14
Mar 21
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How to get started with TBM and cost transparency…

Category:cost,EA,Services Tags : Bill of IT CIO cost management

Many organisations struggle to provide transparency to cost of IT. Even though it sounds simple, there is a number of challenges like:

What is the border of IT? – Now that most of IT is used across the entire organisation and within services and products, then what is the IT budget?
What is the best terminology to make cost models? If looking into computing servicers, maybe different types of computers; for servers maybe the sizing, for storage maybe the type of storage. How to get the right mathematical model to connect daily end-users through behaviour to something that generates cost?
What does “cost” mean – if we pay upfront and depreciate, versus lease or annual subscriptions?
Where do we get the data from? Most CMDB’s don’t provide the necessary information as cost is more information management than data management. How to re-use data-sources to make the proper information design?
When digitalisation and digital transformation change the way we work, what is then the “reduction” in the IT spend?

These questions are all relevant and easily solved when properly addressed with our services.

We advise to adopt the main principles from the TBM Framework (Technology Business Model) to allow tracking of cost year on year, month by month and to support a common taxonomy to allow comparisons.

The TBM concept is not new; Large accounting companies have worked with the practice years before the TBM Council started, but the standardisation, the scale and the maturity of digital platforms offering the bill of IT is ramping up.

The TBM suggests three perspectives of the cost and it offers a taxonomy that helps for IT to in the IT perspective to track unit cost and cost drivers. The main objective of TBM is the increased transparency, the ability to track year-on-year and month-by-month, and finally to cross-companies, e.g. if you are a number of companies that do the same type of business, then the TBM offers the comparison option.

Over the last years TBM has become almost a cross-standard to the taxonomy of how to deal with this. There are hundreds of organisations that now move into the three-layered structure of the TBM to get a comparable measure of the bill of IT. What is the process of the TBM when implemented?

We can guide you through the implementation. If you are interested in getting a clear view of the Bill of IT, this is something that is hard to solve without technology and advice.

We can offer to you technology and advise – as one service. With Next-Insight you get a unified enterprise design of your business that includes the full TBM taxonomy. With role-based access to managers and ordinary end-users of your organisation, we help you to standardise IT costs. Next-Insight is a next-generation technology that is based on our experience with customers and architecture practices of how best to ensure an interactive behaviour-driven solution to IT Cost management. With senior consultants, we can help you to outline the future processes, then start with the information management to establish the digital governance.

We have seen too many project implementations that suffer from not aligning the governance early enough, creating poor data and too restrictive assumptions. This typically happens when financial tools are introduced without focus on digital governance and data quality. So to succeed you need to form a project charter with enterprise architecture and financial managers involved. It typically follow a three-steps approach:

The TBM model should be implemented as a single service across finance and architecture, as most of the IT-related information should be managed and updated in the EA repository. This is where tools like Next-Insight is useful as it offers the full TBM support and the EA support all as one solution. However, the implementation of such a solution should be process-centric, what processes should be supported, to allow the customer solution to add value to the organisation. Our recommendation is not to buy another point-tool, but to integrate financial perspectives to strategy and planning.
Once the processes are agreed, reconfigure Next-Insight tot he way numbers should be crunched to support the EA-stack to be connected with the financial system. This will require a design and implementation to get the chart of account setup up correctly to master the relationships. The best option is typically to formulate a project, and allow finance people and enterprise architects to work together. The integrations between an information management and a financial system like SAP or similar is required. The information management will manage the collaboration with end-users, IT managers, service managers helping to get meta-data correct. Then the SAP or similar financial system will provide the cost centres, the daily bookings. The rule book is carefully designed.
Finally, the EA tool like Next-Insight is adjusted to provide the user screens for the intended processes. Once the solution is configured and set alive, the budget cycle will start as an ongoing process, relying on the master data from the information management system, typically, it is based on last year’s consumption providing input to the budgets and forecast numbers. The TBM is the model or taxonomy of this data crunching.

What is the basic concept of TBM? Irrespective of the digital platform, the bill of IT is simply structured into three layers, like almost three different architecture layers:

Service layer: To describe the business processes and assets of the technology supported. This should provide an enterprise perspective of the business and future cost perspective. The logical grouping and allocation of cost should be mapped to business applications or business initiatives – using the language of the business.
IT layer: To describe IT towers and subtowers which is technology groupings of units and unit cost within functions. As evolving the solution, then also IT Dev as part of the layer.
Financial layer: Describing services procured in some currency, by terms, depreciations, cost, to understand cash versus cost perspectives of the agreed bills.

The benefit of the TBM model is that it translates between the layers. Solutions typically can provide the what-drives-what view between the different perspectives, typically build on some degree of allocations or apportions, handshakes and cost agreement splits. However, without the assumptions and structures of TBM, no-one will be able to communicate clearly what the cost of a project or a service really is.

If you are interested in knowing more about TBM and cost models, please seek advice on how to implement this on a modern digital platform. You may contact us for our solution and services to read more. We help to align long-term planning with short-term planning, which is an ongoing architectural process – and a digital process of information management.

We power your digital mood!

