Hopefully the topic on Insurance was helpful...Today lets touch upon Business Analysis
Background
Who is a Business Analyst? Who activities does a Business Analyst perform?
In an IT based project, Business Analysts form the bridge between Business and IT. For Example, say we are implementing a Policy Administration System and have a Rate Structure Table that needs implemented, the business has been rating policies in Excel for past 20 years and now they want their Rates, Rating Factors, Discounts etc to be available in the Policy Admin Software so that when an Underwriter or Operations are processing a Quote for a Policy or Rating the policy for Renewals or some mid term endorsements, the UI properly allows them to rate the policy, just the way they have been doing it in the Excel form. Moreover the UI can also display log messages as to why a particular rating factor was applied, so that the Underwriter can view them and take corrective actions, if necessary.
Now this above is a Business scenario which a developer may not understand (Unless he has spent a few years in the Trenches and understands the business well, this is usually not the case)
This brings us to our Savior, the Hero - The Business Analyst. The Business Analyst is a person who not only understands the business, but also understands the IT aspect of it, which means he can ask the right questions to the End users and SMEs by holding workshops and then translate the Business requirements to High level design documents and specs that the Application Developers can comprehend and produce loads of software code that does what it is exactly supposed to...or so we hope.
For the requirement sessions or Gap analysis sessions as they are called, to proceed, the BAs are equipped with their quiver full of Use Cases. Use Cases are the documents that take a particular functionality and describe the application, System and user level interaction in that particular functionality using various scenarios. This helps clarify the various processes that business follows and sets the expectation from the business side as well as the IT side on how the future application to be implemented looks like.
Along with the getting the requirements on the functional scope, BAs are also involved in the business process mapping of the whole scene meaning for an insurance company that has been in business for say 30 long years, that has 12 regional offices and 200 adjusters, operators and underwriters that handle the day to day business. The Users are used to do the business in a certain way based on the IT application limitations, the business outlines and statutory and state mandated requirements set out. The job of the Business analysts here is to select a functional area, map the process using a process mapping application like Visio. For this, the BAs hold sessions/workshops with the business to understand their current process with the objective that how they can better the processes in the future. Help the organization in improving their bottom line. run the processes more efficiently so as to benefit the entities involved.
To give an example of business process improvement, there was an Insurance company that used a pretty outdated software to quote an insurance policy to an insured, who was (say) calling in for the first time. For this, the agents sitting in their office with the insured would first send the policy information to the insurance company via fax. It would be received by an operator who would then load the data in the system and give out a quote to the agent via another fax. This would take up atleast 30-40 mins for getting just an insurance quote. you don't want to know how long it took to bind and issue the policy. Anyways, by mapping the process flow, the BAs were able to show the organization that implementing Internet based IT solution would not only resolve the timing issue it would also fix any bottlenecks related to data inconsistency or incorrect data entry thus saving the insurance company tons of money and a happy customer in return.
Coming along, the BAs also help in System Testing, Regression Testing, End user testing the final application after it gets developed. They also help the Testing Team to design and develop the Test cases and Test scenarios.
Business Analysts are a very Unique breed and they gain expertise by their specific overall background, business knowledge by executing various projects etc
PreRequisites
Now we come to what it take to be a BA. If you are already in the field, you can skip this. If you are trying to enter into the field of business analysis, this may give you some idea.
The first and foremost prerequisite to being a Business Analyst is to have a an eagerness to understand the business domain which can be anything from Insurance to Banking to Manufacturing. Choose an area of your liking and move ahead.
The 2 main functions that a BA performs and would work towards his benefit if he has gained skills and knowledge in these areas
1> IT Process and Methodology
- i.e. Understand the IT Process lifecycle, the Inputs and deliverables for executing any project, using a specific Project Management Methodology
2> Business Knowledge
- Knowledge of the particular domain that you will be responsible for.
After you have acquired the knowledge, it is important to have some exposure via some realtime project exposure, there are some online and classroom courses also available that give you some first hand exposure via case studies etc
Let me know if you have any specific questions or viewpointd, i will be glad to answer and will try to guide and direct you in the proper direction
Do let me know through your comments if you found the article helpful.
Showing posts with label Business. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Business. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Thought process Transformation
They say..If you show a dollar coin to an IT and Business Person both will look at it differently...
