Enterprise changes happen due to a lot of external & internal factors.
Each of these changes spread through the enterprise as a Domino Effect and cause a certain amount of disruption; Processes change & breakdown, Data models become corrupted or incapable, downstream functionality gets stalled & even more importantly core business processes & compliance needs cannot be fulfilled. I shall cite some genericized & abstracted examples from my experiences in the last decade or so.
A retailer with half a million products in its rapidly changing product hierarchy, product tagging & supplier identification (SKUs) environments has an array of processes that may or may not be able to handle such changes & sustain Data Models that enable a lot of their processes to work. Their focus being primarily sales / revenue driven and secondarily operational improvement & innovation, BI becomes the ‘starting’ initiative but not very well designed or sustainable, given the nature of their business environment; processes & data always in flux.
A high-tech manufacturer with several BUs, varying product & hierarchy lines, that share components & parts, have independent but related & compatible offerings, various diverse supply & sales channels, use global - sourcing > manufacturing > assembly > delivery models, have geo-culturally diverse markets & customized offerings (North America, Latin America, EMEA, AsiaPacific) and competes in a very ‘dynamic pricing’ based sensitive environment has a whole plethora of disruptive Domino Effects.. in action.
A telecom services provider having undergone major Mergers & Acquisitions, Bankruptcies, re-orgs, market & technology evolutions, having a strict deadline to meet ‘compliance’ needs for a Federal Program that promises chunks of the world’s largest double digit multi-billion dollar telecom services contract that will become the primary source of revenue for a larger part of the coming decade. The plethora of internal technologies, groups & organizations, multiple consulting vendors and neglected elements in the formulated roadmap causing missed enterprise milestones & unaddressed gaps.
A financial services major with a large variety of businesses; each buying, selling & running financial assets in various markets, with diverse forms of risk, liabilities, underwriting, ratings and what not. Their financial assets & product offerings keep changing and so do the underlying legalities & compliance as well as safeguards. Their ability to bring on, grow & maintain knowledgeable talent is limited and their goals place more work on those shoulders with additional pressure towards shorter time to markets.
A healthcare outfit.. (more to come)
An insurance services major.. (more to come)
The key is in observing the ‘nature of change’ and ‘designing for change’. Building into the Enterprise a ‘culture of change’ and integrating into the Enterprise DNA that ‘change sustainability’ gene. This DNA is to be composed of various “business change patterns” observed & envisaged (past, present & future) in various parts of the enterprise in every area & at every level & in the right granularity.
The Business Change Patterns (BCPs) are usually ‘known’ to most Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) in the enterprise in a specific area. The issue is that, this ‘knowledge’ is something that resides in their heads and may never get realized & really utilized into the Enterprise other than some documents, presentations, discussions or limited black-box configurations. The knowledge of the summarized Domino Effect of several BCPs is very important to Incorporate, Virtualize & Manifest (IV&M) in an Enterprise for successful & sustainable enterprise evolution.
Incorporate – Selection of parameters…
Virtualize – Modeling of parameters…
Manifest – Realization & usage of parameters.. into & as meta-data
So far, the IT / technology world have been active adopters of ‘Modeling’ techniques all the way from Design to Execution. On the other hand, it has been much more difficult and complicated to model business behaviors; largely because they are more complicated & less predictable. Imagine, being able to model a real life process that exisits in the physical world and represent, execute and observe it in the virtual world.
To cite a simple example let’s take a simplistic “procure, manufacture, store, distribute & sell” value chain. In a simplistic sense you would sell at prices determined by the cost price & the manufacturing price & maybe adding an aggregate value to storage & distribution costs. Now, what if you could actually model properties & attributes to every step of the processes in the value chain and see exactly how each cost varies for different products & under different business conditions. This would take the observation of the processes from a more abstract viewpoint to a more ‘accurate’ one by taking into consideration the true ‘change factors’.
It was very difficult to and at times next to impossible to incorporate such factors and account for them. That needs to change for the business & process world.
A couple of examples..
