New performance management trends in Saudi Arabia

The beginning of February accommodated an important QPR visit to Saudi Arabia where I had the opportunity with my colleague, Tero Aspinen, to meet local QPR partners and customers. One of the highlights of the visit was meeting with PMCGA (Performance Center for Government Agencies), a QPR key customer. PMCGA carries out tasks such as measuring productivity rates of government agencies by checking the optimal use of human, financial and material resources. In effect, it is the key organization that supports Saudi Arabia’s government agencies in performance management.

QPR visits key customer PMCGA in Saudi Arabia

Reflecting on the above, interest in Kaplan & Norton’s balanced scorecard, as a strategic planning and management system, has increased in recent years in the Middle East. Demand seems to be growing especially in the public sector, where there is regulatory pressure to raise transparency and efficiency. Meeting with customers in Saudi Arabia helped us to gain important insight about the growing market opportunities within the region.

Another exciting trend is the spreading interest in Enterprise Architecture (EA). EA is starting to gain visibility in the agendas of organizations. Organizations seem to be especially interested in combining balance scorecard and strategic level performance management with EA so as to generate a holistic view of companies’ operations. The main reason for this is that EA is a discipline that covers all the dimensions that are needed to align strategy with business operations such as organizational structures, processes and It systems.

The recent change of regime in Saudi Arabia will inarguably bring about both big and small changes in governance and organizational structures in the Kingdom, including ones affecting PMCGA. But the above mentioned boost in demand for operational excellence through increased agility and efficiency is a refreshing direction.


Sakari Lapinsuo

https://fi.linkedin.com/in/sakarilapinsuo

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

 

“You have reached your destination”

When planning your way to a less known destination, it’s good to take a short break and think ahead. If you travel by car, the planning is made easy with the emergence of car integrated navigators. They monitor how much gas we have left or if a road is blocked, reflecting this on our journey. This kind of solution would be perfect in business as well, where planning should be done every day. But often we sit down only once or twice a year when some major strategic lines have to be defined. 

Equally important to reaching your destination, is reflecting on the now; where you are and what you have. That's just what we did recently at QPR Software with a group of colleagues from different units. We know of course well what we can offer in the fields of Process Intelligence, Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Enterprise Business Process Analysis (EBPA), as well as Performance Management. But while doing this reflection, we also observed that our tools enable organizations to know where they are and how to plan forward. 

In a changing business environment, you need to react fast and be proactive. This agility means that all tools supporting operational development must be interconnected, leaving no room for guessing and reducing complexity of root cause analysis.

As said previously, first you need to know where you stand in terms of your operations and see how you're doing. Dashboards and reports using the performance management standards of your choice must be easily available at all times to provide your current status compared to your objectives. When the red light starts blinking, many fail however to discover the real root cause of their current performance problems, because they don’t have the visibility to the actual processes behind them. This can be easily handled by linking performance metrics to the actual processes. 

Knowing your current performance is not just a matter of numbers and sitting down to review your operations. You need facts and process intelligence. Especially when processes become complex and produce vast amounts of data to your business information systems, it's vital to use the information and see what works and what doesn’t. Process tools use the data to provide process intelligence for monitoring performance and gaining visibility needed to make correct decisions on improving and developing your processes. 

After you know what happens under the hood, comes the part where you need to draw the map to your goals. It all comes down to evaluating and aligning your assets against the strategy in order to make your business successful. Your strategy map should not be linked only to the actual performance information, but also to your current as-is enterprise architecture model. Often when discussing with our customers they tell us how important it is to be able to fast track the dependencies of one single item to the tens or hundreds of other items in process, application, information and technology layers.  At first glance the layers often seem to be a complex grid of elements; however the right EA tool will highlight and help you recognize the necessary connections and dependencies. This considerably reduces the needed time to plan a future to-be model and the transformation roadmaps associated with it.

Support for successful business transformation and continuous improvement should remain a high priority. QPR sees that taking a comprehensive approach to develop operations drives sustainable results. Reducing and managing the complexity of operations becomes a key asset in growing organizations. The integration of software tools supporting EA, EBPA, Process Intelligence and Performance Management might not yet be at the same level as a car integrated navigation system, but at QPR we can already offer our tools together as an integrated solution to help the work of business units, planning functions and ICT.

Jussi Siltanen

Product Marketing Manager

fi.linkedin.com/in/jussisiltanen/

How to get started with Enterprise Architecture? Part 1/4: Business

Enterprise architecture (EA) is a hot topic both in public and private sector organizations. One of the reasons why interest for enterprise architecture is rising, is that world has become quite a complex place. Complexity costs, especially unplanned complexity, and therefore many organizations are seeking holistic, and systematic thinking approaches to clarify and simplify things. The promise and essence of enterprise architecture is to provide that kind of thinking and a tool for business planning and management.

