Guidelines: Business Vision

Topics

• Explanation
• Finding Areas of Improvement
• A New or Thoroughly Restructured Target Organization

Explanation

A Business Vision for the organization in which a system is to be deployed, referred to as the target organization, is meant to be changeable as the understanding of what the objectives should be and what the change potentials are evolves. However, change should happen slowly and normally only throughout the earlier portion of the lifecycle.

We suggest you express the objectives in terms of business use cases, business workers, and business entities, as these are developed so you can see how the business vision is realized. The description of the objective should eventually cover: 

• The names and descriptions of the target organization's new or changed business use cases.
• An overview and brief descriptions of the future business use cases, emphasizing how they differ from the current ones. For each such business use case, name the customer, supplier or other type of partner, as well as the input, activities, and resulting product. These descriptions do not need to be comprehensive or detailed they are intended to stimulate discussion among senior executives, employees, and customers. Furthermore, these descriptions should present the business philosophy and its objectives in straightforward terms.
• Measurable properties and goals for each business use case, such as cost, quality, lifecycle, lead-time, and customer satisfaction. Each goal should be traceable to the business strategy and its description must say how it supports that strategy.
• A specification of the technologies that will support the business use cases, with special emphasis on information technology.
• A list of possible future scenarios. As much as possible, the specification should predict how the business use cases will have to change in the next few years due to new technologies, new interfaces to the environment, and other types of resources.
• A list of critical success factors; that is, factors critical for the successful implementation of the business vision.
• A description of the risks that must be handled for the business-modeling effort to succeed. 

Finding Areas of Improvement

This section suggests a number of questions to ask yourself in order to find areas in the target organization that can benefit from business improvement.

Look at each business use case and ask these questions:

• Can the organization structure be improved?
• Is unnecessary work performed?
• Is the same or similar work performed in different places?
• Is time a problem?
• Is cost a problem?
• Do many errors occur?
• Are relationships with suppliers and partners a problem?
• Can Information Technology be used to improve the business?

Keep three things in mind as you decide how to improve a business:

• Always prioritize your customer's needs.
• Focus on the core business and outsource those activities the business does not do well.
• Don't pick the first idea that comes to you; there are always several ways to improve a business or solve a problem.

Can the organization's structure be improved?

There are many ways to improve a business. An important aspect is how you organize people working on the business processes. The following guidelines are recommended:

• Build multi-competence teams to carry out core business use cases.
• Reduce the number of business workers involved in each business use case. This leads to reduced costs, fewer handoffs, and fewer misunderstandings.
• Give the business workers involved more responsibility, then they won't wait for others to decide. If necessary, they can change the way they work.

A basic way to streamline a business use case is to create teams that have the necessary competencies and responsibilities.

Is unnecessary work performed?

Identify unnecessary work by looking for activities such as:

• writing reports that no one reads
• storing information that is never used
• sending information to people who never read it
• approving results for no reason

Eliminate these activities wherever possible.

Is the same or similar work performed in different places?

You want to avoid performing the same work several times within the same business. You know that work is being performed in several places when:

• Work is redone, either because people don't trust the results or they don't know what has been done before.
• Results are checked and approved several times.
• Same or similar information is stored in several places; for example, two similar databases.

To avoid these situations, change the way business is done by one or several of the following ways:

• Instill trust in results by officially releasing them.
• Educate people about how the business works.
• Combine similar activities into one.
• Collect information in one place.

Is time a problem?

Lead-time, or lifecycle time, can be a problem even if everything is working well. To identify where time is problem, analyze how time is spent in each business use case. Identify the relationship between productive time, waiting time, and transfer time.

Change the business with one or several of the following actions:

• Change the order of activities so they are performed in parallel.
• Assign several activities to one business worker.
• Simplify interfaces between business workers, using predefined forms and templates.
• Cut waiting time. Streamline the workflow. Don't let things sit and wait.
• Let people have more responsibility instead of waiting for decisions from others.
• Improve the working environment. Check out the tools with which people are equipped. Are you using an old copying machine to produce material. Consider buying a new one or outsourcing your copying.
• Cut waiting time by combining several activities into one.
• Minimize the time it takes to move information or material between people by improving communication; for example, use electronic media.
• Automate or mechanize human activities.

Is cost a problem?

One way to reduce cost is to reduce the number of people involved. Of course, you should try to make activities less expensive, but minimizing time is often the best way to reduce costs. Be careful reducing costs often adversely affects the quality of the business results.

Do many errors occur?

If many errors occur within the business or in the results the business produces, consider the following actions:

• Localize the source of the error and prevent it from occurring.
• Minimize the number of handoffs.
• Improve internal business interfaces. Clarify responsibilities.
• Conduct an extra review.
• Use forms and templates.
• Write simply.
• Simplify activities.
• Simplify instructions, forms, templates, and so on.

Are relations with suppliers and partners a problem?

Examples of problems in relationships with external suppliers and partners are long lead times, waiting, errors in orders, and doing the wrong thing. Consider the following actions to remove the problems:

• Simplify communication. Assign someone responsible for the communication.
• Work closer with the suppliers and partners.
• Cut down the number of partners or suppliers.
• Instead of finding a supplier, consider doing it within the business.

Can Information Technology be used to improve the business?

We recommend you take a close look at how technologies can change the business and each individual business process. This topic is typically covered in parallel with Activity: Define Automation Requirements.

A New or Thoroughly Restructured Target Organization

This section suggests a series of topics to discuss when your task is to restructure the business use cases of an existing business or to add new business use cases to perform business reengineering or business creation:

• Look at the target organization and its borders
• Look at the individual business use case
• Critical success factors
• Risk factors

Look at the target organization and its borders

When you are ready to develop a vision of the new business, we recommend you start by first establishing what the entire business is-every business use case and all the business actors. The purpose is to identify changes and improvements that affect how responsibilities are distributed among business actors and business use cases. This often involves changing the interface between the target organization and the business actors, moving activities between business use cases, and even removing and merging business use cases.

Look at the individual business use case

Once you've decided which business use cases to focus on, we recommend you follow Davenport's [DVP93] structured way to develop a vision. This calls for a series of workshops, each with a specific focus.

Critical success factors

Critical success factors are those factors essential to the success of the business-engineering project. [JAC94] classifies success factors in the following categories:

• Motivation
• Leadership
• Organization-wide ownership
• Vision
• Focus
• Well-defined roles
• Tangible products
• Technology support
• Expert guidance
• Risk taking

Risk factors

According to [JAC94], business-engineering risks roughly fall into two categories: risks associated with the change process and risks associated with the technology used. [DVP93] classifies risks into five categories:

• Resource allocation
• Organizational and cultural
• Technical
• Product factors
• Market and environment

Rational Unified Process