innateaspectsofprocessmanagement

Innovative people-centric process management is about encouraging and influencing process innovation and optimization. 

The "Social BPM" is a concept that describes collaboratively designed and iterated processes. These processes mirror the way work is performed from a "doer" perspective and experienced from a "receiver" perspective to harness the power of continuous learning from "the collective" insight. In short, "Social BPM - Design by Doing."

1. A Series of Questions upon Social BPM 

As “Social BPM” is just a concept that describes collaboratively designed and iterated processes. The term is very synonymous with “socially enabled processes”.

• Fundamental FAQ about Social BPM: What actually is Social BPM, how does it differ from regular BPM - is it just an attempt to provide a communication platform for sharing while designing automation? Is it the inclusion of "listeners" so that you can capture where and when your customers are talking about your products or services on social networks and then have that captured information start off processes within your organization automatically? 

• Tactical Questions about Social BPM: Do you need social things in your modeling tools when you are modeling/ designing a process? Is social so important in the execution of processes nowadays that we cannot ignore it as another enabler for process performance? Social" BPM as the understanding of the informal processes that exist in any work place,  It is part of the value network movement. Most processes are linear and structured and social is chaotic and non-linear. Clearly there are some processes that lend themselves to a more collaborative approach in the creative aspects of businesses. Here is where social-BPM can augment the activity by giving just enough structure without limiting innovation. The other question has to be is the cost of doing this worth the potential benefit? Majority perhaps vote "yes" because social computing is here to stay and users are becoming used to working in this manner. Forward-thinking businesses must adapt and adopt the new paradigm faster than the users do. 

• More questions: When we're trying to solve a business problem or improve our customers' experience, does it really matter how we categorize the activity and whether or not it is technically feasible (work around have been a reality for decades)? What comes first? Process or Collaboration? Is collaboration grafted onto process only? Or is process discovered through collaboration? Can we use the concepts of social and the philosophies of BPM to build a better solution? How do we use technology to build shareholder value? How can technology improve our lives? Does it help grow revenue and market share, build shareholder value, improve customers' experiences and operate more efficiently and then, you can call it "success". 

2.  Social BPM Intersects of Process and Collaborative Activities 

BPM describes what needs to be done and the order in which it needs to be done - so the process defines the way we do things - how the actual work can be done, and is often, left to the "doer" - The other point seems to be saying that because there is a carbon (people) component to the process then it is automatically social, but how does that move the agenda? - Processes exits (and always have) at two levels (carbon and silicon) and they interact with systems and people all the time. Also there are many touch points in processes that will take us into the collaboration world - social BPM is simply putting a tag onto something that is well known and well researched - start by looking into the case management to see

• Social BPM resides at the intersection of process and collaborative activity. It is supported by BPM and social software that make process design more visible and holistic Social BPM is not helping move the agenda along since it's simply a new monica for extending well known problems - remember today’s requirement solution often turn into tomorrow's problem. The focus ought to be on how the work gets done - that's paramount - the process is simply a mechanism to define how it's distributed and how to know when it's done - Case Management for instance.  

• Social BPM supports more-effective process execution through the use of social software tools that augment human actions to better mirror the way work is performed, while also providing visibility to this work. This includes the ability to support all process activities, such as collaboration, social networking, collective activities and communications, that are a natural part of "work" to create a holistic process design that is open to influence and change from a variety of perspectives (for example, customers, partners, suppliers, employees and the collective). As such, social BPM moves BPI closer to design by doing.  

• Social in the enterprise or in BPM is just a helper, it helps adoption of change, it supports better, faster and more flexible work, anywhere you are at any moment of the day, it means you are connected not only to your department but to the Enterprise and to the outside world as well. What is new is the speed with which our marketplaces are changing. There can be no doubt that technological change, and as a result many other types of changes, are growing exponentially. We are at the elbow of that exponential curve now and the rate of change is only going to speed up. There are benefits to incorporating user feedback in processes. From collaboration to social, it's more related to scale & scope, social means the abundance of collaboration at broader environment (either work or life setting) with much faster speed.  

3. Social BPM Energizes and Super-charges BPM 

Social BPM not only focus on process, it's about understanding the nature correlation & connection between people and process, if traditional BPM is a bit artificial mechanism, then, social BPM seems more nature & artistic.

• Social BPM has to deliver "Business Value": All the latest technology trend may also need to get more connected with its business purpose, how to engage employees, how to delight customers, to welcome the era of participation.  Social BPM is just an enabler for faster processing and for a better visibility of the business process from an end-user/customer perspective. With the current trend where Social Media has gained so much momentum, it just provides the option to reduce the friction between the business and the end user by involving a wider audience in a short span of time. Moreover its not necessarily a mandate. Every enterprise must decide on whether to adopt Social BPM based on the business objectives it is trying to achieve. Social BPM becomes very handy in situations where the social data needs to be exploited to reap better benefits targeted towards customer centricity. 

• Where social BPM should have led was in evolving the way business structures are perceived to make them more networked rather than in silos. Coupled with evolving the BPM method to encompass this new way of thinking, it might have been an enterprise revolution. And the sets of enterprise 2.0 tools (collaboration platform, gamification, analytics,...etc) will enable business effectiveness (doing the right thing via collective wisdom) and efficiency (doing thing right), the goal is to make business more agile, purpose driven, with flexibility. The use cases include:
  1) Using social as part of the design (business of business improvement)
  2) Embedding social into the pattern of work (social changes how work can be delivered)                 3) Inclusive rather than exclusive, low barriers to entry                                                                     4) Nevertheless, associated clearly with identity, not anonymity                                                         5) Designed for sharing, for community 

• Social BPM is an important pillar to build up an untethered social enterprise, to enforce culture of innovation, enhance cross-functional communication & iteration, re-tool enterprise architecture, and improve customer experience management.