A problem many organizations face when starting enterprise architecture work is where to start, and how to get started? Here is my simple three-point starting list how to begin your EA work regardless of your role in that work:

1. Understand. Start to understand your organization’s business. Read annual reports, investigate operating plans and have a look at your organization’s strategy and goals: what value and mission does your organization drive for? Ask, discuss, and look for more information about how your organization does its business.

2. Communicate. Have a dialogue with business and supporting units. When discussing about business, use common business language. If you are not familiar with business language, you need to learn the basic terms related to your business. Discuss with business people what are their thoughts, concerns and worries about running the business.

3. Network. Discuss and share thoughts with people in your organization who are the customers and suppliers of your organization, and find out if there are other interest groups your organization is collaborating with. Analyze the value network of your organization. If you don’t know something, ask people who knows. People in your organization are surely willing to answer if you just ask.

No matter if you are CEO, CIO, Enterprise architect, IT manager or a line worker in your organization; the same list applies to you all. If you are a consultant trying to help other organizations, again, the same list applies. Capture all your learnings, and you have a good starting point to create your first EA deliverable called Business Architecture. So, start your EA work from the things that really matter, that is, business.
 
Ari Anturaniemi
Chief Consultant, Enterprise Architecture

fi.linkedin.com/pub/ari-anturaniemi/3/572/a51/

Who stole Enterprise Architecture?

Dear friends,

The term Enterprise Architecture (EA) appeared in the literature for the first time some 25 years ago. Enterprise architecture pioneers like John Zachman and Stephen Spewak linked the concept with a multidimensional and layered structuring of an enterprise, intended to satisfy the needs of the business. Since then, various frameworks have been introduced by different individuals and organizations, ranging from military and government to private sector. Practically all of them contain the basic elements in some shape or form: business drivers and requirements, information architecture, process architecture, application architecture, and technical architecture. The practitioners and standardization bodies are in violent agreement that these are all in the heart of enterprise architecture.

Given the above, one would assume that the concept and the term Enterprise Architecture would  be a stable part of common knowledge. I wish this was true, but the EA culture is suffering from unnecessary turbulence. There are individuals and organizations, acting out of ignorance or commercial interest, trying to introduce definitions and interpetations that are not adding value but rather distorting the picture and confusing those that are new to the topic. For example, some companies having a significant interest in the technology side of IT have advertised enterprise architecture as a big IT architecture. Having strong marketing muscles and excellent access to enterprises through their IT departments, they have created the confusion among their customers that EA is about IT only. If this is the first message that the CEO hears from the CIO about EA, the damage has been done and is difficult to repair.

The above is an example of twisting the meaning of an existing term. Another type of confusion arises from inventing completely new terms. This has been the core competence of marketing departments throughout the history. Marketing is seeking novelty, defining niches which then can be occupied, claiming to be the first or biggest in the recently invented niche. You can always define your own terms and concepts, and distract your customers from the competition. There is no need to have true novelty in your products or services, playing with words is enough. This is an old strategy: if you can't win on a level playground, try tilting the playground. Who cares if you do damage to your customers and to the enterprise architecture community.

Education, science, and language are part of our culture. As such, they are subject to the natural laws governing the eternal evolution of culture. Despite of this unavoidable evolution, we need to keep in mind that it is not random but is influenced by people. It does matter, where the evolution takes us and that we do influence it, when it matters. Concepts like business capability and enterprise architecture are purely abstract and artifical, but they are serving an important purpose for the enterprise management and should be engineered to serve that purpose effectively. Whether we can or cannot, is determined by the strength of the global community of scientists and practitioners driving the ontological process for enterprise architecture. New terms and concepts should be introduced cautiously, weighing their value and linkage to existing ones. New knowledge has value only if it can be put in the context of some existing knowledge. This way we can make sure that climbing the stairs of knowledge is not followed by falling down on our noses.

Enterprise architecture is not something completely new and isolated from other parts of management science. It derives from systems thinking for its philosophical part, and from systems engineering and economics for the methodological part. We need to protect it as the broad conceptual framework and foundation for defining, scoping, and positioning other disciplines like Business Modeling (BM), Operational Development (OD), Business Process Analysis (BPA), Business Process Management (BPM), Enterprise Business Process Management (EBPM), Capability Maturity Model (CMM), Six Sigma, Business Intelligence (BI), and Corporate Performance Management (CPM). None of these disciplines has the richness of semantics and structure to be used as a reference framework for the others. Enterprise architecture as a concept and discipline has these properties for the most part, and as for the remaining properties, let's make sure EA evolves to cover them as well. Starting from the scratch, with a completely new term and concept, is not feasible nor necessary.

Together we can catch and stop the term thieves!

Jaakko Riihinen
Senior Vice President
Products and Technology
QPR Software Plc

fi.linkedin.com/in/jaakkoriihinen/