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