            1) Managing projects

2) Recruiting & managing talent

3) Providing customer service

4) Increasing sales

5) Driving brand affinity

BPM is about managing knowing from flowing, then, social BPM is about encouraging and influencing process innovation and optimization. A highly orchestrated workforce is necessary to keep pace. Social BPM is the next practice via taking advantage of collaborative platform and knowledge sharing tools to refine and optimize processes from end-to-end to promote efficiency and effectiveness, nurture innovation, amplify collective human capabilities, or optimize customer experience & increase customer value

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Three Characteristics of Digital Enterprise

Increasingly, enterprises find themselves enmeshed in "eco-systems."

Digital enterprise with organizational democracy is a way of designing organizations to amplify the possibilities of human potential and collective human capabilities for the organization as a whole. Enterprises of the future are increasingly exhibiting such characteristics in various shades and intensity. Architecting for and operating in such environments will demand a different level of architectural maturity.

Enterprise architecture and enterprise architects have a central role in defining the enterprise of the future. This is different from the current thinking where EAs largely try to fit in with the current enterprise. Current thinking aims to define the target architecture (within the contours of the existing enterprise), but EAs should define the target enterprise (not merely the target architecture). There are three characteristics of a target digital enterprise.

1. Nonlinear & Emergent Complexity

Complexity has increased exponentially. Imagine the complexity that comes in due to these characteristics (less structure, fewer rules and regulations, diversity, ambiguity, unpredictability, lack of linearity, and increased flux) working and impacting together.

• The multitude of digital complexity: The emergent digital complexity includes hyper-connectivity, hyper-diversity, hyper-dynamism,  and the non-linear complexity such as less structure and multi-dimensional views, or design complexity such as highly-productive complexity, value/cost/risk ratio complexity; digital enterprise democracies are inherently and intensely complex. Moreover, these changes and more do not happen in isolation from each other in predictable ways. They act as a complex and unpredictable system, feeding, amplifying or ameliorating the effects of others and shaping enterprise architectures.  

• Managing complexity is an EA imperative. Most obviously there is a need to define precisely what processes and decisions can be executed locally and which centrally and ensuring that operational systems support those definitions. The question is whether the way enterprise architecture is done today (primarily in a top-down linear approach) sufficient or do enterprise architects have to explore new archetypes - more democratized enterprises to deal with complexity? Especially for those legacy industries and enterprises, as Big 4: Cloud, Social, Mobile, and Big Data are all shaping some wind power as four pillars to such a digital business transformation, in fact, it requires stronger, better and super capable enterprise architects to do well in environments which are characterized by less structure, fewer rules and regulations, diversity, ambiguity, unpredictability, lack of linearity and increased flux.     
      
• Globalization is another key driver that plays a role as including many other factors to consider: If enterprise architects have to influence how enterprises create long-term value for all stakeholders, they (EAs) better start to understand the process of democratization, the complexities it creates, and the role EAs can (and should) play given that this is an architecture issue. The bottom line is this; there are many rollups within EA and the enterprise architect, as ever, they must be the master planner of the new state to craft business artifact include: 

Leadership styles

Governance archetypes

Planning approaches

Customer engagements

Employee involvements

Product/service developments

Organization structures...

2. Organizational Democratization

Enterprise democratization could be at the tipping point for the biggest business shift, It means that the shift from being autocratic to democratic is transformational and profound (unparalleled in management history). Historically, autocratic enterprises are a result of natural organic evolution (not typically the outcome of architecture thinking). - It is hard to get democratization right - hence it will need to be thought through and "architected." 

Is complexity the cause of or the consequence of enterprise democratization? That democratization introduces complexity, and increasing complexity requires democratization (closed reinforcing loop), require enterprises to rethink their structures and behavior. In this scenario, what does the enterprise architect bring to the table?

• Digital Enterprise Democratization is to enforce Culture of Innovation: Is democratization the management innovation we have been looking for, Enterprise Democratization is, in the first instance, NOT an EA issue, it is a question of understanding and changing Enterprise Culture. It is a cultural issue. Then we can use EA as changes in enterprise culture may require changes in business processes and their supporting information technologies.  There are many good reasons EA needs to be involved in designing the social domain and the drivers are everywhere including the challenge of attracting new young talent such as the Millennial generation especially are driving changes in “how we work” (requiring work shifting design) and they expect to work from anywhere at any time. An observation of human nature, as it applies to organizational “management models”, is that it is not universal. For the most part, organizational human nature is a reflection of the underlying national culture. This is a challenge for multi-national organizations that can excel in performance in the different regions and grow to be a truly global enterprise.  

• Enterprise Digital/Social Architecture (ESA) is one of the most exciting focus areas for EA. The people construct social domain of the enterprise has always been neglected or ignored when practicing EA discipline and the shift from push power (autocratic) to pull power (democratic) is profound indeed. People and cultures are inherently complex and intentional design in this area will have a positive benefit for any organization. Change from capital centered structures to knowledge-centered structures,  dissolution of rigid organizational hierarchies into self-managed relatively autonomous units that use local knowledge to address the unique market dynamism  

• Enterprise Democratization (ED) is a Governance Issue (that influences and gets influenced by culture). EAs today are extremely inward-looking - not attempting to understand the system their enterprises operate in, let alone create it. Enterprise democratization requires understanding and changing organizational culture and then changing governance mechanisms, processes, and the IT support of those processes and mechanisms. How do current day EA frameworks stack up depends on the degree to which they effectively support enterprise governance; and the degree to which an EA framework addresses Enterprise/Organizational culture.

3 Enterprise Enmeshed in an “Eco-System”

Increasingly, enterprises find themselves enmeshed in "eco-systems," whether they like it or not. For the most part, while they can influence and get influenced by these "ecosystems," they have limited "control" over these eco-systems. Autocratic enterprises are limited by their DNA to take benefit of such ecosystems - after all such systems are most likely to have a lattice-based architecture, rather than a hierarchy. So we now have architectural mismatch wherein enterprises that are internally hierarchical, have to operate in an environment where the external structure is a lattice.

