CIO, CXOs and middle managers that face major challenges – like: going digital; implementing a ‘customer experience’ program; planning a major new business technology platform; wanting to beef up innovation; or reducing unit costs. They know what must be done, but are looking for ways to increase the probability of success. They are fully aware that there are more failure examples than success stories.
We all have doubts about past recipes. What are we missing? How can we break away from the past? How can we avoid falling into the trap of doing the same things, over and over, and hoping for different results? How do we balance this when everyone is time starved and must generate results fast?
Those who decided to invest – to trust the approach, to bite the bullet recognising that alignment comes from hard collaborative work, and a different thinking and way of working – got significant results. The interesting, and perhaps most telling, part is that very few CEOs will go to the market place bragging about this. Would you go on the market place to tell your competitors that you found a highly competitive way to leverage acquisitions faster and better than they do? Would you publish in business journals how you were able to cut your IT investments by 30% or more while meeting your business objectives? Similarly, what organisation would talk publicly about its strategic game plan?
This is exactly what designing and managing a valid process-based business architecture is about: a real business game-plan to win or differentiate, transform, and execute.
Examples of benefits
Some of the harder benefits to recognise are:
- Realigned or better aligned performance investment plan with traceability
- Realigned or better aligned performance metrics
- Increased performance of your IT investment portfolio
- Faster decision-making
- Better investment project scoping
- Reduced IT investment waste
- Reduced execution risks for core or strategic programs.
The softer benefits are not so soft!
- Shared meaning and common language among leaders
- Stronger engagement and ownership
- Clearer sense of direction
- Reinforced leadership team
- Reframed thinking and visioning
- Alignment, alignment, alignment
- Breaking down of siloes.
We often get healthy doubts when helping management and executive teams to start their journey. This is a top-down approach – the CEO must take ownership and trust the approach. When starting conditions are appropriate, benefits come.
