6 steps to excellence strategy

By Luciano Balzarini, CEO, CST Consulting

How our customers align technology, information and business processes, to react rapidly to market changes, make the right decision at the right time, gain competitive edge and achieve the best economic results.

“Our customers know very well that IT, Organisation and Business are closely connected. We just help them making this connection working.”
-Luciano Balzarini, CEO, CST Consulting

The relation between technology and business results

A recent study by CST Consulting analysts of the company's large customers has produced interesting results. The study was conducted with the support of CST Consulting consultants' average of 15 years' experience working on Business Process Reengineering, ERP systems (SAP © Service Partner), Enterprise Content Management systems and Business Intelligence & Corporate Performance Management systems (IBM © Business Partner, Kofax © partner).
Our analysts have examined in depth both the relationships between “back-end” strategies (technology, information, business processes, business decisions), and “front-end” outcomes (competitive advantage, operating results, market share).

According to the study, all the organizations that have built competitive edge, excellent performance and a position of market leadership have implemented a simple but coherent step-by-step “back-end” strategy.
What is this strategy?

6 steps to excellence strategy

1.    Managing structured data (e.g. RDBMS). All CST Consulting customers have already understood the importance of managing their business transactions, and as a matter of fact all of them have implemented a SAP or other ERP system. A smooth (rather than a big bang) approach to adopting an ERP system emerged from the study.

2.    Managing unstructured data (e.g. documents, emails, fax, etc). As Gartner states ”… almost 80 percent of any information held by an organisation is unstructured, meaning bound in documents.” The leading companies analyzed have made large administration cost savings by implementing a single central Enterprise Content Management solution (unique repository) and have centralized their record retention management.

3.    Integrating structured and unstructured data (interaction between business data and business content). Our customers have distinguished between ERP-contained document integration and process-management functions on one hand, and ECM-and content-centric Business Process Management functions on the other. Because of the fundamental differences in the functional requirements between business applications compared to Content Management applications, the enterprises interviewed have combined and integrated both infrastructure components in the implementation that best fits their needs.

4.    Business Process reengineering (as-is, gap and to-be analysis first on core business processes and then on non-core business processes). BPR helps our customers streamline business processes and increase the organization's productivity before adopting a relevant BPM technology.

5.    Business Process Management. Typically organizations use more than one IT system to handle a complete business process. Within these systems supplemental or sometimes even redundant information is processed, as in the case of separate applications for CRM, calculation, sales, production planning, logistics, accounting and support. Leading enterprises have adopted a BPM strategy that considers the difference between application and content. They have understood that ERP-based BPM is mainly capable of integrating different application systems, whereas the ECM-based BPM component is targeted at combining this capability with broad support for content-centric BPM. Many customers have chosen a content-centric BPM approach to react instantly to any external event. For example, a user doesn’t have to actively wait for an incoming letter but will instantly and automatically be informed by the content management system when the letter arrives. So the difference between content-centric BPM and “classical” data-oriented BPM lies in the fact that content-centric BPM can react instantly to any change to content stored in an ECM repository. The change might be a new document filed in the library or any other change of document content (especially a new document version), metadata or filing structure.

6.    Corporate Performance Management and Business Intelligence. The implementation of a Datawarehouse/Datamart containing complete and accurate information is another important step taken by interviewed companies to make better business decisions. According to the study, “front-end” outcomes are better when BI&CPM is used not only to realize forecasts and budgets (the classic planning, control and analysis cycle), but also to perform real-time analysis on core business processes. This helps enterprises to understand in real terms where and why certain processes don’t work and how to “fix” them. In short, reporting, analysis, dashboarding and scorecards have to be implemented not only for data, but also for workflows.
 
Conclusions

The study shows that leading companies have aligned technology, information and business processes. This helps them react rapidly to market changes, make the right decision at the right time, gain competitive edge and achieve the best economic results. Following the step-by-step “back-end” strategy described creates a positive correlation coefficient with “front-end” outcomes. Technical elements such as servers, enterprise content management systems, information platforms and business intelligence applications all need to work cohesively to ensure business decisions are made based on complete and accurate information.