

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