Troux Staff

The 24 satellites that make up the global positioning system (GPS) space segment are orbiting the earth about 12,000 miles above us. Traveling at speeds of roughly 7,000 miles an hour, they are in constant movement, making two complete orbits every 24 hours. Military, civilians and commercial industries worldwide depend on the GPS system for location and time information every day. A GPS is an effective tool used by many to help save time and money and reduce daily stresses. When used correctly, a GPS can help its end users find the most direct route to their destination while delivering decision-making information that helps avoid time consuming obstacles such as road construction and traffic. Now imagine a GPS navigation system specifically designed for CIOs. One that could provide CIOs with the information they need to successfully steer IT and business together. Sound too good to be true? Navigation systems for CIOs already exist in the form Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPM).

Like a GPS satellite, a CIO must maintain a very precise orbit around their environment to maintain crucial insight into their entire organization to navigate current challenges and architect a future-proof infrastructure. However, GPS satellites are built to last ten years, while a CIO’s average tenure is only four years. How can a CIO successfully steer an organization and extend their tenure? An EPM solution can provide CIOs with a 360 degree view of the IT landscape in the context of the business, providing them with the information they need to synchronize IT with business goals in real-time. 

Everyone knows that the first step in operating a GPS device is plugging in the destination. Many organizations undertake enterprise architecture (EA) initiatives with the vague destination of “aligning the business with IT” in mind. Without defining specific business questions to answer or outcomes to achieve, a program can get bogged down in activity that does not drive EA initiatives in a direction that supports corporate goals. To determine the best route, a CIO needs a clear picture of the landscape as it exists.

An EPM solution provides a powerful and interactive analysis engine that supports a library of preconfigured visualizations to help decision makers quickly analyze and identify risk areas, as well as opportunities for cost savings and investment re-alignment. Without a set of rich analytics that represent the current state of organizations, processes, information, technologies and their relationships, the EA program will not have the roadmap it needs to reach the destination.

GPS accuracy depends on a number of variables, most notably signal to noise ratio, satellite position, weather and obstructions such as buildings and mountains. Businesses are often challenged to capture the structure and dynamics of the enterprise due to obstructions such as siloed information existing in disparate repositories such as Excel, Visio or even PowerPoint. An EPM solution provides the CIO with a comprehensive, advanced report creation environment, which delivers a collection of standard reports that answer critical business questions. These reports provide a comprehensive view of the IT landscape in the context of the business. Further, built-in data stewardship capabilities support the ability to federate the management and maintenance of information assets on both an organizational and individual level. A CIO can browse, search, edit and report against data stored in a centralized repository.

With a clear picture of an enterprise’s entire IT portfolio, a CIO can then leverage a comprehensive EPM solution to provide a visual modeling environment which enables decision-makers to create models and quickly understand the connections and dependencies between different types of enterprise portfolio elements. With rich visual models that represent the current state of organizations, processes, information, technologies and their relationships, a CIO can perform scenario-based alternative analysis to understand how each decision can impact the organization, allowing the company to link actions to business goals.

A GPS helps users reach their destinations by providing them with up-to-date, relevant information. When it comes to defining and implementing a strategy to connect the enterprise, an EPM solution can do the same for a CIO.  Businesses have always had tremendous decision-making challenges due to the lack of complete, accurate and timely information. With a solid Enterprise Portfolio Management strategy, enterprises can gain clear line-of-sight and instantly see how current and future technology strategy decisions impact an organization before they are implemented. Businesses can make more informed decisions that synchronize IT with business goals leading to reduced costs, decreased risk and increased agility. Capturing and managing information in the context of these portfolios is a critical component in providing visibility and synchronization between business and IT investments.

In conversations with customers and prospects we sometimes find they are struggling with the right starting point to bring a business architecture focus to their EPM program. Should they start with a business capability approach or a business process approach? This sounds like the “chicken or egg” dilemma — which comes first? Much like the chicken and the egg it isn’t an either/or situation, you will have to have both, and much more, for a successful program. That said, the “which comes first” question is probably the wrong question; we should be asking what outcome are you looking for? If the outcome is tactical such as improving a specific process then you might want to start with understanding that process and where it fits in the value chain. Alternatively if the enterprise is looking to the greater value you will likely need to take a different and more considered approach.

