Achieving transformational performance through business harmonization

As companies struggle to align technology with business goals, the biggest challenge that IT managers face today is how to manage their IT investments to create more business value. As part of the management process, they must align and adapt their IT systems to meet current operational needs, reduce maintenance and support costs, and establish the right infrastructure for future business demands. To achieve this, it is vital to have the right tools and business processes in place and to have a good vision of how the business will need to operate in the future.

By undertaking a complete operational assessment, a harmonization plan can be developed that sets out a course for transforming enterprise operations to enable the adaptivity and agility needed to address future business needs. Atos Origin has developed an industry-recognized set of business harmonization capabilities that provides performance benefits throughout the transformation to adaptive enterprise operations.

Addressing the challenges

Companies today face two broad challenges: how to meet new business requirements with aging, complex IT at optimal cost and how to keep in step with regulatory directives, international standards, technological developments, and evolving business demands. Atos Origin’s Enterprise Architecture addresses these challenges and prepares organizations for the future by enabling the operational adaptability needed to manage ever-changing business and regulatory requirements.

Enterprise Architecture is a set of capabilities, processes, and tools that enables companies to systematically capture and analyze their current IT assets. Using best practice methodologies, it allows them to determine the best IS and IT infrastructures to address the enterprise’s strategic goals, to plan for transformation, and to manage investments for durable savings and gains. Enterprise Architecture builds on Atos Origin’s extensive knowledge and consulting experience in developing and reengineering business and management processes. It adds vast Systems Integration (SI) and Managed Operations (MO) capabilities through the rationalization and standardization of IS and IT systems, resulting in sanitized enterprise architectures that are well structured and capable of meeting future demands.

Implementing the changes

Enterprise Architecture enables top-down and bottom-up profiling methods that take into account the entire organization, including people, processes, data and information flows, applications, and infrastructures. It provides an unparalleled view of the complete enterprise ecosystem, and gives indications on how best to maintain it and where to direct investment to ensure that IT stays in-line with business objectives.

One essential deliverable is a multi-year rationalization plan, mapped against an enterprise maturity model. The plan provides a detailed business and technology roadmap and recommendations for enterprise-wide changes that provide performance and cost reduction benefits throughout the transformation to adaptive enterprise operations. In most organizations, the plan dramatically reduces the number of enterprise applications in order to eliminate redundancy, streamline infrastructure, and avoid duplication. It may include deploying shared services based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and support a fully backed-up, single rationalized master data warehouse.

The rationalization process is implemented step-by-step, over time, with each step prioritized in terms of importance of function and short-term payback. Winning early increases – in business performance and cost reduction – maintains confidence in the Enterprise Architecture process and generates cost savings for reinvestment in the process. In this way, Enterprise Architecture is an iterative process implemented in a continuous fashion for ongoing improvements in business agility and operational flexibility.

 

Creating the vision

The most immediate cost savings of Enterprise Architecture planning are derived from decommissioning applications, canceling software licenses, rationalizing IT systems, and reducing maintenance and support overheads. Atos Origin’s Systems Integration experts are responsible for implementing the rationalization plan and they work closely with Atos Origin’s Business experts throughout the process to ensure the result is in line with the client’s current and future business requirements.

The first step in the Enterprise Architecture process is a comprehensive ‘health-check’ of the organization. Working with the client, Atos Origin examines the client’s current organization, business processes, and IS/IT infrastructures, including all applications, databases, etc. in order to understand the company’s current enterprise IT. Atos Consulting conducts in-depth management interviews to determine the future business direction and what the client is looking to achieve. Based on this vision, the Atos Origin team is then able to assess the current business processes and user activities in terms of their relevance and contribution to the overall business performance.

Depending on the maturity of the company, there are several entry points to an Enterprise Architecture implementation. Currently, application rationalization is a common entry point to the broader Enterprise Architecture function which naturally links “up” into business orchestration and “down” into infrastructure consolidation. Once they have established a clear business vision, experts assess (and sometimes build) the application portfolio, study all the client’s applications and analyze their operational relevance, quality, and business value. They then rank the applications in order of the value of their contribution to the company’s performance. Based on this information, investment and divestment decisions are taken and implemented, and shared service recommendations are made that include how to rationalize business data.

Investing in innovation

Application portfolio management is the basis for recommending which applications are to be maintained, which should be suppressed, and which should be frozen (and for how long). By taking these recommendations on board, client companies can make significant cost savings and the money saved can be invested in innovation and applications that add real business value. So-called ‘star’ applications – those with lots of users that are good for the business – are maintained, fully supported, and, if necessary, upgraded. ‘Good’ applications, that may have glitches, can be reengineered to enhance their performance. Enterprise Architecture delivers real cost savings in terms of maintenance costs and functional upgrades. It frees resources and liberates more money, previously consumed by the cost of maintaining old applications, to invest in new technologies that are in step with business requirements.

The Enterprise Architecture process goes beyond enterprise applications to encompass the entire infrastructure, machine park, and operating landscape. Enterprise Architecture presents an integrated view of business planning and operations, data and information flows, application portfolio, and the enabling technological infrastructure across the enterprise.

Going beyond IT

Enterprise Architecture enables the effectiveness of business processes to be studied, analyzing them within the context of business objectives and identifying improvements that enable users to perform day-to-day activities faster and more effectively. The client’s operating environment is analyzed to determine the match with the client’s future business vision, and an equivalent scenario, which pools together all enterprise IT elements, is then created that matches the future vision.

When moving from the current scenario to the desired future business vision, key business elements (processes, organization, people and culture) must be taken into account. These elements represent the areas that require change in order for the client company to move forward and become an adaptive enterprise.

Like ascending Everest, no climber reaches the peak in one day. They climb to a base camp where they assess resources and regain strength before moving on to the next level. Similarly, when transforming operations to become an adaptive enterprise, progress is made via a series of plateaus. At each plateau, all business and IT elements are brought back into harmony and incremental performance enhancements are assessed and assimilated. Using this type of plateau planning, long-term objectives are translated into actionable steps – ensuring performance benefits and cost savings at each step along the way.

This cloverleaf structure helps to balance the demand and supply relationships of the business. It also ensures that enterprise IT meets business requirements at all times whilst managing the risks associated with business change and operational transformation.