Organisation’s with a solid foundation have higher profitability, are faster to market and have lower IT costs. Business agility is becoming a strategic necessity as globalisation, increasing regulation, and faster cycle times all demand the ability to quickly change organisational processes.

Building a foundation starts with understanding your activities, information needs and how technology can enable this through digitisation.

The questions we are answering in this stage are;

  • What are the core business processes?
  • How are they related?
  • What information drives these core processes?
  • How must this information be integrated?
  • What activities must be standardised to support data integration?
  • How are technology systems supporting processes and managing data?

Process Maps

In stage 2 we used the Value Chain to discuss high-level process flows, we now build this out into process maps, specifically the ones that are strategically important. These are fairly high-level unless there is a problematic process, for example processes with high-wait-time, manually intensive or a high number of defects/errors. For these we will apply  lean patterns to identify potential solutions.

Information

For each strategic process we define the business information needs, for example, Customer, Product or Inventory data. The business information structure of an operation is the only stable element. The organisation, technology and activities frequently change.

The review objective is to break down each process into high-level steps and identify if information is missing or poor quality. We also identify Lean/Six Sigma problem patterns; slow process, inventory too high etc…

To give you a flavour of the approach the “entity / process” matrix below is a compact way to perform this analysis. We’ve also found that other intersects such as Process and Location can be as revealing in terms of business opportunities.

Some of the key analysis indicators we’re looking for are;

  • An entity group with many filled rings (⦿) implies that there is an opportunity for reuse (e.g. Customer Order)
  • If a process has many empty rings it needs to reuse information that is created by other processes. But if it uses systems that have mainly filled rings this process is poorly integrated with other processes
  • We analyse one process at a time to understand the functions of the systems used in each process. If a process uses different systems it may be isolated in terms of the information required

Systems

The next step is to provide a better understanding of the information connection via an end-state review and systems matrix. The systems matrix provides a general overview and is usually sufficient to generate enough insight for action.

A dependency on this stage is that application discovery has been performed, and it is common for this to run in parallel with this stage. This is outlined in the end-state assessment stage.

The systems matrix may reveal that the same information is entered in several systems independently of one another. Ideally this information should be captured just once, at the source, and then disseminated as required.

The key areas the process investigates are;

  • Comparing the system matrix with the process matrix by observing the information requirements of the processes, the extent to which the systems can supply that information, and the level of quality of the information supplied by the system
  • Identifying if different processes store the same data in different places
  • Many instances of filled rings throughout the matrix indicate inadequate information ownership and insufficient insight regarding information management
  • One with few empty rings implies that data is infrequently reused. Few empty rings thus means that business information is not shared and that system keeps useful knowledge isolated

The systems matrix should be in context of understanding the end-state architecture. Reviewing systems in isolation will not paint a full picture of an over-complex or inelegant architecture that is unable to support the business goals related to process or data.

Business Capability Model

An overarching picture is now in place describing the strategic processes, information needs and the current end-state architecture. Using the insights gained in the analyses, the target architecture is designed.

An architecture matrix consists of a set of logical business functions guided by the principle that states there is no reason to implement functionality and business rules more than once for each entity group. In other words, there is one function for each entity group that is able to manage all of its data.


Divided into these blocks, the architecture matrix describes the desired architecture and provides a picture of how it should fit together as a whole. The blocks represent a proposal for how the business capabilities in the architecture matrix should be arranged.

Gap Analysis

The next key step is to identify an existing system or earmark a new system in which the information will be captured. In the systems matrix, we identify which systems are the original sources for each of the entity groups. If information is missing this will become part of the delivery roadmap and potential candidates for new services.

A comprehensive assessment of the technology landscape is performed in the end-state assessment stage.