• Enterprises have always been parts of simple or complex eco-systems. That is the fundamental nature of the marketplace and the environment within which the enterprise functions. In order to function, an enterprise has to be linked to the many and varied ‘touchpoints’ between itself and the marketplace environment of which it is a part. Why should it matter if the internal organization is hierarchical and the eco-system is lattice? The enterprise is nothing more than a ‘switch’ in the network lattice of the eco-system. The aspect which matters is ensuring that the enterprise is connected to all the appropriate eco-system, lattice, or otherwise, touchpoints.      
      
• The optimal internal structure – autocratic <-> democratic – of the enterprise is the one which provides the greatest effectiveness and efficiency, and depends, in large measure, on the nature and purpose of the enterprise. Business change is hyper-accelerating, especially as it relates to the people and value creation dimensions and it is more important than ever to engage sharp thought leaders to help the enterprise chart the course and set a better sail. It is critical that EA diligently focuses on the people construct and through deliberate design, craft a more socially connected and dynamic people-centered eco-system, taking full advantage of the massive shift from push to pull power.  

• EA is not only a mechanism; it's also a philosophy and methodology to enable such a best scenario. In the digital enterprise, it is not necessarily the case that a less structured and more dynamic enterprise means a diminished role for EA. Such an organization essentially needs strong, viable DNA to sustain its operation and ongoing flexibility and agility. EA will assist it in determining what it needs to focus on and strengthen in order to attain this state. As long as the interfaces are provided and remain, why it should matter what happens. In contrast, (1) individual enterprises and the eco-systems they operate in are both complex adaptive systems. Such systems do not operate in a linear, predictable way as the whole notion of the "master-slave" relationship does not work and (2) such systems also have the added complexity of not just dynamic relationships but also dynamic nodes. 

It probably comes to the conclusion that if one wishes to pursue enterprise democratization, then EA provides a philosophy, methodology, and mechanism for making it more visible what is being decided about and therefore will become a valuable tool. Digital enterprise with organizational democracy is the means to the end, it means people enjoy sharing knowledge, values, and wisdom, then divergent thoughts can be converted into more objective and effective decision making by wise leaders, execute the strategy and create values for all shareholders in long run. 

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EA’s Three Big Views of Big Data

Nowadays, Big Data emerges to be part of business strategy as it has potential to provide foresight upon future of product & service, thus, EA is required to know Big Data based on Domain they are working upon and continue to make inquiry such as:  How is Big Data influencing strategic technology investment and choices? What are the implications for IT governance and data governance? Does Big data fundamentally change anything about your Enterprise Architecture, or is it just a modest tweak of the information architecture that's in place now? 

 1. EA View of Big “V” of Big Data 

Besides Volume, Variety and Velocity, the other "V" –Value which interests EA the most. Without the ability to repurpose and extract intrinsic value from the data and content to facilitate social innovation, the big data premise is useless. So EAs need to comprehend the "so what" factor and make the concerted effort to extract the business value behind big data and fuel its impact on social innovation.

• Big Data Influences EA Design: When you include Big Data as an essential driver / guiding principle to develop the architecture for a business capability (Example loyalty), it has a great impact on the way the capability is designed, developed and enabled. It can be leveraged to open up exciting opportunities and strategic advantages.  

• Enterprise Technology Architects need to understand how Businesses can benefit from Big Data and explain it in financial benefit terms to Businesses. Big-Data has huge potential in providing Business Intelligence and Analytics done on unstructured data (word, excel, .pdf, images, videos etc.) as compared to traditional BI technologies, to optimized management or finance reporting, in which case you may first go back to the strategy to find a driver 

2. EA View of Big Data Strategy & Technology 

The business perception is changing. Technology strategy is no longer a backseat after-thought of business strategy. We are in the era of technology strategy driving business strategy - a first at such a scale in our lifetime - and it will become more and more common in the future, as more often than not, technology is innovation disrupter cross-sectors. This allows technical minded individuals to push technology boundaries to achieve business capabilities that some business people won't understand but agree need to be done in order to survive. Is BIG data (or whatever it will be called then) one of those?

• Big Data & EA Mutual Decency: The business goal for Big Data is to optimize customer experience and gain insight upon future products and service, which is consistent with the purpose of EA to bridge the current state and to-be state of business, that said, on one hand, EA, DA or SA can help business craft Big Data strategy, framework and solution, on the other hand, the insight captured from Big Data can also feed back in designing more practical enterprise architecture So, in that context, it appears that Big Data is (1) opening up data sets to analysis where the business value is speculative and, (2) removing the need for technology workarounds that add complexity and reduce velocity.  

• An EA needs to know about basic concepts about Big Data such as No SQL database, column database, distributed processing, distributed file systems and the other emergent technology trend and framework:  1) There is a growing interest in analytics such as SaaS providers and data visualization services. 2) There is a big impact in the way these Big Data services and vendors are integrated and rationalized into the organizations  

3. EA View of Big Data Governance

 Governance becomes very important when Big Data drives critical business processes impacting customer experience and financial.

• Big Data Impact Process and Architecture: Doesn’t that fundamentally change something about the organization and its architecture? Obviously it affects the processes involved in acquiring, managing, storing and analyzing that data. But more broadly, how about innovation strategy, information governance, and risk management 

• EA’s Role in Governing Big Data Project: Although in reality, most of forward-thinking businesses work hard to get benefit from the amount of data, very few achieve expected result. More than 75% of BI projects fail to reach expectation, lack of architecture consistency is one of pitfalls, from EA/DA perspective, how to become part of team, in order to to improve project success rate?  How to leverage limited resource to deploy Big Data? What are strategy and best practice in deploying Big Data projects 

Thus, EA’s view upon Big Data is not about “cool” or catching the eye of management as such, but the true business value it can capture and turning “Big Data” into “Big Insight/Foresight” and gold mine of digital businesses. 

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How to Promote IT Effectively

The best way to promote IT is to communicate proactively with critical thinking and a creative mind.