Business person will say "I wonder what is today's exchange rate?" and the IT person will say...""hhhmmm, this coin is shaped more like Alpha character "O" (Letter Oh) rather than numeric Zero"..(Not true...just made it up....but you get my point)....
IT developers and the business folks live and operate in 2 different worlds....unfortunately sometimes it is true...There should be steps taken by both sides to minimize this gap as much as possible...
Why?
A very basic necessity of working in today's world is to understand the business you are in and work towards supporting the business using your technology acumen and skills.
This is true, unless you work in a IT product based environment or somewhere else, where you may be working only to service your internal IT customers e.g. IT Infrastructure in a IT Company etc or you work alone on a marooned island manning a lighthouse switch.
Beyond that you have to work with the business.
This is required because Business is what drives Profits, Revenue and Sustainability to an Organization. Business has drivers like internal and external customers and partners, Competition, Compliance etc that decide and drive business and its exective decisions.
Coming from a Technology background, sometimes it becomes really difficult to think in terms of business, it is very easy to go back to the "Ones" and the "Zeros". During my initial IT Career days, being a consultant you have to wear the hat of an IT Developer cum Business Analyst, it becomes very difficult, to not think in terms of Tables and Columns and integrity data checks, rather in terms of Actors and Use cases, in front of the customer, who maybe as a Claims adjuster, is trying to explain how to send data to a glass vendor from the claim screen and wait for an amount estimate for damage repairs and then has to follow an escalation process so it gets approval if amount for repair was above the assigned claim adjuster's limit.
This really requires a major mindset change, a paradigm shift, if you may... wherein you get away from the developer mindset, where you in your own world do an efficient and scalable High level and low level designs and develop and unit test your own software to a Business person who tries to understand the people who run the business, their process and thinks of ways the technology can help them to make their work easier, better, faster and more efficient and smoother.
How?
The most important way to do this is, "to place yourself in the other person's shoes" and think the way he/she goes about the business day. This will help understand their painpoints and in turn help you to help them.
Certain steps that can be taken to overcome this chasm would be,
1> Get IT and Business aligned...In terms of Corporate Business goals and Objectives.
2> Companies to organize trainings, seminars for IT folk and business alike to make each side of the other side. For instance, hold workshops for business expaining them an IT lifecycle, what is a Functional document, high level designs, Integration, System Testing etc. Similarly for IT Folks, explain them the business processes and not just give them specs and expect the work to be done.
3> Have regular IT/Business meetings, maybe on a monthly/weekly basis where there will be general updates from both sides, Q&A to understand more and better
4> More involvement of IT Developers in Business meetings so they can understand the discussions and business painpoints and start thinking in terms of making those better.
Let me know your comments if you feel there are some points that can be added/modified to help you.
Business person will say "I wonder what is today's exchange rate?" and the IT person will say...""hhhmmm, this coin is shaped more like Alpha character "O" (Letter Oh) rather than numeric Zero"..(Not true...just made it up....but you get my point)....
IT developers and the business folks live and operate in 2 different worlds....unfortunately sometimes it is true...There should be steps taken by both sides to minimize this gap as much as possible...
Why?
A very basic necessity of working in today's world is to understand the business you are in and work towards supporting the business using your technology acumen and skills.
This is true, unless you work in a IT product based environment or somewhere else, where you may be working only to service your internal IT customers e.g. IT Infrastructure in a IT Company etc or you work alone on a marooned island manning a lighthouse switch.
Beyond that you have to work with the business.
This is required because Business is what drives Profits, Revenue and Sustainability to an Organization. Business has drivers like internal and external customers and partners, Competition, Compliance etc that decide and drive business and its exective decisions.
Coming from a Technology background, sometimes it becomes really difficult to think in terms of business, it is very easy to go back to the "Ones" and the "Zeros". During my initial IT Career days, being a consultant you have to wear the hat of an IT Developer cum Business Analyst, it becomes very difficult, to not think in terms of Tables and Columns and integrity data checks, rather in terms of Actors and Use cases, in front of the customer, who maybe as a Claims adjuster, is trying to explain how to send data to a glass vendor from the claim screen and wait for an amount estimate for damage repairs and then has to follow an escalation process so it gets approval if amount for repair was above the assigned claim adjuster's limit.