13
Apr 19
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Key Success Factors in Digital Transformation

Category:EA,Services Tags : Digital transformation MooD strategy strategy planning

Based on a conversation this week where the topic of digital transformation was discussed, we synthesized the following:

Many talk about ‘digital transformation’; fewer agree on what it means and doesn’t mean; and too few succeed in doing it!

Using the term as defined in our recent post, then digital transformation represents the change to a different business model where the future business achieves a different market position with (maybe radical) different services, offerings, delivery methods, locations and meet-up. Using this definition, a lot of organisations will today maybe work with digitization, but not the same as digital transformation. Companies that strategically seek to change the paradigm and business model are radically different than those companies which talk about digitizing some processes. To quote recent post,

“Digital transformation is the strategy to execution toward a new business model which is based on a different paradigm, that it splits rather than fits the existing processes, and for that you need to map-out your future business model. Don’t start with your existing processes; start with your future operating business model!”

It becomes more evident that the discipline to succeed requires a top-down approach to define the target business model. Some may suggest that ‘digitization’ could be a step towards the ‘digital transformation’, however, if the digitization is based on fitting processes, and digital transformation is based on splitting processes, one will almost never lead to the other! To succeed with digital transformation, there is at least a handful of key success factors to consider. Let’s discuss some of the important ones:

Map-out your future business models. Digital transformation is about getting to the open-minded discussion of where we want to ‘move to’ in terms of future products, future services, future customers in order to innovate the business model. This has nothing to do with optimizing the existing business processes but is a pure forward-thinking exercise. As highlighted in the McKinsey Quarterly, organizations are embracing digital transformation to knock down traditional industry boundaries and disrupt conventional business models.
Drive-out your business model for time and space. Digital transformation is also about exploiting digital advances and to couple digital technologies, then to use these advances and couplings to optimize the business model to eliminate or optimize the value chain and customer experience in time and space. This may be barriers or man-power works today, it may be self-service or differently delivered in the future. We often say, that Michael Porter is still valid reading, just to be seen in the new digital context! Eg. if one can deliver an email rather than a physical paper envelope, it opens a lot of future services and delivery models.

Plan with Scenarios. No-one has the full insight to the future, so to plan and make it realistic often involves scenario-based planning or risk considerations. As discussed in the recent post, the quote of Dwight D. Eisenhower is still valid, “In preparing for battle, I always found that plans are useless but planning is indispensable”. We always recommend the exercise of information management to provide risk-based or scenario-based planning, which is typically where tooling such as MooD or similar digital transformation suites can help. Reason is, that for a company to survive coming 3 or 10 years, it is hard to argue that no considerations of external threats, new technologies, emergent legislation should be not be considered. May well be that the forecast is poor and the prediction ends up being wrong or displaced, but planning as the preparation and improving the agility of what to respond as an enterprise is indispensable.

Make it business-led on a digital platform. If you want to make an impact, try to avoid too many barriers. Focus on the strategic change with focus on strategy-to-execution. This is most easily accomplished by enabling the strategy-to-execution with modern technology. With a core focus on the strategy implementation, it is possible provide actionable insights. This may or may-not be solved with agile approaches, which is another topic.

Be first in the game. Unless protected by borders or regulation, the front-runner is most often the winner. The only constant is the change – and as highlighted in the McKinsey Quarterly article, organizations are embracing digital transformation to knock down traditional industry boundaries and disrupt conventional business models. In other words, the first ones to see the potential of the new business model are likely given a better chance to reach it.

If you look for advise how to start and implement a digital transformation initiative, please do not hesitate to contact us.

You may contact us for our solution, next-insight, to read more. We help to align long-term planning with short-term planning, which is an ongoing architectural process – and a digital process of information management. Long-live the digital planning. If you have questions, please make contact. We are a consulting house with senior profiles and business solutions; we provide deep expertise in digital planning, digital governance and process automation. We power your digital mood!

20
Dec 18
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Do digital board packs help your organisation to comply with GDPR?

Category:Services,UK Blog Tags : EAM gdpr GRC MDM Risk

Do you have governance around your board back? Do you have meta-data and master data supporting your generation of the board packs?

Now, first, we did pass the May 25^th – and large organisations are still struggling with GDPR! No longer as a project, but typically more to absorb the endless amount of excels and small GDPR tools that eventually were delivered as the project outcome. Now another phase takes over – what to do with the project outcome?

This calls for another maturity level that cannot be provided by small point tools or excel. This calls for a larger piece of collaboration to make ‘stuff’ updated; typically, by having the GDPR processes embedded into a larger solution flexible enough for helping the executive team to steer the boat – it calls for the governance around the digital board pack!

That was then…

A lot was written about the impact the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the period up to May 25th 2018. And even though up to 60% may have slipped the deadline, see a recent survey, the fact is more likely that most organisations completed the GDPR project during 2018, but still will be working with GDPR also in 2019 – how can that be?

As mentioned in a recent blogpost, there is a natural progression towards being better at compliance, and also for GDPR – and that is way beyond the project outcome ending 2018. It is the progression..

to move from project to line organisation
to onboard managers and specialists to keep information fresh
to transition from project into process – and what is the IMACD of person-related data process activities are solved
to simplify the Article 30 report generation
to remove simple risk tools to consolidate the governance in the digital platform
to make ownership up to the board for the updated compliance views.