It is no secret that IT can often only be noticed when things are broken, the CIO and his/her team should be the leading persons driving that message of IT value throughout the enterprise. They are, after all, the face of the IT organization. The key challenge is to demonstrate what you provide can help the client achieve some critical purpose of theirs.

1. Marketing IT through Proactive Communications              

Either to internal or external audiences, promoting IT is to achieve business objectives. Modern CIOs and other IT leaders do need to become good marketers themselves in order to engage in business communication and change. IT reputation from a cost center to a value center. Besides a clear message from IT leaders, it's more effective and efficient to train all client-facing IT people to become better at influence. All communicators must understand the messaging and use it.

2. Successful Communication Achieves Clear Business Goals

Successful communication programs are designed to affect change or encourage adoption of a product or service -- internally or externally. And it must be ongoing, consistent and measurable to achieve results. Try to do this by providing system availability stats, actual cost savings related to IT efforts (such as automating a manual task), and clearly defining the value of development efforts often in terms of revenue enhancement. In addition, it may also be persuasive when selling the costs associated with redundancy, DR and Business Continuity as insurance, while calculating and communicating realistic costs of downtime is critical to justify and address budgetary concerns

3. Good IT Promotion to get Business Buy-In

To persuade people to fund a program, adopt a product or change the way they do things. You must understand who your audiences are and what their specific concerns are and then create consistent communications that address those concerns. And IT should cultivate talent with multiple skill sets including how to influence others, understand both business & technology, cure the root cause of problems, instead of just fixing the symptom, especially now, IT needs to work more collaboratively with marketing department & other functions to drive outside-in customer-centric solutions.

4. The Message must be Written for what's Relevant 

Target each audience's specific concerns. - Is the proposal compelling? Does it address a critical purpose or goal? - Is it valid? (Can you demonstrate - to a non-technical person - that it will work as claimed?).  Is it implementable? (Can you execute if we commit). The messaging needs to be written that's relevant to tailor customers' needs and achieve clear business goals.

5. Communication Assets 

Diversified content (blogs, website content, brochures, posters, talking points, email content, internal and external PowerPoint presentations, etc.) need to be written and designed in terms that are relevant to the intended audience and distributed via channels that are used by the targeted audience. Why create a newsletter if you don't have an email list to distribute it to or why blog if you don't keep content fresh and also create awareness for your blog? 

6. Understand both Business & IT Language Proficiently

The effective IT promotion skill is to know how to explain technical concepts to technical people and non-technical people. They also can have the expertise to understand the value and benefit of an IT initiative and how that will positively change an organization or business process. It's a specialty that requires a blend of technical understanding and expertise in best practices in communications.

The best way to promote IT is to communicate more proactively with critical thinking and creative mind, the clear message from IT is to have business buy-in, grow IT as change/innovation engine, and IT needs to communicate the new perspective effectively in order for the organization as a whole to move forward. 

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EA as Strategy Steward

EA function can add value by creating and managing a 'strategy framework' (custodian of) to help ensure that strategies are articulated that assist bridging to execution.

There are a number of definitions of Enterprise Architecture that describe it as helping to realize the enterprise strategy, translating business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change. 

A difficulty with this is that strategies are often so poorly articulated that they are almost impossible to translate into anything realistically achievable. Some strategies are little more than project road maps, whilst others are wish lists of improbable objectives. Should Enterprise Architecture be the agent of enterprise strategy?

1. Enterprise Architecture, as a discipline and a function, should be responsible for the form and expression of enterprise strategy, certainly the quality of the artifact, and preferably contributing to the development of its content. The best way to shape an effective form of strategy, enterprise, or departmental, is to facilitate its development. 

2. EA can be used to help express what business capabilities will be required or have been assumed to be required to execute business strategy. It will give some line of sight to various assumptions, test out completeness, highlight interdependencies, etc. To this extent, it is aiding the process that takes an organization from published strategy to fully executed strategy.  

3. EA can add value by "QA" the strategy outputs, showing where there are inherent weaknesses, giving visibility to critical hidden assumptions which would render the strategy virtually un-executable. That, is a genuine opportunity and role as strategy agent, it means assuring quality, including that an appropriate development process has been followed as well as the form and logic of the artifact(s). 

4. EA can be the bridge between vision and tactics and thus can act as the steward of the strategy. Today we complete the strategy, tomorrow we execute the strategy. To bridge between strategy and execution is to be actively involved in and contributing to strategy development with the outcome being a strategy with its associated program plan, ready for execution.  In the end, getting consensus and agreement in the organization is critical. Consequently, an EA function can add value by creating and managing a 'strategy framework' (custodian of) to help ensure that strategies are articulated that assist bridging to execution. 

5. EA discovers, documents and formulates a common cross-domain communications vehicle of language (normative glossary), models, relationships and analysis to bring the whole of the enterprise's interests to a consistently understood view of the as-is and desired-future state of the enterprise concerns. Strategies are often poorly articulated or aren't really strategies, which can mean a huge amount of misdirected activity and investment 

6. Strategy is definitely a foundation component of enterprise architecture - but from complete comprehension, improvement inputs and practicality test perspectives. EA should have (significant) contributory role in crafting well articulated, realistic, achievable and executable strategy (and objectives). EA is trusted advisor, enabler and informer to decision maker or strategy custodians 

7.  An EA group has to manage all aspects of strategy. They have to manage a reasonably stable standard core to support real innovation that could be built on top. They also need to manage the growth or evolution of core itself, as well as gracefully handling special projects. And two of the major problems of business strategies are (1) they are poorly communicated and (2) poorly understood. As a result people are unsure of 'What is happening', 'What they should do', and most importantly 'Why anything needs to be changed'. 