Strategy to Execution.
There are a multitude of benefits to a business architecture program, but certainly one of the most important is to improve “strategy to execution”. In fact, a Harvard Business Review survey of 1000 companies reported that only 37% thought they were “very good” or “excellent” at execution. If this is the objective then you will first have to start with understanding the strategy. One of the best approaches to understanding strategy is to understand how strategy affects the business. Since business capabilities are a common and very useful abstraction of what the business does they are an excellent starting place to begin the work of linking strategy across the set of enterprise portfolios. Using business capabilities as a common foundation for assessing enterprise performance it will be possible to create an investment roadmap that improves alignment and execution.

But What about Business Processes?
Business capabilities create the context for strategic planning, but that is not the end of the story by any means. Whereas business capabilities define what the business does, it is business processes that define how the business executes. Business processes and their assembly into value chains provide important baseline performance information for assessment of business capabilities. This baseline information can be compared to industry benchmarks and future state targets to highlight investment needs and possibly even the need for creation of new capabilities. Furthermore, there has been a proliferation of Business Process Management Suites (BPMS) across the enterprise. These suites enable the modeling, simulation, execution and monitoring of processes. When integrated with an enterprise portfolio management system they can provide ongoing measurements— but given the departmental nature of their usage they likely will not give a complete picture of the process landscape across the enterprise. In most cases performance information will require both automatic and manual assessments (see our Case Study: Capabilities-Based Planning at Fidelity Investments). In fact, in many instances manual subjective performance assessments are “good enough” to start driving real business value.

A Complete Picture.
An assessment of the business capabilities’ performance sheds light on the high priority investment areas but to get a complete picture you will need to understand how the other enterprise portfolios support those capabilities. A complete picture would include how the application, information, and technology portfolios impact the investment plan. Only then can you be sure that not only are doing the right things, but also doing them right (see our blog ‘Doing the Right Thing vs. Doing Things Right’).

Learn more:
Surveys indicate that both BPM and EA are top of mind with today’s CIO’s This comes as no surprise as CIO looks to the EA team to lead strategy development and they look to modern BPM suites to deliver those transformations. Unfortunately in the real world there are gaps in the “strategy to execution“ of a transformation. Our upcoming expert brief will discuss how to leverage the integration of BPM into your EPM program to deliver improved business transformation and identify gaps and redundancies in your Enterprise Portfolios.

With summer only halfway behind us and many professionals scrambling to fit in vacation time, you might think this is an odd time to contemplate going back to school.  I beg to differ.  It is always time to think about continuing professional education. Being successful in your trade means staying well informed of the most recent developments and changes that unfold within your field. Continuing professional education is important because it provides validation of an individual’s knowledge and skills.

Professionals–such as those working in the medical, legal and financial fields–are required to be consistently up to date on new standards, in addition to being refreshed on the knowledge they may have obtained previously. Continuing education ensures to patients, clients and licensing agencies that professionals are qualified to handle the responsibilities that affect people’s lives. Even if someone’s life is not at stake, any customer paying for your product or services wants to be assured that they are hiring knowledgeable experts, so similar expectations should apply to any corporate setting as well. 

In many organizations leadership teams rely on their enterprise architects to help chart a successful course for the business.  According to Wikipedia “Enterprise architects work with stakeholders, both leadership and subject matter experts, to build a holistic view of the organization’s strategy, processes, information, and information technology assets. The role of the enterprise architect is to take this knowledge and ensure that the business and IT are in alignment. The enterprise architect links the business mission, strategy, and processes of an organization to its IT strategy, and documents this using multiple architectural models or views that show how the current and future needs of an organization will be met in an efficient, sustainable, agile, and adaptable manner.” Quite a mouthful!

With the breadth of the enterprise architects role and the rapid advancement and development of new technologies, continuing professional education is critical for the Enterprise Architecture (EA) professional.  Unfortunately, today most of the non-degree professional education in EA takes the form of EA related certifications.  While certifications are fine, they typically focus only on one framework or perspective and are mostly training oriented. 