The data of the GDPR compliance will continue its journey to be alive, and it will continue down the maturity ladder to distinguish dataprocessors from data controllers, move away from text fields and into elements of meta-data to oversee the ocean of GDPR.

But most importantly, the transition is about getting the organisational ownership, where managers act on their responsibility and accountability to be compliant. Where the project 2018 was driven by fear of potential penalties, the new demand is much more to make it actionable within the line organisations where ‘stuff’ gets updated and the executive board can make decisions based on new evidence. This is often referred to as “EA”, the grid or architecture (A) space of an entire enterprise (E ).

How does this tie into my executive team?

Once you have completed the project, you may have data. Once you have moved it into a point tool, you may have reached slightly modified data so see the first patterns. It still doesn’t bring you much further. The heavy lifting involves more:

First, you need to move from free text and text fields into meta-data. This means that you don’t type pay-slip in a text field, but you check ‘pay-slip’, and you can afterwards analyse where ‘pay-slip’ is being processed by systems and processing or controlling activities
Second, you need to transition into the architecture portal where governance is typically managed, that is, who is the system owner? Who is the data process owner? Who should update this piece of data. Very often, we see BI solutions reporting long lists of data – but that is very distinct from the next maturity level where these people can do actionable reviews and updates. This if often is referred to as digital platforms or EA platforms (like MooD, ERP, etc).
Third, you need the escalation route embedded to the executive team. It is the management team that is accountable and needs to have the blind eye opened. Without their eyes open and provided insight – only the one-eyed will be king among the blinds.

So anyone within the board should be trained, concerned and be kept updated!

The way forward?

There is a natural progression towards maturity – but only if it is guided. You need to find an advisor who can helpyou to make a living architecture.

With a living architecture, you onboard the ‘softer’ side of and provide decision insight to your management. When used properly, you get the connected enterprise where boards act when things start to drift. So, anyone within the board should be trained, concerned and be kept updated! That is what we provide as part of our digital board pack service.

Working with different next generation technologies, we offer a digital platform that help large organisations to have a digital board pack, not a PowerPoint! Online views where you can drill into data, updated by the responsible people in the organisation, supplemented by technical data so you can view the online portal and stay compliant. We talk about powering your digital ability.

Giving all your directors access to the information they need to know about your GDPR policies in one place, makes it much easier for them to find the information they need and ask the right questions when it is discussed – all managed as meta-data and by the relevant people. No more emails – no more point tools.

If you have questions, please do not hesitate to make contact. We are the leading organisation in digital governance helping large organisations to succeed with their business transformation. We power your digital mood!

19
Jul 18
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Do you grow your digital governance?

Category:EA,Services,UK Blog Tags : architecture big data MDM strategy

Whatever term one might use, the meaning of ‘digital governance’ seems to be what we all care about in larger organisations – how to automate digital information to provide better collective transparency and insight of the enterprise. It is not just about data and it is not just about processes; it is about people – how we work smarter and more automated as an enterprise with data and processes to improve our digital ability to drive forward better decision-making. Sometimes ‘digital’ is simply loose for data, but underneath, it is associated with either digitization and/or digital transformation – and don’t mix up these two terms…

“Increasingly, the work we do is enabled more and more by new IT, including automation, robotics, and intelligent platforms”.
— Pierre Nanterme

Working with decision processes, we need to consider that such decision-making processes are very different from business processes of a value chain; simply the characteristics of cause-and-effect are less tangible and more ‘soft’. Trying to understand the complexity and nature of the decision-making processes, we need to adapt to the company tongue, the stakeholders, and the way such a business is driving decisions. It means we can still implement smarter solutions of digital governance, which is what we normally refer to when we talk ‘how we make decisions; however, it also means that to succeed with such solutions we need to consider how to digitize and successfully grow the governance when data is not enough on its own.

“I think the automation of vision is a much bigger deal than the invention of perspective”.
— Trevor Pagien

We often talk about ‘digital governance’ in the context of ‘automation’ because digital governance will automate manual tasks. A growing governance is where we continuously get more data into the fact-based decision support, and where we achieve this by managing the organisational change federating more data to collectively become wiser. This is what enterprise information management (EIM) is all about, the outcome of enterprise architecture (EA) in a nut-shell mastering the terms and information architecture.

Governance requires corporate information as fuel and needs to be flexible enough to accommodate ever-changing market conditions. Digital governance will benefit from our approach to agile information management. Today there is almost a hype around business models but only a few enterprises have conceptual models connecting this to business models and providing a closed-loop approach by ‘wiring’ these models to real-time operational data and planning input.

The objective of the governance of the information management is the agile construct of an enterprise-wide business model which serves the purpose of better decision insight and strategic planning. Digital governance cannot be achieved without people, stakeholders, and data. It is not about making another calif ERP; it is about recognizing the eco-system, where we provide the technology and methodology to maintain the logic model, where data can be interchanged, communicated, enriched – via a (digital) web front end or via (digital) integration to other (digital) systems. This is about applying information management, growing it in a DevOps or agile way, to support the open-ended construct of improving the way “we make decisions”. For this, we have chosen to work with award-winning world-leading software.