Therefore, EA provides visibility & insight upon Strategy: A good strategy takes creativity, but neither strategy nor innovation is serendipity only, it takes structure or framework, that's the role EA should play, to balance the two sides of world, or two parts of human brain, innovation vs. standardization; creativity vs. logic, analysis vs. synthesis, management vs. governance. EA does not REQUIRE that everything fits within the "tried and true" architecture. What EA ideally does, is to provide visibility and insight into the costs/resources associated with various business strategies. EA can evaluate business's capabilities to implement strategy, also design risk/governance management process in executing strategy

Read more about EA roles in digital enterprise: 

EA as Complexity Master

EA as Process Conductor

EA as Capability Producer

EA as Change Agent

EA as Strategy Steward

EA as Innovation Enthusiast 

 

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How to Build CoE Analytics

Analytics is a journey that more and more organizations head on, there’re road maps have been outlined, shall they also build Center of Excellence in sharing resource and govern practices? What do organizations need to consider if they are thinking about building their own internal Advanced Analytics Center of Excellence and what should be the measures of success?

1. A defined purpose for the CoE is key, measure success against those goals that support the purpose and mission of the COE. A good Cost benefit analysis, some quick hits and a motivation for folks to utilize the COE are key factors as well... 

2. Most CoEs start with and revolve around a solid methodology: from strategy and visioning, to architecture and design, and a strong dose of change management. Analytic implementations have many nuances you don't find in other more traditional app development or implementation projects, so a specific well-honed analytic approach is truly necessary. if businesses use CoE extensively, and it produces high ROI, it is successful. This assumes that data governance, data quality, security etc. is impeccable. 

3. Executive sponsorship is a key factor. Strong business involvement at all levels is critical to success, such as executive sponsorship. Quick turn around on the business's request and high utilization by business are the measure of success. The people leading an analytics center need to have a particular mix of characteristics. They must be able to speak to management but also have a very strong grasp of the modeling concepts. If they cannot convey their vision of analytics to the rest of the company, then the analytics group may eventually be perceived as interesting but not necessarily meaningful work done by back-room staff. 

4. It is crucial that domain expertise and institutional knowledge be reflected in the reports, tools, and predictive models that the center of expertise creates. Analytics is one of the most widely applicable competencies in business… and also one of the most interdisciplinary practices. A good analytics team should therefore represent a range of skills and perspectives. Within the technical realm, a good team should contain talented systems people, dedicated data experts and statistical programmers, as well as statisticians and machine learning experts who are capable of creatively fashioning technical solutions to business problems. or taking an analytics initiative to fly. 

5. Analytics Talent in CoE are “interpreters” who are capable of speaking the language of multiple disciplines. So an analytics COE should be conceived neither as a back room full of number crunchers nor as an ivory tower R&D group. Not coincidentally, the COE - and its products - will gain a lot more traction within the rest of the organization if it is organized to have strong links with the business units that it is intended to serve. In short, a range of skills and perspectives, strong intellectual and social links with the rest of the organization are key.  

6. A center of excellence would define the time frame and detailed objectives for achieving enterprise-wide excellence. Excellence can be defined and measured by applying a framework that clearly identifies the differentiators. At the highest level, businesses that have truly knowledgeable business intelligence people implement technology that works, provides clean usable data and uses proven processes to consistently maintain value. Measuring the degree of excellence is accomplished through use of the capability maturity model (CMM) against each of the pillars of success. 

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Tough Choice for Project Management: Do you Know When to Pull the Plug on Project?

If a project no longer provides its planned business benefit, for whatever reason, logically the project should be stopped and its resources need to be re-distributed. However, in reality, the pressure to keep project going because "success is just around the corner" can be extremely strong.  It is also important to note that if a project has exceeded its budget and the business can't see many benefits, then it can happen. Or the projects have had to be cancelled because the economic climate or other times new management comes in and they are under pressure to cut the costs.  Sometimes a project may be a total failure but it is completed because the expenses are required to be claimed in tax.  The reasons why such circumstances happen may vary, the point is how to learn the skills to know when to pull the plug on the projects smoothly? 

• Lack of  Proper Project Preparation: Statistically, only 20% of the projects analyzed the business benefits of the projects, it can be summed up with proper project preparation. An IT project needs to be viewed as any other project in the enterprise, with the due diligence necessary to ensure good results. If you can't, you should not be tackling a project of any scale. You will not be able to define measurable goals, monitor spend, gain any metrics and determine progress. 

• There are two types of 'forced' completion. The first is when the project is no longer under the portfolio management and governance oversight and carries on independently of this process. This could be that the oversight process itself is very poor, which leads to the second cause being that of vested interest. This second cause tends to flourish in organizations where there are poor oversight mechanisms.  

• The human effect and that many projects are not 'scoped' out properly, it is the job of good governance to ensure that these effects are minimized. This same good governance will stop even the best planned projects if the conditions change. A good project is started, business thinks it is fantastic, and IT commits on developing the project without locking the project scope. Business is asking to include all possible features and the result is a budget overrun which follows cancellation. So the IT Project Manager needs to monitor and control the scope and deliver the project with all features in many releases rather than just one. 
      
  Project governance should be proportional to the size and complexity of a project/program. As size and budget increases, so should the governance around it. Effective governance forums and Steering Groups should ensure that projects remain relevant, are changed to re-align or are axed. This involvement of senior stakeholders and executive oversight tends to negate the worst aspects of vested interest and decisions tend to be made more objectively 

• PM Skill Limitation: That questions the triple constraint of scope, budget and time triangle as being too constrained and needs to include skills such as business acumen, relationship management and finance knowledge. The point is being that many projects fail by a strict adherence to the belief that a PM only manages the core constraints. It  is also caused by inappropriate scope, the wrong methodology being used (Waterfall vs. Agile), the ineffective PPM & mechanism, the wrong set of measure to monitor project progress. or more fundamentally, it's just the wrong project to start with-lack of clear business justification     

Generally speaking, it's Governance Issues: Carrying a project through to completion when it has lost its relevance is likewise a failure, and often demonstrates that a project has become 'independent' of the portfolio management process. It is an important skill is to know when to pull a project - but it is not just a 'one person' view, it needs to be part of a governance process that continually aligns the project outcomes back to a set of business driven KPIs. When the KPIs change, then the project needs to re-align, and if this means a change to scope, budget, time, quality, etc, then the process of assessment and cost-benefit analysis needs to kick in. 