There are few continuing education opportunities for mid and senior level people that focus on broader strategic issues.  Creating leaders that think and act strategically is crucial for a position with the responsibility of aligning business goals, strategies, people and technology.  With so much at stake, it’s good to see that some programs are being developed to offer EA professionals an opportunity to hone their strategic analysis skills.

The Center for Enterprise Architecture at Penn State University is taking a leadership role in defining and offering these programs for mid and senior level EA leaders.  That’s one of the reasons Troux is excited to support their program (Troux Donates $4 Million in Software to Penn State University).  Two goals for the Penn State Center for Enterprise Architecture are to help EA become more of a mainstream academic discipline and assist in the evolution of EA into a “real profession” – on par with established professions such as accounting and engineering. 

As the EA profession continues to evolve, the importance of continuing education will only become more significant.   Perhaps the time is now to get this part of your professional development started.   Perhaps this is the time to go back to school.  Don’t be late.  The school bell is about to ring.

For more information about the Penn State Center for Enterprise Architecture and their executive programs please see:

http://www.pennstateexeced.com/ET070213-1.html

By: Ben Geller, VP Marketing, Troux

For any global, highly diversified Fortune 500 enterprise, providing reliable and cost-effective IT solutions that support company growth objectives requires a great deal of planning and foresight. For companies that have multiple subsidiaries and disparate business groups with different priorities and infrastructure requirements, the IT support challenge can quickly escalate from complex to overwhelming.

Troux customer Bayer Corporation knows this challenge all too well. With more than $36 Billion in revenue and 110,000 employees worldwide, the German chemical and pharmaceutical company is comprised of 283 subsidiaries representing three major business areas — CropScience, MaterialScience and HealthCare — each of which has distinct, yet overlapping, IT and application needs. While each business group had previously experimented with Enterprise Architecture, as the company continued to grow it became increasingly clear Bayer needed a comprehensive strategy for managing its expanding application portfolio and IT assets.

In an effort to more effectively support the business goals of each group while simultaneously reducing IT complexity and costs, in 2008 Bayer began working with Troux to implement an EA strategy that would enable it to be more agile and strategic while positioning the company for future growth.

As with many EA projects, a core objective for Bayer was developing a common language and understanding concerning IT infrastructure across the entire organization to improve collaboration and ensure stakeholders were invested in achieving the same goals. Another critical and ambitious project Bayer tackled with Troux’s support was revamping the manner in which the IT management team tracks, monitors and reports on the overall health of technology assets, key services and resources. Like many organizations, traditionally this information was silo-ed in a collection of Excel and PowerPoint documents and updated inconsistently, making accurate reporting a near-impossible and time-consuming challenge. By managing information through Troux’s platform, the IT department is easily able to retrieve answers to questions and quickly push updates to stakeholders across the business to aid in decision making.

If you’d like to read more about Bayer’s approach, you can access the full case study here at the link below.

Creating a Global Community: Bayer IT unites multiple business segments using Troux

In a recent Wall Street Journal – CFO Journal blog, James Wilmsen, CFO for cloud service provider XIOLINK stated “I am often surprised by how infrequently, if at all, the CFO is engaged when a company is evaluating [technology]. Many times CFOs take a back seat to the CIO or IT manager despite the inherent financial and strategic implications when evaluating investments in technology and IT services. However, the insight of a CFO can be critical in evaluating and choosing the right [technology].”

In essence, on behalf of CFOs everywhere Wilmsen is sending a message to their CIO counterparts… Help me help you!

Working in concert with CIOs and IT managers, Mr. Wilmsen believes CFOs can help IT leaders make the right decisions. He postulates there are a number of ways a CFO can add value to the technology evaluation process. A few of these are listed below.

1) CFOs can help evaluate risks. “As the chief steward of the company’s assets, both tangible and intangible,” it is critical the CFO understand the what, how, and where of a new technology investment. Mr. Wilmsen suggests “a series of meetings with the executive team of the [technology or IT Services] provider can uncover any concerns or potential issues which may later manifest themselves as poor service levels. Establishing a relationship and dialogue with them early in the process can pay dividends as the relationship grows and expands.”

