Business Transformation

In Today's economy lots of Organizations, especially in the financial sector have an increased focus on their internal IT spend and leveraging their business processes and lesser focus on improving the external business aspect.
This has lead to a lot of Enterprise level business transformation projects. Essentially these initiatives are more or less related to identifying duplicate and/or redundant business processes, eliminating them or making use of latest technology tools to achieve organizational efficiencies.
In general, most Financial organizations (Insurance, banking etc) are a little slow to adapting such enterprise wide changes due to strict regulatory and compliance policies and their sheer organizational size, resource count that would be required to execute the changes and the overall Organization culture.
They get into transformation projects due to sheer Market competition pressures, regulatory requirements, directional change in executive management or changes in labor market etc.

What is Business Transformation?
The primary purpose or objective of any business is to provide and add 'value' to their customers in return of the price paid. 'Value' is measured in terms of financial gains or commodity, service provided etc. In order to provide more or better 'value', organizations strive to improve, build upon or modify their processes etc so as to attain their objectives. Especially in the current economy, many business and Industry vertical C-Level executives have shifted their attention to business transformation activities. 
One of the best Transformation examples, i have seen in today's marketplace is the innovation giant - Apple. The way the company has transformed itself from the early MAC days into today's world leaders leading the tablet revolution.

Transformation Enablers:
Business Transformation is more related to aligning the Process, people, culture and Technology towards the company goals and objectives. These are the most important business enablers.
for e.g. In the Claims department of an insurance organization, there is a predefined workflow process by which the claims intake occurs. The organization takes in claims information by Fax, email, phone, mail etc and then it is directed to the system of record either as a file upload, manual load etc followed by rendering this information to the Customer service representatives online, so they can interact with customer efficiently, all this plays a very important role in the decision of whether a transformation in the process workflow is required or not.
All this determines the total amount of time taken to input, process the information right from intake to providing information to customers via the customer service portal.
Business transformation is a modern day technique sought by organizations to think about their business processes and outcomes so they can improve on their customer relations, customer service, improve upon operating efficiencies and essentially cut down on costs. The reason why organizations need a business transformation or an overhaul can be manifold.
For Instance, for large organizations, Processes are preset to meet business needs, this gets complemented by organizational culture, external factors like statutory policies, rules set by governing bodies also come into play and before the organization knows it each business unit, department has its own set of processes which are tuned and tweaked over time to run the business. No one has looked at the organization or enterprise level viewpoint and this ultimately leads to lots of inefficiencies mainly due to overall inefficient workflow processes, slower customer outcome.
To add to this, to stay competitive in today's marketplace and to better meet their customer needs, meet the regulatory requirements organizations have to improve on their efficiencies.

A Business Transformation project would essentially involve the following steps,
Objectives and Roadmap
Develop a high level roadmap right from understanding the business needs and objectives at the executive level. This helps define the overall financial objective, the organizational change management expectations from this initiative. Involvement of Top level executives is a very important factor for the success for any Transformation initiative.
The key transformation agents for any initiative are the Top CEOs, CIOs, Stakeholder like Business SMEs, Project Sponsors etc.

Feasibility
High level Feasibility study and planning
  - This involves a feasibility study wrt resources, Technology, budget etc
Strategy Definition
Understand current state and future state of the process
  - Which may lead to Process realignment or altogether process changes
 
Layout the goals as quantifiable and tangible statements as to what this initiative is suppsed to achieve. e.g.
  - Financial goals - e.g. Increase the Net revenues at the end of next 2 years by 20%
  - Customer service - e.g. Reduce Customer service operational time per customer from 15 mins to 7 mins with the same or better quality of service
  - Change Management - e.g. Layout a 3 month plan to migrate the changes throughout the organization to all departments involved.
  - Align organization metrics and KPIs with the Roadmap
 
Execution and Control
  - The esential parts in any project are its execution and control strategies which ensure regular monitoring and data analysis.