Achieving Business Goals

Chief information officers today have a challenge in maintaining consistency across the technology environment for many reasons: demand for new functionality is now being upstaged by regulatory changes; technology obsolescence is an ever-present challenge; technology and operations invariably struggle to maintain pace with business expectations; and maintenance budgets overtake growth. Enterprise Portfolio Rationalization (EPR) has been emerging as an ideal solution to address these challenges.

EPR is a portfolio analysis and optimization methodology to inventorize, analyze and strategize on what changes are required in the environment to periodically realign the operations and technology universes to business goals. It also introduces approaches to ensure that the need for realignment between Business GoalsOperationsTechnology is not too frequent.

EPR also facilitates a holistic impact analysis of strategic initiatives, be it new business launch or technology refurbishment, validating and incorporating such projects into the optimal execution roadmap. The exercise explores the entire environment from two primary perspectivesfirst being the Business Process and Application portfolio (focus is on business environment and goals as delivered by operations and technology) and second being the Technology Infrastructure footprint and related management processes (focus is on core technology products facilitating business users access to the business environment). Deliverables from the EPR exercise include, but are not limited to:

• Identifying underutilized, redundant and obsolete processes and applicationsprimary focal point for optimizing processes and applications
• Identifying consolidation opportunities in the infrastructure arena to optimize the footprint
• Delivering a multi-year roadmap for interdependent set of projects to implement the identified changes, factoring in the business priorities and operational/technology dependencies
• Overall structured approach to reducing manual effort and maintenance costs towards providing an environment for better investment decisions

Approach to EPR

EPR is a three step exercise covering data collation, analysis and option selection. The entire exercise is created in such a manner that there is credible output at each of the three steps (as detailed below), allowing for continuous engagement as also any requested course modifications based on participants apostrophe feedback.

• Data Collection and Landscaping: Starting with basic data collection on various applications within the environment, the critical information collection is through a series of interviews with various IT and Operations managers to understand their perspectives and views, information which is not easily captured in templates but provides a level of insight critical to getting a detailed view of how the organization functions under various scenarios. Time taken from each individual will be only an average of 2 hours. The information collated is transformed into Application Landscape and Hardware Landscape. Application Landscape provides an operational view of the organization with the business applications and their linkages superimposed with the operational process flow and data flow.
• Analysis and Option Identification: Understanding the long term goals of the organization is key to projecting the need for business facilitation environment comprising of operations support and technology solutions. Extra effort and deep industry background is required to elicit and understand long term goals of the organization (3-5 year period). Apart from the future view of the organization, current expectations of the business managers from their operations and technology counterparts provide another set of opportunities facing the internal facilitators.
  A parallel set of discussions takes place with operations managers and technology architects to understand the expected standards of operational control and technology preferences. A new view, the Functional Landscape, is created focusing on the business building blocks and the supporting artifacts serving each of the building blocks.
  An analysis matrix is created to perform causal analysis and grouping of issues and opportunities. Analysis outcome is identification of core challenges and resulting opportunities. Based on the analysis and tempered by organizational preferences, options are then created to address the various opportunities and challenges. Additional discrete opportunities might also be identified for quick wins.
  For a typical business line, the entire duration to complete both the steps is a fairly quick 8 weeks. With the options identified and feasibility established the final workshop is the most effective step to facilitate decision making.
• Select and Prioritize Workshop: A workshop (typically full day) is the ideal approach to further dissect the information gathered in step 1 and take forward the gap & option analysis of step 2 to acceptance. Participants in the workshop involve business owner(s), senior operations managers, senior technology managers and audit/finance representatives (optional). The group is divided into multi-functional sub-teams, each with an identified area of focus; inputs being the collation of challenges and opportunities in the area and the options to address the same. The charter of each subgroup is to:
• Identify/refine opportunities based on the option analysis from step 2 (Analysis and Business Optimization) as base. (opportunities: Synergies/consolidation/replacement)
• Based on short-listed opportunities, analyze the high level cost-risk-benefit for each opportunity (using sub-groups)
• Submit sub group findings for review by the entire group
• Perform high level prioritization based on findings and dependencies, risk and investment appetite; identifying tangible projects and project owners

With more productive discussions with the senior decision makers, finalized projects are set into a roadmap (typically spanning 3-5 years) with participants getting an appreciation of dependencies and drivers of their peers also. Final roadmap identified incorporates the collective organizational knowledge available with the management group and buy-in into the approach is a very critical by-product of the workshop. The workshop also serves as a platform to revert the control of strategic initiative back to the organization while creating a sense of ownership across a cross-section of the senior management team.

Recommended next steps involve setting up a program office to perform a more rigorous analysis of options for a detailed cost-benefit analysis as a first step towards implementing the strategy.

Benefits of EPR

Each stage of EPR provides useful tangible outputs, allowing not only validation of information collected but also tuning of depiction to allow better assimilation of information collated and possibility of initiating subsequent actions on a multi-processed parallel path.

Application and Hardware Landscapes provide the traditional inventory carried within the organization as also the interactions which are facilitated by the inventory (the Process Overlay). This helps managers across the organization to view of their own spheres of influence and appreciation the adjoining functions. A single view of the business is backed by the support environment which facilitates the business.

Analysis of issues and opportunities goes beyond the individual ills plaguing the environment by identifying the root causes of issues leading to possibility of identifying a robust solution. Options identified to address the root issues and opportunities go beyond the standard technology solutions, leveraging tools and applications in unique implementations.

Final stage workshop allows tapping into the knowledge base of the organizations top level management in a faster, time-effective and decision efficient manner.

As a complete exercise, EPR allows for a comprehensive analysis of operational and technical inventory, facilitating creation of the strategic operations and technology roadmap for the organization which is aligned with the business goals.

Sanjay Kumar
The author is VP, BFSI Solutions, ITC Infotech
maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in