I was both privileged and pleased to have the opportunity to present a keynote address at the BrainStorm DC Conference in Washington DC last summer, where my presentation focused on the subject of relating enterprise strategy to business outcomes. By way of reintroducing the topic, I prepared a brief summary of that presentation for publication in the January 2009 edition of the Government Bulletin.
We are barraged by the images of our sliding economy on a daily basis. The news media is spreading fear, agony, and despair. Many companies are reacting by deeply cutting staff, reducing services, decreasing quality and squelching morale. Everyone is told that they are simply going to have to do more with less (work harder or lose your job).
Then there are companies that see this downturn as an opportunity to strengthen their company and emerge from the other side stronger than their competition.
“If we want to enter in an automated processes schema, the principle problem that we must resolve is the modeling of the current and proposed context. Based on my experience in process automation I can say that there exists a high-priority necessity for the correct evaluation of the current activites of the process one wishes to automate in order to assure the successful future implementation of the automation of the said process, based on four fundamental factors: maturity, process definition, organizational culture, and managerial drive.”
Suppose you were in charge of distributing $700 billion to financial institutions that have failed, how would you do it? Suppose you were put in charge of fixing the world economy, how would you do that? Suppose you were in charge of eradicating cancer, how would you do that? I submit that the foundational principles of Business Architecture can be used to address such challenges.
Companies are right to be cautious about employing software to solve process problems. Automating a broken process simply serves to make it more efficiently broken. However, documenting processes is the first – and in my opinion, the most important – step in the improvement cycle. When Lombardi recently offered to demonstrate Blueprint, their web-based documentation and collaboration product, I approached the demonstration as a business professional with processes that need improvement, rather than an IT analyst or industry expert. Criteria for evaluation were ease of us
So you finally sold the value of your BPM initiative to your company’s executives. Now it is time to deliver. Selecting the right tools is a critical step to help you succeed. This may not sound that difficult but if the proper amount of effort is not directed toward this decision point, you could find yourself spending more time with your vendor than with your business partners.
Many companies today are looking to reduce the number of installed/supported applications as a way to save money and reduce complexity. Money is saved via reduced licensing, support and integration costs. However, many do not have a clear execution strategy, even while investing in application portfolio management solutions to get a better understanding of the application portfolio and tracking existing applications.
One obvious route to application reduction is standardizing on a single application globally if possible and if not, to a single application in a given region.
To be ready for something you first need to understand what it is. SOA is often defined in technical terms about the composition of services. Whist technically correct this encourages people to become caught up in technologies and constraints very early on.
I prefer to think of SOA as a solution approach that helps IT solve business problems by sharing and re-using:
There is a new approach to surveying employees that can create the constant and comprehensive feedback an organization needs. Traditionally employee surveys have been large enough that they were done infrequently. They were often part of a major assessment that was comprehensive and cumbersome. No wonder that employees traditionally complain that nothing ever comes of their inputs. In contrast, imagine a survey that is (a) 1-2 minutes long (perhaps 5-12 questions) (b) sent out to targeted samples within the organization (c) once a month or more.
Happy New Year. I think.
2009 opens with the most ominous, and the most hopeful of portents. With the global economy in its deepest dive since the great depression we are holding our collective breath in the hope that the government can steer us away from a calamity such as was experienced in that terrible era. At the same time we welcome an historic new U.S. President, and wish him (and us) success, whatever our political stripe.
Everyone starts here.
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