“It is not about making another calif ERP; it is about seeing the eco-system, where we provide the technology and methodology to maintain the logic business model where data can be interchanged, communicated, enriched – via web front end or via integration to other systems”.

So what is it that we solve with a growing digital governance? We build a connected truth as business models providing a closed-loop approach by ‘wiring’ these models to real-time operational data and planning input. We don’t like building architecture tools for architecture, or bakeries that bake for bakers. We like to connect the users of an enterprise by re-using data, by re-using the knowledge maintained in other systems such as data warehouses, service management tools, financial systems, HR systems, etc. We apply design thinking, so instead of the old-school of “learn a framework, buy a tool, draw some processes, then hope”, then work with rapid development tooling to apply automation processes and data by pretotyping the decision support, simply to avoid middle-layers of requirements analysts interpreting coders. So enterprise architects and strategists working with this methodology will grow the governance as DevOps, and it will keep the customer-facing activities along with the successful growth of digital governance.

Sometimes, we also see words used in this context:

EIM – As the overall Enterprise Information Management discipline, continuously automating information that else would be manually handled in SharePoint, Excel, Access, or similar silo-based system. EIM is what provides the digital platform for execution.
PI – As the solution to Process Intelligence, of how to gain insight to decision support from our business processes. This typically is the automation of drawings, diagrams, and emails, that otherwise would reside in distributed mailboxes with Visio, powerpoints, etc. With a process intelligence setup, people can collaborate on the same set of process insights as re-usable metadata.
CMDB – As the specific solution to the service desk and IT operations. With a CMDB, people can start to automate ticket flows, email, and chat notifications, to automate the configuration items of IT operations.

To make digital governance successful, it needs to grow. To mature the governance, make it actionable and follow the data and the people in the room to discuss how decisions are taken, and then grow the outcome to make it tangible. This is what digital growing governance is all about.

20
Jun 18
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How “Design Thinking” improves corporate performance

Category:EA,Services Tags : #governance architecture design thinking strategy

How can a design process impact an overall corporate performance? Design Thinking really is a mindset or a paradigm of how an organisation works with human-centered problems; it is the soft skills that make the execution successful. And working with improving performance and governance, successful execution of such an initiative is often more about the human adaptation where the mindset and behavior are tackled better and where creativity, collaboration, and iterations are factored into the approach. It does require buy-in from the top management, but also requires buy-in from the contributors. Succeeding with strategy is more than a single person working differently.

According to Jen Sheahan, Design Thinking should be perceived as a “mindset”; a way of approaching problems that are human-centered, but as such is nothing new. Design thinking has some interpretations associated, however, when we apply it with information management and strategy to execution, it can be boiled down to the following solution elements:

– Preto-type

– Collaborative

– Short-Cycled

– Sprints

Let’s go through these to understand why Design Thinking is considered a wise approach that may seem “lightweight”, but often also shows faster-to-market, cheaper and with higher chance of reaching the targeted outcome. As such Design Thinking is agnostic to technology, however, it does put requirements on technology to support the rapid developments embedded in the new mindset. This way we have chosen to work only with predefined technologies that support the mindset of Design Thinking.

Preto-type:
One should look up the pretotyping manifesto by Alberto Savoia. Where prototype is about developing an “early” product, pretotype is about testing the idea before building anything. And this concept can easily be applied to strategy execution and architecture, simply to support fail-fast and ensure validation of the outcome is done all through the learning curve of implementation; in other words, secure validation is constantly part of development – not left entirely to testing at the end.

Collaborative:
One should look up the talk to yourself hat, by Kate Hartman to value the perspective, that architecture is not meant for architects; likewise, strategies are not meant for strategists. The entire idea of the execution is to provide a solution that interacts with people to support the collaboration and democratization of data. This is often the hardest requirement on supporting technology where BI tools and EA tools often come short with heavy clients that allow only collaboration within specialized sub-communities.

Short-Cycled:
To tackle improved business performance, Gartner operates with a market guide called Enterprise Business Process Analysis (EBPA) which is the discipline of business modeling aimed at transforming and improving business performance with an emphasis on cross viewpoint, cross-function analysis, and strategic decision support aimed at improving business outcomes. The fundamental principles of this performance improvement are short-cycled delivery, lightweight but robust modeling, and governance that provides frequent updates like Dev-Ops and many of the agile concepts. This is fundamental for providing constant delivery.

Sprints:
In the discussion around agile (which to a large extent may be categorized as short-cycled), there is typically a need to structure epics and use-cases into sprints, simply as to communicate and focus development in a larger picture. The structuring of work into Sprints is key to align with management and stakeholders to provide “planning”. Management should focus on the agility and changes of the environment, hence, the ubiquitous purpose of sprints is to support the strategic planning to be prepared.

We help to align long-term planning with short-term planning, which is an ongoing process – and a digital process of information management. Long-live digital planning. If you have questions, please make contact. We are a consulting house with senior profiles and business solutions; we provide deep expertise in digital planning, digital governance, and process automation. We power your digital mood!