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Seven Business Touch Points for BI

Businesses have many issues and decisions that need to be addressed. Some of these are well suited for business analytics solutions. Analytics are being used in virtually every industry in multiple ways and the race continues to find the next new area that can make a difference. What are some business issues and decisions that could be helped by Business Analytics?

1. The most critical point is BA/BI should be the most effective tool to help executives to make the right decision at the right time.  The field of Decision Sciences can be viewed as a combination of analytics, economics, psychology, and philosophy. Helping businesses make better, unbiased decisions is not an art, it is science and should be viewed as so. There is a great opportunity for Decision Sciences beyond business environments, it’s focal point upon how to apply analytics to make better decisions, regardless of what they are, and how to build tools, methodologies and software to help people make better decisions – analytics is at the core of it all. 

2. Increasing the organization's profitability would be the other important value proposition. Profitability is key to running a successful business. Looking at which products or services and customers are most profitable to your business can give you great insights into running a company or division. In certain circumstances, business analytics should also provide a platform for predicting business consequences. Frequently, different business units would have different opinions on a business issue; the platform is the place for testing all the suggested options with predicted business consequences. The insights identified through the tests could lead to an “optimal” business decision. 

3. Analytics-Oriented Talent Management: HR move away from one-dimensional workforce reporting on staffing levels and labor costs, toward more strategic, analytically-driven dynamic workforce planning. it’s been transformed from supportive back office to strategic function. The ability to help set corporate strategy through an understanding of national or global workforce patterns can be a game-changer for organization. BI and workforce analytics can provide talent/performance insight. to ensure the right people at the right position. 

4. Looking for analytics that help them to better predict future business performance. In nearly every company there exist 5-10 key drivers that are truly correlated with future performance. In the past using simple regression analysis could help identify these drivers but the data sets were limited, primarily internally generated. With the tools available today, the data sets that can be analyzed are much larger and much more important, it allows for external data to also be analyzed and used for predicting future performance, identify the pool of possible drivers both internal and external and with the help of today's tools,  the truly predictive parameters can be identified and incorporated as part of the recurring forecast process. 

5. Handling uncertainty - reduction, avoidance, impact mitigation. Case in point is Asset Intelligence being the focal tech-enabled business trend. While technology and solutions are no longer 'very' challenging to develop and deploy, real benefit will be derived from transitioning the management of assets from Reactive to Predictive - controlling uncertainty in business' response to events on resources managed through extensive analytics 

6. Related to pricing optimization analytics, the emerging field of advanced demand forecasting directly affects production planning and efficiency. Platforms that hold the data for demand forecasting are becoming increasingly common. Supply Chain use analytics to predict the inventory, optimize logistic & procurement.  

7. Customer service and sales &marketing department should use BI to measure and improve BPM, gain the insight about the customers' true demand, enforce multi-channel communication channels, develop the next generation of products/service, tune digital touch point in customer experience life cycle. 

One of the most striking things about analytics is its wide range of applicability. In any domain in business – or elsewhere – in which human experts are regularly called on to make predictions, classifications, or segmentations by combining disparate pieces of information, chances are that analytical methods can be fruitfully applied.

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EA as Process Conductor

From an EA perspective, a business process is a set of activities that takes inputs and transforms them into outputs, adding value to an organization and its stakeholders.

Everything in the world is represented by a thing with a state or a relationship between things with the state. A process can be defined as anything that modifies a thing with state or anything that forms, breaks, or modifies a relationship between things with the state. In that sense, everything is a process, and a business is simply a chain of processes that gets very complex at times. BPM usually goes hand-in-hand with EA, what is a business process from an EA perspective?

1.  EA without BPM would not yield and vice-versa. Properly defining a process, versus a function, value stream, capability, and building block is one of the key roadblocks for both BPM and EA, which come from different backgrounds and still evolve independently. 

2. From an EA perspective, a business process is a set of activities that takes inputs and transforms them into outputs, adding value to an organization and its stakeholders. The value chain processes produce indeed goods and services and deliver them to the customers. Therefore the value chain process is the flow of activities, which include what managers, employees and IT applications do. Not all processes can be modeled in a finite process engine, but that does not mean they are not processes.

3. Capturing "how" business performs a set of tasks to achieve the desired capability is a business process. EA Line of Business needs to have a set of desired capabilities to achieve business goals. The capability, therefore, represents a higher level of abstraction representing the "what" aspect to achieve. These business capabilities are then prioritized to arrive at future state hypothesis. While doing current state analysis, the business capabilities are shown in heat map or kind of represented in gaps. Further, how to derive (via simulation and with some accuracy) the enterprise phenotype from the enterprise genotype? Imagine:
- All artifacts are explicit and digital
- All artifacts are versionable throughout their lifecycle
- All relationships between these artifacts are modeled explicitly
- All models are made to be executable 

4. EA as Process Conductor: EA should consider things like: Do I have to support both synchronous and asynchronous processing? Do I need a rules engine for what I do? How do I integrate my systems across geographies and languages? Rather than worrying about whether something is a flow or a process or a function, be focused on the capabilities needed to support business processes, and not focused on the business process itself.

5.  EA provides a holistic view of the process with all relevant elements. The business processes often contain specific activities that are automated, in whole or in part, and the manager is ultimately responsible for achieving the desired output of the process. In order to do this, he/she needs to be in charge of all of the elements of the process, including employees, business rules, applications, incentives. etc.  