2) CFOs can anticipate the potential return on investment. “The CFO is responsible for evaluating investments and processes to ensure they enhance profitability and achieve an expected return on invested capital. The right technology contributes to both arenas. Good technology, closely aligned with the needs of the business, is a long-term undertaking, requiring constant nurturing and adjustment. An investment in an initiative today could look very different tomorrow based on a changing competitive landscape, customer needs, and capital market factors. It is important that the CFO understands this dynamic and, along with the CIO, understands how an investment of time and resources with the right service provider can provide the enhanced level of flexibility desired.”

3) CFOs can help identify the organizational impact of technology change. According to Mr. Wilmsen, “at its essence, technology exists because of its ability to alter a process.” It allows leadership to “look at the chessboard of organizational capabilities and consider moves and outcomes which otherwise would not be available. The CFO should be aware of this change in process and ensure the change is one that positively impacts the bottom line, both in the near and long term. Nothing is more aggravating to a CFO than having to reinvest in technology without understanding why the previous investment did not work or why it did not last as long as proposed.”

4) CFOs can help ensure technology investment will lead to business improvement. In his blog Mr. Wilmsen writes “at the very heart of it, the CIO and the CFO have the same goal: to sustain, protect and grow the business. The CFO wants to make smart investments that enhance the value of the business. And the CIO knows that implementing new technologies with the right strategic partners can quickly impact revenue growth and enhance profitability, sometimes simultaneously. Aligning on project goals, timelines and projections increases the likelihood of a successful project, which is felt across the organization.”

In his conclusion Mr. Wilmsen states “the CFO’s involvement in the [technology] evaluation process is not done to alter the CIO’s responsibilities. Good CFOs know that IT is the CIO’s world, the one they live in every day. However, technology increasingly permeates all facets of the organization at a blistering pace. As a result, the opportunities associated with [new technologies and IT Services] begin to fall within the purview of the CFO. Because of this, a CFO who works as a partner in the process can make the job easier.

Hopefully more and more IT leaders will heed the CFOs request to “Help me help you.” And when they do, IT and Strategic Planning executives need to be prepared to work side-by-side with their CFO counterparts by delivering the IT transparency needed to make important decisions. Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPM) solutions can help deliver that transparency by showing CFOs how IT resources are spread across the enterprise, illustrating their connection to corporate goals, strategies ,and key business processes. EPM also enables leaders to identify which assets are needed and which are not, guiding them down a path to retire what’s not needed quickly and safely. In short, EPM solutions can yield the decision-making insights that help all executives help themselves.

How many of us can say that we are aware of insurance on a daily basis?  Not many. Of course, we become acutely aware of it when we need it, don’t we? In order to promote a more positive awareness of the insurance industry, an anonymous group (most likely insurance companies) created National Insurance Awareness Day.

At Troux, we’re very aware of the insurance industry. Every day, our solutions help customers such as MetLife, Liberty Mutual and Travelers Insurance make better business decisions. We’re providing them with insights to help them understand how IT can support the goals and strategies set forth by company leaders and change the reputation of the IT department within the organization.  With help from Troux, USAA’s enterprise architecture team has evolved from a technology centric group to one that successfully incorporates business goals into their practice—and they’re talking about it.

As you can imagine, our insurance customers are a pretty risk-averse group. And we love it because we are all about taking the risk out of decision making. When it comes down to it, we ensure that our insurance customers are able to answer critical business questions, reduce risk to business operations and increase satisfaction amongst business partners and internal clients. And we do this by helping them turn EA into an enabler for better decision-making.

Troux customers are even receiving industry recognition for their EA programs.  Northwestern Mutual won a coveted 2012 Enterprise Architecture Award from Forrester and InfoWorld after it successfully changed its organization’s perception of IT by managing technology as a company asset.