19
May 18
-

Go digital – Win the inner game with process intelligence

Category:EA,Services Tags : business management business process management digital inner game process intelligence

As part of the strategic agenda of winning the inner game and outer game, there is a certain set of digital themes, where at least one of the digital themes always relates to the operational efficiency and the digitizing of business processes. As part of the inner game, we recommend to analyse and plan for a digital theme ‘[Improving] – Process Excellence‘. This is the discipline to digitalise the existing set of processes, and provide transparency to the business processes as a foundational layer for the process intelligence:

Business process management (BPM) in short is a discipline for an enterprise to focus on “how we do things” to discover, structure, analyze and improve or digitalize the business processes. The core focus is to document, analyze and improve an overall corporate performance by managing the business processes more efficiently.

BPM is the field of methods, notations, and technologies, however, there is increasing awareness to document business processes both within specific notations like BPMN or certain business process models, that is, to increase the standardization of ‘how we do BPM’.

Within certain sectors where the number of transactions and customer operations are high, or where the risk of deviations to expected handling may be of high severity like health or safety, the imperative of BPM is much higher! This is to secure the constant focus on better quality, fewer failures, and higher efficiency. This is typically what is driven by standardization programs, quality management, etc.

Standards like ISO-900x clearly have a focus on quality and continuous improvement promoting an approach to BPM. As such BPMN is not required, even though it may be an enabling easy choice.

Provided an enterprise has reached a foundational understanding of what they do, and how they do things, they are typically able to progress to a higher degree of maturity. We see many organizations still struggle at a very low maturity level, were simply to ask for ‘what business processes do we have?’ or ‘what is the characteristics?’ will provide empty looks or smiles, rather than answers.

This is typically where BPMN as notation, collaboration tools like Signavio, and an architecture approach should be introduced. if not, we face the alternative that organizations may start and “end” their journey into BPM very promptly, e.g.

If you start to document all processes of an enterprise from wall-to-wall ‘without proper tooling’ or ‘with the tool but without approach’. This will be as to boil the ocean! If you ask people to document their processes, the risk of losing interest in the outcome may dry out much ahead of the project timeline.
If you start without proper tooling and proven approach, but prefer to start cheap and simple with no advisory, free tools, or heavy-client tools, the chance of getting the enterprise to contribute or value the outcome is low.
If you don’t pass the simple levels of browsing processes, visualizing processes, linking it to the most relevant meta-data and use-cases, the value of such an initiative will typically not pay off. It is like climbing a summit taking only the first steps.

However, if you manage to seek advice and find a solution path to the introduction to business processes and related capabilities, this can turn into strategic planning with a focus on tight alignment to management needs. This is how BPM becomes actionable and relevant for the digital transformation. This is what provides the foundation for more advanced use-cases, often referred to as process intelligence (PI):

Business process intelligence (PI) in short is a discipline for an enterprise to use the BPM knowledge to provide more accurate or real-time information of the business processes and its related task to increase transparency and decision support to what tasks exist, who does the work, how long does it take and what is the cost or time of bottlenecks.

The use-case of PI is clearly more actionable – clearly more related to management and risk handling. PI is how to analyze more complex dependencies or suggest improvements on cost and simulated insight. This has to be integrated with Information Management (IM) systems where analytics, dashboards, and related master-data are managed, like the MooD digital platform. Such information can then be used for the refining of processes.

Strategy execution and predictive analysis as part of digital twins are clearly linked to enterprise architecture and planning where future scenarios can be analyzed and decided ahead of project implementations. Information management becomes the intersection of business process intelligence and digital planning.

If you are interested to know more, seek advice from us to improve your process intelligence.

You may contact us for our solution, next-insight, to read more. We help to align long-term planning with short-term planning, which is an ongoing architectural process – and a digital process of information management. Long-live the digital planning. If you have questions, please make contact. We are a consulting house with senior profiles and business solutions; we provide deep expertise in digital planning, digital governance, and process automation. We power your digital mood!

26
Apr 18
-

Manage the bill of IT as a service

Category:EA,Services Tags : digital governance Financial management TBM

While some stakeholders focus on outcomes of IT and how to deliver strategic planning to innovate new business models, there is also the ‘other’ operational perspective: the large mundane of existing IT-related processing which often needs ‘just to continue’. For that second perspective it is of interest to increase the transparency and decision measurability: how can you support the business operations in a more efficient way?

Even today in most organisations, the cost of supporting the business operations is the major cost pool within IT. And to make the bill of IT cheaper and more transparent, it does require some standardisation and framework. While it is harder to compare new strategic stuff, the maturity of financial IT spend models like TBM has matured to provide sound comparable measures of the bill of IT. But what is the ‘bill of IT’? Reflect a little over questions like:

What is the border of IT? (if IT is being used outside of the IT department, which is likely what happens most places) – then what share is the bill of IT?
Where does the cost of IT stop, and when is it cost of another department, cost of another project or cost that we don’t calculate?
What does cost mean to talk ‘bill of IT’ when we pay upfront, but depreciate over many years?
What about digitalisation and disruption catalysed by new IT and technologies – where does this fit into the ‘bill of IT’?

These questions are all relevant and easily solved when TBM becomes an instantiated process with transparency to stakeholders. It is not only about a tool, but typical a service provided enabling managers to see the inside of IT spend leading to decision makers getting meta-data and facts to rely on when discussing where to cut and where to invest more.