6.  There are different ways to manage the process; EA can always complement the process view about BUSINESS TRANSPARENCY with adaptability/interoperability. Especially, EA can provide System-wide view as it's critical to account for cross-cutting concerns (master data, governance, value chain integration, etc.) The concepts that define the processes to be executed include:

Top-down: business objectives, value streams
Inside-out: operational targets and process goals
Outside-In: customer perception and experience
Bottom-Up: people knowledge and innovation

7.   Processes are about flows, architectures are about assets.

As a corollary, processes are identified by governing events and should be classified accordingly. Business processes are governed by changes in the relationship between the enterprise and its business environment.

      BPM as a management discipline (using the process to manage business)
BPM as software (BPM suite); 
BPM as a portfolio of the business processes of an enterprise, and the practices and tools for governing the design, execution and evolution of this portfolio (enterprise BPM system)

EA is like a compass to guide through BPM journey, as BPM is not a one-time project, it’s continuous improvement.

Read more about EA roles in the digital enterprise: 

EA as Complexity Master

EA as Process Conductor

EA as Capability Producer

EA as Change Agent

EA as Strategy Steward

EA as Innovation Enthusiast 

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Big Analytics Starts Small

Becoming analytics driven is a big undertaking. But that doesn’t mean you need a big project. Big Data can start small. A pilot is a perfectly acceptable start and often the best way to gain momentum.

1. Becoming analytics driven is more a state of mind than an activity. If that’s the case then the key thing is creating simple 'Eureka' experiences which change mindset by letting people experience in lots of small ways just how big difference it can make to performance if you know what your key measures are , know how you are doing on them each day and keep them in your face at all times. 

2. Pilot programs are useful when they demonstrate tangible value. Take something small and manageable and test it within the organization. Two other key pieces are education and marketing the WIFM (what's in it for me). Sometimes a senior team member does not understand one of the key data analytics used by the company and won't be comfortable asking, so it can really pay off to have a quick one-on-one session to discuss the analytics and how they can benefit that executive. 

3. Connect analytics projects with BPI-business process improvement project, to pick the right initiative either base on re-purposed business goal or low hanging fruit, to deliver the manageable result with visible metrics. Keep clear goal in mind, either to optimize business processes or to improve customer satisfaction, with manageable metrics and incentives to inspire the participation. 

4. POC or POV helps in building that acceptance from Pilot to Full Scale purchase of software. Establish small pilot study / analysis to show the efficiency of the procedure / economics of purchasing the software that is where proving the value of analytics is required, as many times businesses are not ready to invest on big bang tools yet.     
       
5. Cultivating the analytics culture is sometimes even more critical than project itself, Analytics culture or mindset is required among senior management team to accept the future. A lot of input data and lot of understanding is must. Then only it can show true output of a POC to impress the customer. Still, people are the key, not only the knowledgeable analysts, but also enthusiastic power users, the top-down leadership sponsorship, and supportive end customers 

6. Start with Driver (Drivers) mattering the most for the company. In a perfect world, analytics
   
   should embrace the whole organization and should be built around the business drivers that matter the most for that company. In reality, if you're going to get greater acceptance by starting with just one driver and measuring some or all of the KPIs relative to that driver, that's the way to start. It’s important to learn as much as you can from small programs and use that knowledge in developing subsequent programs 

7. Even starting with a proof-of-concept or a focused pilot, for the large organization, the BI framework should be blueprinted via the holistic view and long term perspective, to avoid the multiple BI platforms with inconsistency in the future, to ensure the effective data governance/ management. 

Developing and maintaining a culture that values "analytics" is a journey. It often starts from and grows with leaders consistently seeking fact-based recommendations and decisions. Leadership support and executive sponsorship are critical success factors to becoming an analytics-driven organization.

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An Inquisitive Leader: Leading by Asking

The Future Of Leaders Lead by Asking.  –Peter Drucker

The business and the world becomes over-complex and hyper-dynamic, how can leaders become more comfortable and confident in asking questions rather than giving answers?  As in many, if not most instances, there is a perception that leaders "should" be the most experienced and thus have all of the answers.  That's a fallacy. Confidence comes from being comfortable in your role as a leader, acknowledging that your job as a leader is NOT to provide answers but facilitate solutions.

1. Why Should Leaders Ask Good Questions 

During the leadership interaction, disagreements will arise naturally. So asking questions means you truly want to know the answers and there is a certain honesty about it which propels you forward as a leader, so you become a leader when you are already comfortable and confident with questions. While in reality, when leaders don't know the answers, they sometimes go silent and stop communicating, much to the detriment of team engagement, it is partly due to the fact that many leaders' success is based on expertise and so the thought of not having the answer can be quite threatening.

• Effective leaders want to understand the issue, so they ask. Leaders are great thinkers, visionaries, and analyzer of the situation. They will always ask questions to people around them, get views of everybody, learn about the subject when necessary and then use their leadership qualities to resolve the situation or make decisions which would be appreciated by everybody. Only when they see and understand the problem from the other person's perspective, are they able to give an answer that makes sense to the team?  

• Effective leaders always ask tough questions It is almost like confusing true leadership with position or rank as they need input from a variety of sources before making decisions. Leaders could gain MORE trust and respect by asking the tough questions. By doing so, the team feels that the leader is interested in helping get the work done, The more interactive the conversations can be, the more valued everyone feels.  

• Effective leaders ask by looking for options: Third, leaders may be inflexible about the goal but they are extremely flexible with the strategy for attaining that goal. They will embrace different strategies if they will get to the goal quicker and more effectively. As a result, they are always looking for options and the only way to discover options is to ask.  

2.    How to Help Leaders Get Better at Asking

A leader asking better questions can be perceived as assessing the ability of the asked when the leader is attempting only to understand a visionary opportunity. This is where a leader must exercise their cognitive and sociological sensitivity when asking better questions. For some, this is a natural approach. For others, it is a matter of practice. They need to see that they do not lose respect by not having all the answers but rather are able to knit together a higher functioning team. This is also related to the ability to delegate effectively

• There are two things that help leaders get better at asking. One is to have an understanding of why this is important. That includes understanding something about the benefits of thinking through problems, identifying solutions that can work and verbalize actions that will lead to goals. And even more importantly, it includes helping leaders trust the people they wish to lead and make an objective decision via the state, ask, decide, act approach. 