We’re proud to partner with insurance providers around the world, including Achmea, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, Marsh, Talanx, Farm Bureau Life Insurance Company and Aspen Insurance.  So on this National Insurance Awareness Day don’t just think about revisiting your policies and coverage limits take a moment and give a nod to the great companies that have you covered!

To find out how your company can take the risk out of decision making, click here. 

Last month, I came across a post on Fierce Enterprise Communications that cited some interesting statistics pulled from a survey of 200 IT professionals by IT staffing firm TEKsystems. What jumped off the page for me was this: a majority of senior-level IT professionals are expected to be accessible 24 hours per day, seven days per week, 365 days per year. Which, of course, leads to the next stat: one-third of the senior IT survey participants claimed work-life balance as their biggest challenge.

IT professionals never truly get a day off. And as the relationship between IT and the business matures, they’re being asked to weigh-in on high-level decision and strategy. More and more, they are helping organizations to realize their goals of reducing costs, decreasing risk and improving agility by serving as the linchpin of the company’s IT and business portfolios.

There are solutions available that help time-crunched IT pros make accurate, informed decisions. They are collecting data from across the enterprise, wrapping intelligence around it and using the results to answer the important questions—faster. And this is a big win for any organization.

At Troux, we recognize that the value of our solution extends beyond the business. Having accurate, up-to-date visibility across the entire enterprise and its business and IT portfolios gives you the gift of time, which is a win for you. What will you do with all of it? Start by getting out to have some fun on the longest day of the year.

You can learn how Troux’s enterprise technology portfolio can help lighten your load here.

Did you know today is International Panic Day? An enterprise-wide technology failure is one of the biggest causes for panic in the business world behind maintaining profitability. If a company’s IT infrastructure or mission critical application goes down, it affects everyone – including customers.

Troux customer, Scottish Widows Investment Partnership (SWIP), a subsidiary of Lloyds Banking Group, supports over 500 financial professionals across a number of business teams including front office, compliance, risk and others. The company deploys cutting-edge technology to process huge volumes of data and manage sophisticated investment products, all within policies designed to meet industry and regulatory standards and policies. They can’t risk a possible technology failure.

SWIP sought out an enterprise portfolio management partner to evolve their solution architecturepractice and help the company scale. With aggressive growth plans on the horizon, changes had to be implemented quickly.

Luckily the EA team engaged Troux early, and using the Troux Accelerator methodology and EPM approach, SWIP was able to identify critical business questions that needed to be addressed in order to prevent future growth issues. Within just 12 weeks, SWIP was able to capture and store mission-critical information from six enterprise portfolios spanning business architecture, applications, goals and strategy, investments, technology and information.

As a result, SWIP was able to create SWIP Transformation Architecture Repository (STAR), a common platform that manages all elements of SWIP architecture, which allows the EA team to access data and information in real-time, across the company and the portfolios to easily scale to meet business needs.

STAR has become not just a tool for enterprise portfolio management, but a decision-making tool for stakeholders across the company. For example, in the event of a service failure, the IT support team can refer to STAR to identify the impacted applications, business functions and business capabilities. Reports producing all the information on a specific server can be run in seconds, providing enhanced information to support failure recovery and inform affected areas of the business.

So, if your company lacks the visibility needed to understand and deal with the potential of an enterprise-wide technology failure before it happens – don’t panic – Troux has you covered.

To read more about Scottish Widow Investment Portfolio’s experience with Troux, please visit: http://www.troux.com/outgoing/case_study_swip.pdf. To learn how your company can benefit from Enterprise Portfolio Management, please visit www.troux.com. 

As you know, Troux recently joined other industry experts in support of the Penn State Center for Enterprise Architecture (EA) program. The fact that Penn State’s Center for EA Architecture is receiving industry wide support and recognition is a testament to how the discipline of EA is hitting its stride.

On Wednesday, June 12, Troux hosted a webinar featuring Dr. Brian Cameron, Executive Director of the Center for Enterprise Architecture at the Pennsylvania State University, to discuss framework for determining how to best measure EA value within your organization. The webinar broke registration and attendance records and we were thrilled at the level of participation and engagement from attendees! (If you’ve ever sat through a particularly dry webinar, you know exactly what we mean.) We’re fielding requests for access to the replay left and right. And this tells us that we nailed it. EA professionals are out there, they understand that value measurement is imperative to their programs’ success, and they want to know more.