This really requires a major mindset change, a paradigm shift, if you may... wherein you get away from the developer mindset, where you in your own world do an efficient and scalable High level and low level designs and develop and unit test your own software to a Business person who tries to understand the people who run the business, their process and thinks of ways the technology can help them to make their work easier, better, faster and more efficient and smoother.
How?
The most important way to do this is, "to place yourself in the other person's shoes" and think the way he/she goes about the business day. This will help understand their painpoints and in turn help you to help them.
Certain steps that can be taken to overcome this chasm would be,
1> Get IT and Business aligned...In terms of Corporate Business goals and Objectives.
2> Companies to organize trainings, seminars for IT folk and business alike to make each side of the other side. For instance, hold workshops for business expaining them an IT lifecycle, what is a Functional document, high level designs, Integration, System Testing etc. Similarly for IT Folks, explain them the business processes and not just give them specs and expect the work to be done.
3> Have regular IT/Business meetings, maybe on a monthly/weekly basis where there will be general updates from both sides, Q&A to understand more and better
4> More involvement of IT Developers in Business meetings so they can understand the discussions and business painpoints and start thinking in terms of making those better.
Let me know your comments if you feel there are some points that can be added/modified to help you.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
IT Understanding by Business
What is Technology?
The dictionary meaning of Technology is "Applying skills and knowledge towards use of Tools and Techniques to serve a purpose". In the Insurance domain, IT Technology is the use of Computers and its associated tools and techniques so as to solve a business issue or serve a business purpose.
Let's say an organization goes for the latest and greatest Policy and Claims administration system investing millions of dollars to phase out their rigid and inflexible legacy Policy administration application. They have hired tens, if not hundreds of IT workers who must work with business and try to get the job done by understanding the business objectives and painpoints and resolve them by using the IT solutions based on the functionality supported by the product and use of their own years of experience.
IT side of Business and its Advantages
To achieve this and similar objectives, it is very important for business to be aware and be abreast of the IT world, to understand the IT jargon that goes on today. Parallely IT also has to understand the business processes, their jargons and painpoints and try to bridge the gap that exists between the two so as to make the job easier.
But the focus for this post is the Business side understanding of IT - Why do we need it? and how do we culminate it?
There are a lot of technology areas that are closely associated with business and having a fair understanding definitely helps and makes your job easier as a Business analyst. For e.g. in the Insurance world, understanding XMLs for sending data across applications, configuring policy, claims and billing applications for user administration, organizational setup, permissions and access, rating rules configuration etc are all areas that are closely associated to the day to day working of the business folks. Lots of Policy, Claims, CRM applications nowadays have a business rules configuration engine which will allow business users to setup business rules without the intervention of Technical group and will thus save cost and time to rollout. The output will also be of a better quality due to the involvement of business who will ensure all day to day and boundary scenarios are well tested.
Knowledge of IT would definitely give business users a good perspective on how things progress from requirements to design to development to testing before making it to the floors. They would be able to better understand the estimates provided by development, cross question and correct the estimates to more real world numbers.
Sometime business people get intimidated and lost in the technical jargon. So it definitely helps to know the tech talk so both Technical and business folks are on the same page. Business definitely stands to gain if they understand the nuances of the functional and technical features of the application along with knowing the tools of usage just as IT would gain if it understands the day to day business process of the applications they work on.
Business should be and nowadays is getting more and more technology savvy. The Gap between Technology and Business is reducing.faster than an ice cream cone in a hot afternoon. There exists a set of business SMEs who not only understand their busines but also the Technology aspect to an extent, but they may not get the whole picture due to various reasons,
1> Not enough technical inclination
- There is a set of business users who have got so used to their own way of doing things that they do not want to change. For example - Some people are so used to use to the abacus for doing calculations that they do not want to switch over to using the latest calculator. Agreed, Abacus has its advantages, but certainly calculator gives you more features and does it faster and with rapid scalability and flexibility.
For e.g. Calculating Rates and premium in an excel though worked as a solution in the old ages, in the new world we have application features that will do the calculations for you or using a desk calendar for policy premium, insured letter reminders rather than using the latest automatic activity and diary reminders that the applications provide out of the box.
2> Know as you go attitude
- I will learn about it when i get there. Procastination is another reason that many smart and intelligent business people do not use their knowledge in understanding IT which otherwise would serve as a great benefit, not just to that individual but also to the organization as a whole.
