Senior management wants to get serious about consolidating and managing customer information. Customer contact and related information is scattered across dozens of business units, each of which updates and manages this information in unique, nontransparent ways. Continuing the current piecemeal approach to customer management, however, creates severe roadblocks to servicing customers more effectively, streamlining operations and competing with other companies in your industry.
Why is this situation getting attention now after years of discussion, politicking and failed attempts to address the issue? Because the pain threshold for addressing customer management and related horizontal business initiatives has become so great that management can no longer afford to ignore the issue. Horizontal business initiatives address complex challenges that span multiple business units or silos. Tackling these issues has been very difficult, however, because most organizations are not structured in such a way that allows them to address horizontal challenges.
Individual business units commonly have doubts about the feasibility of meeting cross-functional challenges. They may additionally fear that customer information consolidation could undermine unique business unit objectives or decrease their organizational sway. Even if a given business unit wanted to tackle a horizontal challenge, it would be impossible because they lack visibility into the world that exists outside their own domain.
Certainly IT understands horizontal challenges. IT wrestles with customer data redundancy and inconsistency on a regular basis. Customer information consistency, currency and integrity issues surface whenever the business needs to reconcile customer information through management reporting or data mining. Yet IT has no power over the business units that own this information and little knowledge or control over the processes and end-user computing facilities that generate, manipulate and utilize this information. [IT may think it understands these issues – but experience has shown otherwise.]
Business Architecture Steps Up to the Challenge
If no single business unit can tackle a horizontal issue and if IT is not equipped to craft an overall business strategy and solution, where can executives turn for help? Executives should turn to (or alternatively form) their business architecture team for help.
There may be skeptics. How can a small team, unaligned with any particular business unit, play a substantive role in solving complex, cross-functional challenges such as customer information management? The answer lies in the question – the lack of allegiance to a given business unit or to IT allows the business architecture team to seek pragmatic, out-of-the-box solutions to a wide variety of horizontal business initiatives.
A second key reason for turning to the business architecture team is its ability to leverage state-of-the-art industry techniques for aggregating and visualizing relevant aspects of the business that are germane to horizontal challenges. The first step involves creating a blueprint of the business that can be populated with all aspects of the business that represent customer information and the various business areas, actors, processes and automated systems that feed, manipulate or rely on customer information across business silos.
The living business blueprint provides the basis for management to understand how customer information enters and flows through the enterprise. In addition, a living business blueprint allows management to zoom in or zoom out across a variety of topic areas – just like an online mapping facility. The depth of information gathered and represented within a business blueprint is directly proportional to the scope and goals of a given initiative.
The business blueprint also offers a foundation for future initiatives because it provides the baseline meta-structure for subsequent horizontal business initiatives. This may include any number of business scenarios such as integrating a new business line, product or even organizational structure.
Population of the blueprint relies on collaboration with various aspects of the business and IT. However, maintaining the integrity of the blueprint means that it must live independently from any single business unit or from IT. Otherwise, it will lose its ability to represent and service the whole.
Creating an independent business architecture team is critical to ensuring that any particular horizontal challenge is viewed from a non-partisan, non-politicized perspective. It is also essential to ensuring that the business blueprint provides executives with a map to understanding and solving immediate horizontal business initiatives as well as a baseline for assessing and addressing future horizontal challenges as they may arise.
