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Enterprise Solutions
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Engineering the Enterprise for Excellence®
Engineering the Enterprise for Excellence® involves all the activities that organizations ("enterprises") perform to improve productivity, gain and maintain competitive advantage, optimize resources, deliver quality products and services, and meet customer expectations and demand. These can include traditional activities such as reorganization, concentration on core products and competencies, niche marketing, acquisition, merger, and new technologies. Enterprise Engineering also includes new techniques and methods such as business process re-engineering, continuous process improvement, total quality management, enterprise architecture, and enterprise integration. Enterprise Engineering, which applies equally to well-established and newly-forming enterprises, responds to the fundamental business drivers of the 1990's: migration to "agile" production, globalization of markets, changing labor pools, and volatile political and business environments.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 assigns personal responsibility to senior management of public and non-public organizations in the USA , and is being applied in various forms also by other countries throughout the world. Of particular concern is Section 404 of the Act, which relates to “Management Assessment of Internal Controls”. Internal Controls will vary from enterprise to enterprise. Controls need to be tailored to the relevant industry (or industries) that the organization operates within; they are also typically unique for each enterprise. Controls are also determined by a businesses' activities and processes, as well as its financial controls. They are closely related to the IT systems and databases that the enterprise uses for financial and other reporting. Senior management needs to show that answers are available in relation to key resources such as: data; business activities and processes; locations; people and business units; and events. Answers should be available that also show how resources relate to strategic and tactical business plans that have been defined by management. These are internal control questions that address: “What”; “How”; “Where”; “Who”; “When”; and “Why”. Visible's tailored framework solutions address these questions.
Visible's state-of-the-art framework products and proven, comprehensive methodology facilitate implementing results-oriented, customer-focused management in any enterprise. Visible's methodology provides guidance and a flexible framework that allow an enterprise to establish effective, management practices that, at the same time, reflect the enterprise's unique culture and requirements. In today's enterprises, knowledge and information are key resources on a par with capital, personnel, equipment and plant. Information systems are tightly interwoven within today's enterprises, requiring close coordination between information systems professionals and business engineers. The impact of business engineering requires significant change in how information is processed in an enterprise, which means that systems supporting changed processes must also be changed. Visible's Enterprise Engineering methodology and tools not only make effective change management possible - they make it easy.
Change is (a) Constant
The only constant in American enterprises is change. There are external changes in politics, climate, laws, markets, competition, and customer desires. External change in the information/Internet age happens suddenly, unexpectedly, and unpredictably. There are also internal changes of ownership, products, services, process, technology and measures of effectiveness. Today's enterprise must be able to react quickly and correctly to external change, while managing internal change effectively. Even the most stable enterprise changes. For example, not too long ago, a manager was overheard telling his staff, “If we're going maintain the status quo around here, something has to change!” External change is usually obvious and has immediate impact. We often have no choice and must deal with external change in order to survive, comply with new laws, meet customer requirements, remain competitive, etc. Everyone in an enterprise recognizes the necessity for reacting to external change.
The need for internal change is often less obvious, unless it is in response to external change. Also, internal change usually seems less immediate. This is partially because changes we make to improve products, services, and practices may not have short-term results. Radical, enterprise-wide change, sometimes called “culture change,” may not achieve all desired results for years. Because internal change is not necessarily forced upon an enterprise by outside factors, and because results are not immediate, it is usually given less emphasis and priority than external change. This is unfortunate, because only by carefully managing internal change can an enterprise uniformly meet the challenges of external change.
Enterprise Architecture – Blueprint for Change – Getting Visible®
Linking an enterprise's strategic plan (business architecture) with its data (information) architecture, application architecture and technical architecture results in an Enterprise Architecture. When change is desired or necessary, the enterprise's architecture provides a means for determining the impact of the change and a blueprint for speedy implementation of change. A well-documented architecture is a logical organization of information pertaining to the following corporate-level, enterprise-wide elements.
• Strategic goals, objectives, and strategies
• Business rules and metrics
• Information requirements
• Application systems
• Relationships between applications and data elements
• Technology infrastructure
Enterprise architecture also establishes guidelines, standards, and operational services that define the enterprise's systems development environment. A well-documented enterprise architecture can help accomplish the following:
• Facilitate change management by linking strategic requirements to systems that support them and by linking the business model to application designs
• Enable strategic information to be consistently and accurately derived from operational data
• Promote data sharing, thus reducing data redundancy and reducing maintenance costs
• Improve productivity through component development, management and reuse
• Reduce software development cycle time
CIO Role in Change Management
The Chief Information Officer in a competitive, visionary, strategically managed enterprise has a key role in responding to external change and managing internal change. The CIO is the chief enterprise architect.
Fundamentally, the CIO is responsible for enterprise information resource management. In addition to being the steward of one of the critical enterprise assets and its supporting infrastructure, the CIO should also be a key player in the enterprise's strategic planning process. Only the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) has an equally broad view of the activities in the enterprise.
The CIO, as a key member of the enterprise management team, helps make decisions concerning what changes to implement. The CIO also helps sustain approval for those changes. Most importantly, the CIO is ultimately responsible for translating enterprise goals, objectives, and performance measures into quality information systems.
Summary
All enterprises change all the time. Change can involve any enterprise function, asset, or customer. Change can range from minor adjustments to complete enterprise overhaul. External forces or internal strategies can initiate change. Change happens – and change must be managed.
Effective change management requires three things:
• Management Commitment
• Universal Approval
• Measures and Rewards
Efficient change management utilizes two practices:
• Strategic Planning
• Enterprise Architecture Engineering
The enterprise CIO has a significant new role in the era of Sarbanes-Oxley, effectively and efficiently managing change so that the enterprise can be meet governance requirements. The CIO participates in strategic planning, manages the enterprise architecture, helps gain and maintain approval for change, and delivers mission-critical management and performance measurement information throughout the enterprise.
Enterprises can either manage change or be managed by change. Successful, competitive enterprises proactively and constantly manage change.
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