A over the last years, there has become almost a cross-standard to the taxonomy of how to deal with this. The answer is moving towards an open standard called ‘TBM’ where TBM stands for Technology Business Model. There are hundreds of organisations that now move into the three-layered structure of the TBM to get a comparable measure of the bill of IT.

The TBM concept is not new; Large accounting companies worked with the practice years before the TBM Council started, but the standardisation, the scale and the maturity of digital platforms offering the bill of IT is ramping up. The TBM perspectives of the bill of IT provides a clear view on IT spend, offering a model to get transparency to unit cost and cost drivers, consumption and performance – helping CIOs, CTOs and CFOs to get aligned views of where to cut cost and where to invest more.

Who are the stakeholders of TBM and the transparency of the bill of IT?

‘Many’ is the simple answer. Just to touch a few:

Managers in Business Operations: Who can finally get a fact-based overview of cost pools, contracts, systems that aggregate to the spend of running the IT within the business operations.
DevOps: Application owners who can better understand the application cost, quality and value. Help to decide future spend profiles.
Service Owners: What is the cost of certain infrastructure components such as servers and software, supplier by supplier, and how to estimate end-of-life cost.
CIOs and CTOs: People who are asked to invest in the future and cut cost on operations. Where to look for the savings?
Business Relationship Managers: Helping the business to get more value to the business planning, what is the priorities to take.

What is the process of the TBM when implemented?

The TBM is based on single-loop learning of implementing an annual learning cycle where IT Spend is aggregated from managed architecture meta-data, stripped into pools, and aggregated with the IT landscape as systems and services, before aggregated to business capabilities or Business Units.

We typically advocate to master the meta-data not just to crunch numbers without clear ownership. It typically implies TBM to be solved by finance people and enterprise architecture teams to unite the task of managing the overview, often solved by information management tools like MooD or similar.

The integrations between an information management tool like MooD and a financial system like SAP or similar is required. The MooD system will then manage the collaboration with end-users, IT managers, service managers helping to get meta-data correct. Then the SAP or similar financial system will provide the cost centers, the daily bookings, the different accounts. However, if no solution is in place, bookings often follow financial account numbers, where as the mapping to IT is typically done within the architecture system.

Once a solution is configured and set alive, the budget cycle will start as an ongoing process, relying on the master data from the information management system, typically, it is based on last year’s consumption providing input to the budgets and forecast numbers. The TBM is the model or taxonomy of this data crunching.

What is the basic concept of TBM?

Irrespective of the digital platform, the bill of IT is simply structured into three layers, like almost three different architecture layers:

Business layer: To describe the business capabilities and value chain of the technology supported IT spend. This should provide an enterprise perspective of the business and future looking cost perspective. The logical grouping and allocation of cost should be mapped to business applications or business initiatives – using the language of the business.
IT Ops layer: To describe IT products and IT towers of IT assets which is technology groupings of units and unit cost within functions. As evolving the solution, then also IT Dev as part of the layer.
Financial layer: Describing services procured in some currency, by terms, depreciations, cost, to understand cash versus cost perspectives of the agreed bills.

How to get started with TBM?

If you are interested in getting a clear view of the Bill of IT, this is something that is hard to solve without technology and advice. Try to outline the end process; then start with the information management to establish the digital governance. We have seen too many project implementations that suffer from not aligning the governance early enough, creating poor data and too restrictive assumptions. This typically happens when financial tools are introduced without focus on digital governance and data quality. So to succeed you need to form a project charter with enterprise architecture and financial managers involved. A transparent view of IT should include the above layers:

If you are interested in knowing more about TBM and cost models, please seek advice of how to implement this on a modern digital platform.

09
Mar 18
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Digital governance & agility – getting it right this time!

Category:EA,Services Tags : agility business transformation digital governance

It is always of interest to locate the pathway towards success. However, according to both Gartner & Mckinsey, statistics state more than 75% of the agility and digital transformation projects fail. Gartner has recently published a model, BODEA, that will help to architecture the program, not specifying any required technology. The details also reveal that technologies vary and likely impact success rate as well, not only the approach and staffing:

The BI “approach” is typically led by financial people and with a reporting perspective. It may be a view for the few with less interaction. If you try to fry using a pot rather than a pan, it will take longer, and with a lower chance of success.
However, what about the magic quadrant of EA Tools then? Quoting one of our customers, “EA Tools are like lemons, sour and very hard to eat on their own” … The magic quadrant seem populated with tools that have a very narrow view of enlightening the architect herself/himself that puts effort into modelling. How can that in any way help the corporate agility?

Agility is the ability to change direction at higher pace, it is not about the speed! For a company to be agile, it needs to provide a foundation where people share an understanding of change, and eventually, share the interest to change course when needed. This is partly culture, partly getting people to buy into to the strategy, often helped by a digital platform to help building a digital governance of managing the business processes, systems, and offerings.

“Agility is the ability to change direction at higher pace, it is not about the speed!”