A recognized thought leader in the EA field, Dr. Cameron shared his insights on tackling the challenge of value measurement, which—while typically cited as a key area of importance for an EA program—is the least mature category in the discipline and the toughest to capture. When all is said and done measuring the value of EA is not straightforward or easy. Dr. Cameron’s insights highlighted – measuring EA value takes analytical skills and organizational finesse, making the task part art and part science. Sometimes results cannot be successfully achieved without third party involvement.

Troux has long recognized the challenges of the discipline. We’ve seen it across organizations of all sizes and all verticals. We’ve got some pretty good war stories. So, when we heard that Penn State was putting together a program to develop successful EA professionals who will be able to integrate business with technology and then analyze, justify, and communicate the solution to enterprise architecture problems, we said, “How can we help?”

As we mentioned in our last blog post, old data methods don’t work in terms of value measurement. Curious about what does? You can view the replay here.

While most celebrate National Repeat Day by doing the things they enjoy over and over, I got to thinking about all the things in life we consistently repeat for lack of information and understanding of what is truly necessary. “Shampoo. Rinse. Repeat.” comes to mind as a once widely accepted directive developed by shampoo companies, which has now been  exposed as a damaging daily routine.

Here at Troux, we often work with customers that have found themselves repeating past sins
when it comes to formulating IT strategy and gaining visibility over IT asset’s spread across an enterprise. When the task of collecting data about applications, technology, projects and information is performed, the data often ends up in a spreadsheet and, at the rate that business and technology move today, the data is outdated the moment it is saved. Without real-time visibility across all the business functions, it’s impossible to accurately determine whether initiatives, processes and assets are duplicated, still relevant or operate in an efficient manner.

One time snap shots of the as-is state and disconnected strategic planning processes, often based on static collections of Excel, Visio, and PowerPoint documents, are no longer sufficient (not to mention the recent study revealing 88 percent of Excel documents contain mistakes). Lack of real time information and a management practice prone to errors can lead to highly involved decisions and processes that have no impact on the business, or worse, cost the business a great deal of money and resources.

The up side is there are solutions available that enable organizations to understand and optimize the connected set of portfolios that characterize an enterprise: goals and strategy, business architecture, applications, technology, information and investments. A clear view and scientific analysis across all of these portfolios sets up your organization for wise decision making and efficient processes, no repeat necessary. Now you can free up some time to repeat that trip to the ice cream shop or take another spin around the lake.

See how some of our Troux customers broke the repeat cycle here.

In the wake of the recent global financial crisis, a recent Gartner CEO survey¹ cited 68% of chief and senior executives see business conditions as “rather uncertain” for the foreseeable future.  In spite of this uncertain environment, the show must go on. CEOs are increasing their investments in initiatives that target growth, improved profitability and programs that focus on the customer experience (see our blog: How Can CIOs Prepare for the Age of the Customer? ). 

Roughly 60% of the CEOs and senior executives surveyed by Gartner stated they would actually increase investments in the areas of product enhancements, sales, and IT to drive execution against these initiatives. 

For those of us who spend our days helping corporate executives gain the transparency needed to make better business decisions, this comes as welcome news.  Whether your perspective of the business world looks at things from the outside-in  or from the inside-out, it will probably comes as no surprise that the general consensus amongst decision makers and corporate by-standers is that most organizations invest a great deal in developing a business strategy and almost none on the execution. 

As most of us know, it is in the execution process that the majority of strategies fail (see Black Swan Blog).   In fact, Dr. David Norton puts the rate of failure of business strategy at 90%².  This metric draws even more attention to the fact that in a tough economic environment companies cannot afford to waste valuable resources on strategies that fail.  Hence, in order for the show to go on, the challenge facing enterprise architects is to deliver signature-ready recommendations that can help their organizations meet the objectives set out by their CEOs.

