Living in a Post Troux Transformation World

One of the most anticipated highs in any transformation is when you begin to capture the value of the project. A major focus of my work has been working with large and complex organizations to develop an organizational capability to transformation. This capability is intended to enable the organization to meet an ongoing need to change the organization in order to meet rapidly evolving external and internal forces including disruptive technologies, compliance and regulatory requirements, evolving stakeholder requirements and other forces pulling on the organization. Simply put, the pace of organizational change has accelerated and successful organizations need to be able to meet the challenges presented by these changes in an efficient and effective manner in order to perform at a high level. For commercial entities there is a significant sustainable competitive advantage to be gained by developing an ability to rapidly transition the organization in order to meet new strategic objectives, leverage game changing technology, and capitalize on opportunities presented in the market.

In order to develop this capability, it is necessary for the executives involved to develop real insight across major enterprise portfolios and their inter-relationships. For clients leveraging the Troux platform to realize their transformation capability many will choose to focus on specific areas like their application portfolio or enterprise standards in order to get as much value from possible from the development of this transformational capability. These items represent the low hanging fruit available to most organizations, allowing them to immediately leverage new insight to pull cost from the organization. This can help senior executives see the value in such programs by demonstrating an immediate return on investment. This enables the organization to begin to gain the insight it will need to manage future transformations, while gaining the buy in of senior executives who might otherwise be more hesitant to invest in longer running strategic programs devoted to the development of robust enterprise architecture, enterprise portfolio management or other organizational transformation related capabilities.

As reports light up and opportunities are prioritized for action there is a real sense of satisfaction, because this is the moment when the investment begins to deliver on its promise. However, if the organization is serious about ensuring the maximum value from its investment and developing a true transformational capability instead of simply a project centered on slice in time cost savings they won’t stop there. In fact, well prior to the first report lighting up the organization should be looking at what life will be like AT (After Troux). The fact is that if you don’t change the habits that got you into this situation you will find yourself back in the position that prompted the initial investment. Without an ongoing ability to understand how information, technology and other assets support your business you simply cannot expect to be an agile high performing organization. Lack of insight makes governing and executing in an efficient and effective manner nearly impossible and results in an overly complex, cumbersome and costly value chain that is a drag on operational performance despite a large price tag.

The bottom line is that you have to change the way you make decisions in order to get the most out of your transformational investment. The new information and insights provided by a focused effort around a specific portfolio, like applications, may enable IT executives to make clear decisions in specific areas of the enterprise portfolio and get to a return on investment in the near term. In the longer term, organizations need re-engineer the business processes they use for planning and decision making if they are to fully capture the value of this type of insight across the broader organization. The often significant return on investment that is realized by organizations investing in the narrower types of projects that are typically used to jumpstart a transformational program are only possible because the system that is in place within the organization wasn’t capable of maintaining an optimal balance within the portfolio. In order to prevent a recurrence of the factors that led to such great opportunities for savings the organization needs to be determined to develop new processes. These processes will enable the right information to take the right path through the organization and ensure that decision makers have the information they need to make decisions in a timely manner.

Opportunities for ongoing improvement to the decision making process based on the availability of this new information to decision makers need to be examined. This is how the organization gets to the real ongoing value of having an organizational transformation capability rather than a cost savings project.

Efficient, effective, and agile operations based on real insight have to become the normal mode of operations and this is only possible by explicitly focusing on changing the way decisions are made. This needs to be a multi-faceted effort that includes looking at existing stakeholders, decision making processes, analytic components and the informational inputs used to inform them and re-engineering them in light of the new capabilities Troux brings with regard to enabling decision making. A concerted effort needs to be made to define business process touch points across the organization, key informational exchanges, and the real information requirements of decision makers. This should include planning to automate informational flows from the various systems that contain critical planning information into the Troux environment in order to enable ongoing analysis that leverages high quality data that is readily available. This effort is all about developing a world class decision making environment that includes all of the information needed to support business decisions and strategic execution. One of the major factors governing the degree to which the organization will maximize its return on investment is the degree to which it is able to facilitate adoption of the new capability to make decisions. In order to ensure the broadest possible adoption, the organization needs to effectively communicate the value of the information to executives, managers and decision makers as well as embedding high value decision making processes into real workflow based governance that ensures the proper management and consumption of information across the organization.