As humans we encourage people to be proactive, thinking, questioning, – however – it also means if we don’t all buy into the strategy or direction, we will act differently as individuals. For a company to succeed to change course at a higher pace, we need to promote the idea and federate the updates – and every day! Managing the agility is about carrying out many small steps where people can relate and buy into the updates of helping the bigger enterprise with transparency and regular feedback. So it fits well with the recent research by Gartner that advocates an 8-step model to establish an enterprise architecture program to identify the bigger picture, and step-wise provide a practice to achieve measurable outcomes.

So almost paradoxically, what agility means at a corporate perspective is that we need the shared value of helping each other to federate updates and insight to make a company agile, by this, removing some of the individual freedom to avoid new ad-hoc ways of doing stuff. This is a very different perspective than to allow a few architects to analyse and build models on their own. Agility is about getting to the digital platform where decisions and changes can be made faster, with lower risk and based on federated input; otherwise the platform is just for architects, and then you can have a look in the magic quadrant: how to fail yet another time… According to recent research, it starts with the market and business analysis, what is often referred to as the outer game, as a distinction to the inner game of an organisation.With reference to the post, the inner game or outer game of the business planning:

If in context of the outer game, it is relevant to carve out what to shut down, what to procure to deliver the new business model – this is the sweet spot of corporate agility where the business model is transformed into a new form.
If the inner game, then we talk efficiency or changes to way of working, then operational efficiency and processes are the sweet spot where business is being digitized.

The technology required to build the digital platform for improving the agility requires a flexible model, that can be changed again and again over time. It also requires people to use the outcome, daily, every day by loads of people to get the metadata correct. And it needs to look like the corporate web portal with colours, fonts, etc. to get the attractiveness that people buy into.

If you are in doubt on how to build a digital platform in order to succeed with the digital governance and agility, try to look at the organisational usage, then identity the interactions and flexibility. Try to avoid pre-built one-size-fits-all solutions which work the fist mile, but not as a sustainable solution. With the right collaboration, each employee or team is accountable for their own part, they like to contribute to the bigger picture, and the management can avoid attachments and PowerPoints. This is what digital governance is all about.

In practice, this also means the digital platform will be a combination of human input, and online data like CMDB data (Cherwell, Service Now, etc.), PMO data (Project Online, or similar), people data (AD or HR data), finance data (SAP, etc.). A modern digital platform is where decisions and agility moves can be made from – it pulls the data into the single source of connected insight.

We help to align long-term planning with short-term planning, which is an ongoing process – and a digital process of information management. Long-live the digital planning. If you have questions, please make contact. We are a consulting house with senior profiles and business solutions; we provide deep expertise in digital planning, digital governance and process automation.

We power your digital mood!

08
Feb 18
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The value of living services

Category:Services,UK Blog Tags : service management services strategy

For years we have seen the many implementations of service catalogs, hardly used and hardly understood by others than by those who created it. The challenge seems to be they have been dead architecture – a conceptual thinking for the few – not a connected insight for the business where they see every month e.g. the ‘bill of IT’. The future of services is all about connecting information to the living set of services so that it becomes relevant for business and may assists in the modernization of the digital business model as part of winning the outer game and optimising the inner game.

Working with knowledge sharing and change planning, we often see that many of the same words are used for different meanings. That calls for the information architects to define what do we really mean with this or that? – and what connects to what?

As there are many trends in the market, such as cloud, insight, as-a-service, we start to see the patterns of ‘services’ rather than ‘assets’ that come and go, much in the same way as shops open and close, employees are hired and retire.

Managing the complexity of a large organisation, that wants to become digital, and with digital to provide more of the revenue from digital services, there is a shift towards making transformation programs that will do more of the digital stuff, that will do more of digital payments, digital patient journals, digital enabling of whatever type of business. Most of this change puts focus to the future way of working together, the future best practice – the next insight.

Working with the future services across the enterprise, we see a need to master all the enterprise services in a connected way as part of a living architecture. If you happen to be a financial institution or large manufacturer, you will typically have loads of assets, that in limited period will be in a competition with new services that are designed to be more digital or unified. That is, some of the older assets should retire, or we need to understand how to enable them or live with them despite they are legacy. The traditional asset catalog needs an overhaul to be service oriented – and if you work the way-up from the stack, chances are high that you will never complete.

So how to start the enabling of all the enterprise services? If we want to make it living – you need to focus on the automation of the updates of the data that drives the change of the future. This is about people, digital governance and technology to make it stick. We need to put focus to the user experience, to the persona. A typical question is the following, ‘what revenue does your services bring?’

If you cannot tie revenue or satisfaction metrics to a service, then it may not be an “end-service” – and you should rework the service definitions accordingly.
However, if it is an end-service, you can start planning using a digital twin.

Another perspective will be to differentiate between internal offerings versus external services, which then may eventually lead to another view of your IT. Start experimenting and iterating, and you will find your “services”.

21
Dec 17
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GDPR – How to make it stick!

Category:EA,Services Tags : architecture gdpr

Many companies are spending large amount of effort to run GDPR projects prior to May 25th, 2018, however, we face an increasing interest to migrate away from proprietary point-tools of GDPR assessments towards a permanent solution within the EA Portal to make the compliance a continuous process within the data-driven enterprise;

If you manage your EA well, the GDPR implementation it is a minor step to extend your EA Portal to a modern and managed regulations Portal. However, if you do not have a solid, end-user accessible EA Portal, having control of data, integrations, and technologies, the GDPR project may be a big effort. Starting with architecture focus for architects will not help the journey – you need to apply evolved techniques to succeed and mature in time to meet business requirements.

