Business Transformation Workbench: A Practitioner’s Tool for Business Transformation

Introduction

Business transformation is a key management initiative that attempts to align people, process and technology of an enterprise closely with its business strategy and vision. Business transformation is often achieved by taking a holistic look at various dimensions of an enterprise such as business models, management practices, business processes, organizational structure and technology and optimizing them with best-practice or differentiated methods to reach a strategic end state. For example, business transformation in the enterprise finance area would, among others, optimize financial processes such as accounts receivables, eliminate non-value-added tasks, improve efficiency and productivity of people, and reduce errors by using technologies. Business transformation is considered an essential part of the competitive business cycle.

Consulting service companies in the business transformation area brand technology and consulting as their core product and service offerings. These offerings include models, methods and tools devised for facilitating business transformation. While the state-of-the-art business transformation consulting models and methods are useful, there are a number of general problems that need to be addressed to make them more effective. First, the current approaches are often limited in scalability because they demand subject matter experts to work with a variety of disconnected data, tools, templates and other assets. It is often cumbersome and difficult to streamline the data gathering and management manually. Data and documents often reside in multiple folders distributed among several machines. Consistency checking across data can only be done manually, and the process requires experts. Additionally, it is hard to capture a structured thinking process without a tool which enforces the process or method. Furthermore, it is difficult to disseminate and reuse knowledge effectively, if it is not captured systematically. In addition, assets such as knowledge, models and methods are not necessarily managed. For example, more often than not, there is no version control in place, and updating the assets is hard to do consistently across the board. Also, it is difficult to visualize multiple views with scattered documents of a process view, a metrics view, a component view, a resource view, etc., which, in turn, makes it hard to link up upstream and downstream analyses.

This paper presents a practitioner’s tool for business transformation addressing these problems. Business Transformation Workbench is a productivity tool for business consultants. It is a tool to analyze business performance, to identify transformation opportunities and to assess the business value of specific transformation initiatives. The tool helps visualize the linkages of various enterprise models such as the business component model (CBM), the business process model, the value driver model, the organization model, the IT application model, and the solution model. It captures the direct linkages between these models and infers and presents the indirect linkages, thereby, providing valuable insight on how changing one aspect of an enterprise impacts the others qualitatively.

Using this tool, consultants can examine which business functions and components are underperforming in comparison to industry benchmark measures and why. By investigating the organizational responsibilities and IT application portfolio in conjunction with business components, shortfalls such as duplications, over-extensions, gaps and deficiencies can be identified and reasoned. Specific solutions can be discovered to address the identified shortfalls. Financial benefits of implementing specific solutions can be analyzed further via conducting a business case analysis. The Business Transformation Workbench embodies a method for conducting the above mentioned analyses in a structured manner to provide useful insights and various reports to consultants. The tool is populated with generic Finance & Accounting data and can be customized for specific clients' need. It embodies best practices and methodologies in a tool, which also helps address scalability, data management, and governance, linkages to upstream and downstream activities, analyses around benchmarking, component business model-based analysis, and business case preparation.