3> "Who needs this" attitude
- Mr. know-it-all attitude is another detrimental roadbock that delineates project progress faster than you can imagine.
Why does business need to understand IT?
1> Improve solution efficiency
- To efficiently and colaboratively work on Projects. It is necessary for IT and business to understand each other and make sure information does not get lost in translation. e.g. Business says, "Customer service should have the latest billing and payments information so that they can effectively communicate with customers"
Now business has to know and understand
- If financials are stored in the same "Policy & Claims System" or are retrieved from a different system altogether
- Is a realtime integration possible between the financial system and customer portal
- If not, is a nightly batch an option? How long? when does the process run?
- What information is available in the financial system so the type of information to be retrieved can be designed and developed.
- Last but not the least, design and develop a solution that is technically feasible, scalable, flexible and is intuitive to customers, business and the end operations teams alike.
2> Save costs and improve quality of output
- Business involvement in Technology will save lots of back and forth communications and confusions, unnecessary meetings between IT and business.
This will also improve the final quality of output due to the clear requirements and also final real scenario and boundary testing done by business
3> Functionality
- The more business understands about technology, the easier they will be able to put their ideas across and inturn will be able to develop and suggest solutions that are more closer to the real needs and are also technically feasible.
4> Advance knowldege
- Doing all of the above will not help the project and overall organization, but will also help and develop your individual skillsets and improve and expand your area of knowledge. Thus it will help you be more competitive and assist in reaching your career goals
How to achieve this?
1> Explore and understand Technology and business
- Read articles related to technology and business. Be curious, try and understand the daily happenings in the IT world.
- Explore applications
The applications that you work on, spend sometime to understand the fine points, nuances, the small functional quirks that they provide and try to build on that. This will help you not only understand the application's current capabilities but will also help you improvise on them so you can build a better product.
2> Ask Questions
- Ask questions when something is not clear or does not make sense why it is happening. Find a mentor who has a role similar to yours or is from the IT domain. So he/she can explain and resolve your doubts.
3> Training
- Finally training, nothing beats getting trained on the system that will be your source of "if not bread and butter then Jam and Honey"
- If possible, undergo training where you can learn all about Business analyst responsibilities and profile, What does it take to be a successful BA and a technologist?
4> Organization Culture
- IT understanding of business depends strongly upon on the organization culture, the methodologies that are followed for executing a project. How much intearaction and collboration exists between IT and business departments.
- Organizations should also focus on mentoring business folks and having something like a buddy system in place so business and IT work in an aligned fashion.
Doing all this is definitely beneficial to the organization and will help build a stronger and a knowledgable workforce who will help curb the overall organization costs and help in successful project implementations.
The dictionary meaning of Technology is "Applying skills and knowledge towards use of Tools and Techniques to serve a purpose". In the Insurance domain, IT Technology is the use of Computers and its associated tools and techniques so as to solve a business issue or serve a business purpose.
Let's say an organization goes for the latest and greatest Policy and Claims administration system investing millions of dollars to phase out their rigid and inflexible legacy Policy administration application. They have hired tens, if not hundreds of IT workers who must work with business and try to get the job done by understanding the business objectives and painpoints and resolve them by using the IT solutions based on the functionality supported by the product and use of their own years of experience.
IT side of Business and its Advantages
To achieve this and similar objectives, it is very important for business to be aware and be abreast of the IT world, to understand the IT jargon that goes on today. Parallely IT also has to understand the business processes, their jargons and painpoints and try to bridge the gap that exists between the two so as to make the job easier.
But the focus for this post is the Business side understanding of IT - Why do we need it? and how do we culminate it?
There are a lot of technology areas that are closely associated with business and having a fair understanding definitely helps and makes your job easier as a Business analyst. For e.g. in the Insurance world, understanding XMLs for sending data across applications, configuring policy, claims and billing applications for user administration, organizational setup, permissions and access, rating rules configuration etc are all areas that are closely associated to the day to day working of the business folks. Lots of Policy, Claims, CRM applications nowadays have a business rules configuration engine which will allow business users to setup business rules without the intervention of Technical group and will thus save cost and time to rollout. The output will also be of a better quality due to the involvement of business who will ensure all day to day and boundary scenarios are well tested.