• The attitude behind the questions is also very important. Is the attitude behind questioning of seeking involvement? Whether it is sincere enough of respecting co-workers knowledge & inviting contributions? True leaders have a lot of sincerity behind their questions, developed with a lot of patience & practice. 

• Practice is always a good idea. So, practice asking questions and being quiet for a while, get input before providing opinions and listen before you speak. All good qualities of leadership require practice, some practical tools, and ideas. Even five examples of questions that can work in a variety of situations can be extremely useful. (What do you think might work? Tell me more about your situation. What’re your most concerns about this?) These can be used by leaders to get them into the practice of asking rather than answering. Then the more they ask, the better they get at it and the most refined they can make their questions. 

• 5W+1H Inquiry Navigation: Start with why questions, as for why questions lead to people sharing their opinions. When they have a staff meeting and there are actions that need to be accomplished, they ask:
  - What needs to be done?
  - Who is responsible for what?
  - When will you begin working on this?
  - What resources do you need to be successful?
  - When will it be completed?
  - How will you measure success?
  - How will you provide feedback (to the leader, group, customer or?)
  - How will continuous improvement be accomplished?  

 3. Questions and answers are two Sides of the Same Coin 

It's not a matter of whether you should ask or tell more. It's important to do what is right in a situation; discussing things as appropriate. That way you maintain a professional integrity that works to control questions on your authority or gratification with power.

 

• The Paradox of Asking vs. Answering: There is a real political effect that occurs in social organizations. Part of this is representing the vision and operation of the business. It's just human nature that many people have an initial reaction to questions like these. The asking can come across as weakness, confusion, and desperation for leadership. On the other hand, people are just as inclined to deny absolute authority to those in positions of leadership to them. Just because they are in that position, doesn't always mean they necessarily know what is best 

• All leaders need to ask questions, but they also need to assist in providing answers. Good leaders will do both naturally. Confidence comes through experience. So make sure you ask good questions that elicit the best out of your employees. True leaders have always been intrigued and they have always asked questions - to themselves, to circumstances, to books, to experiences, and to other fellow people. A good attitude of a leader should aspire to confidence in both asking questions and giving answers rather equally 

• Improve Leadership Maturity: How can those in authority evolve from their current ego-centric sense of self toward developing a greater (more human) sense of self? In doing so, coupled with the development of their critical thinking ability, all of these wonderful ideas like caring about the development of others, listening & developing trust, respecting others, engaging the minds of others...etc will naturally emerge. How can all of us learn that answers are not ends, but the means for greater inquiry? If there are no questions, there will be no answers. The more we question, the more we know, we learn and thereafter we teach and spread our learning.  

Future leaders need to become more comfortable and confident in asking questions. Think one of the fundamental capacities of a leader, with or without role authority, is that they are open learners, meaning that are willing to engage the ambiguity of the context in service of what contributes to the long-term health of the system. Since curiosity is a natural aspect of learning, confidence in asking questions would be one measure of one's capacity to learn. Asking questions tells us that we are still curious, still willing to learn, which is one of the characteristics of effective leaders at the age of information abundance.

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Why is Enterprises Success so Difficult to Replicate

Business capabilities are path-dependent. 

There are many businesses in the world; few are very successful, what are “Differentiating Factors" which can make business more successful - even if the business model/strategy was duplicated - there has to be something "better" or different.

Distinctive Business Capabilities are Key Differentiator

A business capability defines "What" a business does or can do by encapsulating all organization resources (tangible, intangible or human resources). Enterprise success is dependent upon a few core and differentiating business capabilities.

• Business capabilities are path-dependent: A firm's capabilities today are the result of its history and this history constrains what capabilities the firm can perform in the future. Due to this reason, business capabilities cannot be bought in the marketplace. To acquire a business capability, one has to acquire the company owning the capability as well. Hence, it’s difficult to replicate the capabilities of one company by another company.     
        
• There are many "ingredients" within a capacity: Among them, Capability encapsulates Process, People and Technology and other intangible and tangible resources which are important for a business capability to be effective. One capability may be implemented by multiple business processes for multiple products and services. The process is important as "glue" which coordinates (like an orchestra's conductor) other ingredients to produce a particular result. Also, the process is more flexible than many other ingredients. And explicit processes have many useful features. 

• Distinctive Capabilities as Success Factor: Capabilities *are* abilities that organizations have and are closely related to competencies. It is not a matter of replicating capabilities per se, it is a question of understanding the 'distinctive capabilities' of an organization and attempting to replicate those.  

The People Dimension-Culture Factors

Capabilities are not the sole source of success. One could perfectly replicate a set of capabilities, but if they are deployed in a different context, they might not ensure success.

• The culture role: One of the most challenging aspects is upon understanding the role that organizational culture plays in the 'distinctiveness' of the capabilities. Even more challenging is attempting to replicate the culture because the culture is organization-wide, not capability-based. In order to replicate the distinctive capabilities of an organization, you first have to replicate the distinctive culture of the organization.  

• Culture is a collective human behaviors and habits that could be considered part of the people skills/competencies component to model a business capability. It is through the culture, routines/processes are established and through these routines, resources are integrated and ultimately capabilities are developed 

• The business capability model, one of the elements of business capability is to capture the cultural element as well. It is considered an intangible resource. A business capability is the ability of an organization to perform a particular type of work and may involve people with particular skills, knowledge and culture, intellectual property, operating facilities, software, tools, and equipment, etc.

A model of culture should include:
- What is Culture?
- How is Created?
- How is it operationalized & maintained?
- How is it expressed?

People, culture, leadership, circumstances, belief, etc are all very important - but the cases where replication has seemed to work all align this to flexibility and a focus on what the principles underlying the "copied" enterprise was, and how they can then be best applied to the new structure. 

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