EA – it’s magic!

The leading IT research and advisory company, Gartner, recently made an analysis of the top EA vendors and again assessed each vendor’s entry into its magical EA quadrant. This time around, QPR was one of the shortlisted EA vendors, and we entered the playing field as a new entrant based on Gartner’s assessment of our completeness of vision and ability to execute against it.

So what exactly is our vision?

We believe that EA modeling and analysis alone are not enough to safeguard real business value. To avoid modeling for the sake of modeling, EA initiatives must be monitored and measured to ensure the delivery of a full development cycle and continuous improvement; and above all, EA initiatives must serve a purpose! This purpose can take the form of a strategic goal or a desired business outcome that steers EA initiatives toward a common goal. It all sounds like common sense, right? But in the middle of a diagram jungle and an army of stakeholders pulling you in different directions, it’s easy to lose focus. In our vision, EA brings a unique insight to your operations, which provides decision making support and therefore, allows senior management to execute strategy, reduce complexity and achieve operational excellence.

Now you know our vision, but what does the market think?

Through our daily interaction with many different people and organizations, we have noted that the perception of EA is shirting from an IT centric framework for infrastructure brains to being a tool for senior management to achieve business outcomes. Gartner, too, talks about putting “business objectives and outcomes first in developing EA signature-ready guidance and actions” and leveraging “EA to produce desired business outcomes and guide your enterprise from chaos to competitive advantage”.

With our vision and the shifting market demand in mind, we have developed a unique set of tools, templates and best practices to make our vision of EA come true. Our customers really value our offering for the ability to link strategy with operations and transformation execution packages, the simple and appealing look of the readily configured templates, the pragmatic best practices and  the many EA viewpoints provided to identify change and evaluate business impact.

For more information on our EA offering, visit http://www.qpr.com/QPR_EA-EBPA_offering.htm.

Is your organization using EA to deliver real business outcomes or still trailing behind with countless diagrams?

Virpi Nieminen

fi.linkedin.com/in/virpinieminen

 

Balanced scorecard aligns initiatives. .. And then what?

Balanced scorecard alone is not enough for successful strategy execution. To achieve significant change, it's critical to understand how strategic objectives and initiatives influence organization's business operations and architecture.

Balanced scorecard (BSC) is an excellent framework for defining and aligning strategic objectives and initiatives to support strategy execution. However, many organizations struggle with the discrepancy between strategy execution planning and the actual execution. Based on our experience, the discrepancy is caused by too high level strategic initiatives, which do not take into account organization's existing architecture and operations.

So what should be taken into consideration after a strategy has been defined? How the strategic objectives should be made actionable? You certainly want to avoid your organization ending up in the below situation where planning and execution are going to opposite directions. As per an earlier post by colleague Sami Lotvonen, 44 % of enterprises still fail at strategy execution.

Figure 1 - How not to do strategy execution planning

What to consider in strategy execution planning

Initiatives in BSC are strategic in nature and often drive for significant change. Based on our global experience, initiative planning is often on a too high level and done without proper understanding of organization's current business operations and architecture. To become actionable, the initiatives must cover three vital dimensions of strategy execution: process, people and IT systems. Only by doing this, you get through the strategy execution chain described in the below picture.

 

Figure 2 - Strategy execution chain

Processes
To achieve strategic change, processes must change. You can say that all activities in an organization belong to either core or support processes.  Some processes are automated using a workflow solution or other IT tool and some are based on people, following instructions and formal process models. Especially the latter can be ad-hoc and happen differently every time, giving its own flavor to making changes.

People
Regarding people, you need to consider two aspects: allocating enough resources to strategically important activities and making sure that the people have sufficient competences. Be aware that for most people, the big challenge is to give up tasks that don’t lead toward strategic execution and take on new ones as “walking on the unknown territory” is often uncomfortable. Nowadays it’s more common to cascade balanced scorecard down to individual level so that the high level strategy leads everyday activities.

IT systems
Cloud technologies, big data and mobility open opportunities for completely new business models. Therefore, IT is not only a pre-requisite for efficiency but it should be utilized as a source for innovations and as an enabler for competitive advantage.

Four steps to avoid discrepancy in strategy execution planning
1.       Understand the ‘as-is’ situation of your business operations and architecture.
2.       Consider the three dimensions already when analyzing feasibility of different strategic options. For example, an old technology platform can stop an organization from executing a brilliant strategy. If this is not noticed on time, it will lead to some very expensive corrective actions.
3.       Plan ‘to-be’ business operations and architecture.
4.       Design transition roadmap and deployment for strategy execution.

When in the strategy execution phase, remember to establish continuous monitoring and feedback loops from all three dimensions. This allows you to steer your business towards strategic objectives.

Maija Erkheikki
http://fi.linkedin.com/pub/maija-erkheikki/2/303/a11

Tero Aspinen
http://fi.linkedin.com/pub/tero-aspinen/2a/592/344

Mikko Rajala
http://fi.linkedin.com/pub/mikko-rajala/a/102/179