That’s where an Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPM) approach to enterprise architecture can help.  According to the Gartner survey, CEOs and senior executives must pick the winning strategies and execute flawlessly.   This is something business-outcome driven EPM supports (see blog: Doing the Right Thing vs. Doing Things Right).  By clearly identifying the expected outcomes and having a well-understood process to execute, the chances of success significantly increase.

CIOs and enterprise architecture teams are uniquely positioned to help drive this success.  Gartner’s CEO survey states that improvements in organizational performance can be achieved in a number of ways. The two most common are the redesign of the supporting business processes and the use of IT to automate the business process. Typically, these are done in combination.

Over 50% of the CEOs surveyed stated they will be making significant investments in technologies and solutions such as business analytics and enhanced business reporting (see blog: The Secret to Better Decision Making) over the next 5 years to drive business improvements in the areas of growth, profitability, and the customer experience.

Even in these tough and uncertain economic times it is encouraging to see ‘The Show Must Go On’ reflected by the desire on behalf of executives to invest in technologies that drive business improvements.  By leveraging EPM solutions, CEOs and senior executives can ensure the business performance improvements they seek are actually delivered.  EPM solutions help clearly identify and link strategies to the business outcomes that they are intended to drive, as well as the business capability and business process change needed.  The best way to ensure that a business outcome is targeted to meet business needs is to map to the critical strategic questions that senior executives ask (download our Mindmap).  EPM solutions can add value by providing insight and line of sight into business and IT operations to ensure corporate goals, strategies, business process, and IT are synchronized and aligned.

Please click here to download a complimentary copy of the Gartner CEO and Senior Executive Survey 2013.

Recently technology entrepreneur, lecturer and author Peter Hinssen delivered a keynote address at our annual worldwide conference. The premise of Mr. Hinssen’s presentation was based on his observation that we are beginning to embark on a new era where digital is just a ‘normality’.   Simply put, we have spent the last 25 years becoming digital and we are now entering an era where digitization and technology are expected to be part of our lives, at-home, at-work and on-the-go.

He went on to say, once in the new normal we have a zero tolerance for failure, but at the same time we realize things do not always have to be perfect.  He coined the phrase “good enough technology” and stated good enough technology will become acceptable in the work place.   Good enough technology does not mean we cut corners.  It means that as we become more technology aware in our work lives we would be happy with solutions that are say eighty-percent perfect on the quality scale.   Mr. Hinssen stated in the case of the enterprise if we take a look at the classical way we build and develop IT applications and systems we know it can take a long time to attain one hundred-percent quality.  If businesses would be happy to take IT applications and systems that are eighty-percent perfect on the quality scale IT departments could probably deliver twice as many systems and applications in the same amount of time. 

The difference between one hundred-percent and eighty-percent perfect on the quality scale is a dialogue with business – resulting in – good enough technology.   That’s where an Enterprise Portfolio Management (EPM) approach can help.  By identifying the connection between business goals and strategies to the applications and technology spread across the enterprise, business leaders can make application and technology investment decisions based on facts rather than gut feel.  This helps enterprises better define what ‘good enough’ investments look like and helps prepare the business to move forward with new projects with greater speed and agility – two key ingredients for success in the era of the new normal.

Finally, Mr. Hinssen commented that if we look at the old normal and new normal together we can see that IT needs to evolve.  In the ‘old normal’ we used to design systems that were ‘built to last’, but in the new normal the pressures on IT are quite different.  We have to let IT evolve from the ‘built to last’ philosophy in the old normal to a ‘designed to change’ philosophy in the new normal.

Once again an EPM-centric approach can help with this evolution.  Using EPM decision making principles (making IT decisions in the context of the business) enterprise architects can design fluid architectures that allow business leaders to embrace the ‘design to change’ philosophy ushered in with the era of the new normal.  Using an EPM approach, enterprise architects can help decision makers design and deliver disruptive new services or create new business models that leverage the technologies that are powering the new IT economy.  Technologies such as cloud, virtualization and mobility are now the currency of the new normal.  Using an EPM approach enterprise architects can show business leaders how these technologies can play a more integral part in delivering success across enterprise much faster – and help them build a wining business in the era of the new normal.