Knowledge of IT would definitely give business users a good perspective on how things progress from requirements to design to development to testing before making it to the floors. They would be able to better understand the estimates provided by development, cross question and correct the estimates to more real world numbers.
Sometime business people get intimidated and lost in the technical jargon. So it definitely helps to know the tech talk so both Technical and business folks are on the same page. Business definitely stands to gain if they understand the nuances of the functional and technical features of the application along with knowing the tools of usage just as IT would gain if it understands the day to day business process of the applications they work on.
Business should be and nowadays is getting more and more technology savvy. The Gap between Technology and Business is reducing.faster than an ice cream cone in a hot afternoon. There exists a set of business SMEs who not only understand their busines but also the Technology aspect to an extent, but they may not get the whole picture due to various reasons,
1> Not enough technical inclination
- There is a set of business users who have got so used to their own way of doing things that they do not want to change. For example - Some people are so used to use to the abacus for doing calculations that they do not want to switch over to using the latest calculator. Agreed, Abacus has its advantages, but certainly calculator gives you more features and does it faster and with rapid scalability and flexibility.
For e.g. Calculating Rates and premium in an excel though worked as a solution in the old ages, in the new world we have application features that will do the calculations for you or using a desk calendar for policy premium, insured letter reminders rather than using the latest automatic activity and diary reminders that the applications provide out of the box.
2> Know as you go attitude
- I will learn about it when i get there. Procastination is another reason that many smart and intelligent business people do not use their knowledge in understanding IT which otherwise would serve as a great benefit, not just to that individual but also to the organization as a whole.
3> "Who needs this" attitude
- Mr. know-it-all attitude is another detrimental roadbock that delineates project progress faster than you can imagine.
Why does business need to understand IT?
1> Improve solution efficiency
- To efficiently and colaboratively work on Projects. It is necessary for IT and business to understand each other and make sure information does not get lost in translation. e.g. Business says, "Customer service should have the latest billing and payments information so that they can effectively communicate with customers"
Now business has to know and understand
- If financials are stored in the same "Policy & Claims System" or are retrieved from a different system altogether
- Is a realtime integration possible between the financial system and customer portal
- If not, is a nightly batch an option? How long? when does the process run?
- What information is available in the financial system so the type of information to be retrieved can be designed and developed.
- Last but not the least, design and develop a solution that is technically feasible, scalable, flexible and is intuitive to customers, business and the end operations teams alike.
2> Save costs and improve quality of output
- Business involvement in Technology will save lots of back and forth communications and confusions, unnecessary meetings between IT and business.
This will also improve the final quality of output due to the clear requirements and also final real scenario and boundary testing done by business
3> Functionality
- The more business understands about technology, the easier they will be able to put their ideas across and inturn will be able to develop and suggest solutions that are more closer to the real needs and are also technically feasible.
4> Advance knowldege
- Doing all of the above will not help the project and overall organization, but will also help and develop your individual skillsets and improve and expand your area of knowledge. Thus it will help you be more competitive and assist in reaching your career goals
How to achieve this?
1> Explore and understand Technology and business
- Read articles related to technology and business. Be curious, try and understand the daily happenings in the IT world.
- Explore applications
The applications that you work on, spend sometime to understand the fine points, nuances, the small functional quirks that they provide and try to build on that. This will help you not only understand the application's current capabilities but will also help you improvise on them so you can build a better product.
2> Ask Questions
- Ask questions when something is not clear or does not make sense why it is happening. Find a mentor who has a role similar to yours or is from the IT domain. So he/she can explain and resolve your doubts.
3> Training
- Finally training, nothing beats getting trained on the system that will be your source of "if not bread and butter then Jam and Honey"
- If possible, undergo training where you can learn all about Business analyst responsibilities and profile, What does it take to be a successful BA and a technologist?
4> Organization Culture
- IT understanding of business depends strongly upon on the organization culture, the methodologies that are followed for executing a project. How much intearaction and collboration exists between IT and business departments.
- Organizations should also focus on mentoring business folks and having something like a buddy system in place so business and IT work in an aligned fashion.
Doing all this is definitely beneficial to the organization and will help build a stronger and a knowledgable workforce who will help curb the overall organization costs and help in successful project implementations.
Monday, June 6, 2011
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.
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.
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