We advocate to simplify the governance by applying the EA Portal to make a living architecture supporting the different legal rule-sets including the GDPR. As the core requirement to the GDPR requirements is about the processing of systems, processing of personal data, it easily extends to the architecture overview of managing systems data and integrations data. We see still more places that GDPR point solutions are migrated into the EA Portal to easily demonstrate degree of compliance. Using the principles of EA, it is straight forward to work out a plan to stay compliant before May 2018… Working with us, we provide ready-made solutions to your business.

What is the new with Personal Data Protection?
What is new is not as such the procedure to do so; the new is the regulatory framework that makes the consequences of failing compliance to something that in case of non-compliance will be a board issue… However, incentive or not, the GDPR operates with a new tiered fine structure.

Data protection and impact assessments
The GDPR includes also an article for data protection impact assessments. The Impact Assessments must be provided before new services or products are launched. So, it is acceptable to work with agile approaches and fail-fast approaches, but before the validated product goes live, there must be an impact assessment to secure personal data. This will force many project managers and IT departments to proactively consider what security measures that will be put in place to secure path for compliance assessments.

How to prepare for the GDPR?
May 2018 is soon, so for many companies the GDPR may come as something of a shock. An immediate action is to appoint a data protection officer who would will be accountable for advising on and monitoring GDPR compliance, as well as representing the company when contacting the supervising authority. Very often, this will have a call to the CIO or his/her delegate. However, this is a mandatory step to have an accountable person, but far from enough. The organisation must work with the responsibilities of the new GDPR, and this is where the EA and governance frameworks may be the hidden fuel.

Here is a list of focus areas to consider aligning with EA and governance frameworks:

Business Model Canvas – With the focus of reporting and getting coherency to the business, it is important to lay out a Business Model or Business Processing Map. This business model will serve to understand what functions and overall processing that takes place ‘where’ in the business. With the Business Model, it is possible to pin-point what types of classified data that is expected in each business area. The outcome of such assessment is a recommendation for what types of personal data each business area should have access to. The GDPR will require a gap analysis to be part of the ongoing processes to minimize the access to classified personal data. Without the Business Model, it will be difficult to provide a meaningful reporting of the gap analysis. It should be easy to demonstrate compliance and perspectives of where there is a high risk of personal data is accessed in much larger areas of the organisation. This is where information modelling, capability modelling and our business solutions can be helpful.

Business Applications Management – With the updated perspective of the Business Model, it is recommended to provide a Business Application Catalogue. Such a Catalogue should have strong relationships to the Business Model, hence, this is not an ITSM services catalogue. The Business Application Catalogue should be governed and part of a living architecture. If such an APM catalogue or Business Application Catalogue is not available and managed, this is highly recommended to get in place alongside the Business Model. This will serve as the foundation for the Data Classification and Data Retention. This might be a simple cloud offering from us, or be a more integrated portfolio solution from us.

Data Classification– With knowledge to what business capabilities and what business applications, it is a simpler and more straight-forward task to assess where your personal data is stored. This includes structured electronic data as well as unstructured formats of documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. This is critical for both protecting the data and also to follow the impact of change of personal data. To solve this puzzle, we would advise you to get the overall Business Model and Business Applications Catalogue in place first, then extend to master the presence of personal data with categorization. The categorized personal data is classified and mapped to the landscape of business applications and infrastructure information, and also against the intended usage – to pin-point irresponsible presence of personal data through-out the organisation.
Governance– With data comes also the operational processes to maintain this GDPR information daily. This will lead to establishing the processes to secure ‘data security by design’ and ‘data security by default’, alongside the roles and responsibilities of keeping the Business Applications Catalogue up to date and to understand ‘who has access to what’. We advise that companies first get the foundation in place, then the Data Classification, then to tailor and adapt this to the existing processes of the organisation. Some relevant frameworks would be IT4IT, TOGAF and COBIT to ensure there is a focus on controls, follow-up and management accountability.

Gaps and Digital Action Planning– With its requirements for limiting data retention, there is no firm metrics to follow. This means you’ll need basic information on what data is collected, why it is collected, for how long it is supposed to be collected, and how the processes are for ‘releasing’ information again – tailored to metrics that are justifiable. This must be an integral part of the processes for managing data. Personal data residing in business applications should be periodically reviewed to see whether it needs to be kept or removed. It is important that the Data Retention is supported and supporting the Governance. Also, it is obvious include the gaps identified in a digital actionable form to help with the ongoing compliance. Reports and alerts to non-compliance should be an integrated part of the Digital Action Planning. This is MooD-based solutions can help.

We can help you to build the GDPR compliance within your digital EA Portal. It is faster – and more sustainable. The conclusion is clear, if you manage your EA well, the GDPR implementation it is a minor step to extend your EA Portal to a modern and managed regulations Portal.

Category Archives: Services

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