Delivering stakeholder centric services: from strategy to execution

mwd
advisors

Delivering stakeholder-centric
services: from strategy to
execution
Neil Ward-Dutton
February 2011
In today‟s world, stakeholders‟ expectations of openness, responsiveness and personalisation are far
more informed and more stringent than they were even just a few years ago. At the same time
governments‟ interest in public-private sector collaborations has become more pronounced, and so
the networks of players required to work together in order to deliver services are more complex. To
cap it all, business and technology are also becoming ever more tightly intertwined.
To be efficient and effective in this environment – to meet stakeholders‟ expectations while at the
same time working with the constraints of tough financial environments – public agencies have to
focus on how they can deliver services from a stakeholder-centric point of view (in some territories
this is known as „citizen-centric‟ service delivery). Agencies have to use this perspective to drive the
end-to-end integration of operations and the sharing of underpinning capabilities across teams,
departments, and sometimes agencies.
This report lays out the challenges that arise during a transformation to stakeholder-centric or
citizen-centric service delivery, and highlights the crucial roles that key business and IT capabilities will
play for any public sector organisation navigating those challenges.

MWD Advisors is a specialist IT advisory firm which focuses exclusively on issues concerning IT-
business alignment. We use our significant industry experience, acknowledged expertise, and a
flexible approach to advise businesses on IT architecture, integration, management, organisation and
culture.

www.mwdadvisors.com

© MWD Advisors 2011 This paper has been sponsored by IBM

Delivering stakeholder-centric services: from strategy to execution 2

Summary
Initial moves to deliver ‘e- As agencies began to embark on the first „e-Government‟
government’ have had mixed initiatives in the early 2000s, it soon became apparent that
success, and citizens have not although taking existing service offerings and creating web
benefited overall front-ends for those services might in some cases lower
delivery costs, the transparency of the web meant that it also
had the unfortunate side-effect of shining a very strong
torchlight onto the ways in which services were just not
„joined up‟.

A move to stakeholder-centric The simple transformations that took place in early e-
service delivery represents a new government implementations were driven by individual
phase of e-government which is teams, departments and agencies with the very best of
truly transformational, and as a intentions. The poor outcomes that frequently resulted were
result it requires deep a consequence of entirely natural, but “inside-out” thinking.
commitment
The delivery of true stakeholder-centric services (in some
territories, these are known as citizen-centric services) can
only come about with a high degree of co-ordination
between agencies to ensure that relevant information is
shared in an effective and timely manner. This level of
entanglement between shared capabilities and front-line
service delivery is a significant step beyond the kinds of back-
office service (such as HR) sharing that we see across many
government agencies.
What‟s happening here is a second, deeper wave of e-
government transformation – service transformation – which
shifts the focus beyond cost avoidance “at the edge” of
government, to fundamental cost restructuring “at the core”
of government by changing the mechanics of how capabilities
are developed and delivered as front-line services.

Some key capabilities are required In making the shift to stakeholder-centric service delivery,
to support stakeholder-centric four challenges – legacy systems, existing incentives and
service transformation: Business targets, lack of governance over investment in new systems
Process Management (BPM), and processes, and lack of clarity in responsibility for ultimate
supported by business analytics; delivery of change – can only be overcome with the smart,
and Enterprise Architecture and connected development and application of two key IT and
Business Planning. All need to be business capabilities. The first is the ability to analyse the
open and collaborative performance of work that currently gets done in the delivery
of services to stakeholders; and then analyse how this work
should best be executed and managed. This capability is often
referred to as Business Process Management (BPM), and
relies on effective use of business analytics.
The second is the ability to build a „big picture‟ view of how a
stakeholder-centric service delivery strategy needs to be
supported by particular business and technology capabilities,
how key business processes align with those capabilities, and
how IT should be marshalled to support the capabilities in
different ways. This capability is often referred to Enterprise
Architecture (EA) and Business Planning. It will also help you
set and enforce policies that drive IT project investment to
meet the needs of your transformation strategy.

© MWD Advisors 2011


The changing environment for public sector
agencies
In today‟s world, stakeholders‟ expectations of openness, responsiveness and personalisation are far
more informed and more stringent than they were even just a few years ago. At the same time
governments‟ interest in public-private sector collaborations has become more pronounced, and so
the networks of players required to work together in order to deliver services are more complex. To
cap it all, business and technology are also becoming ever more tightly intertwined.
To be efficient and effective in this environment – to meet stakeholders‟ expectations while at the
same time working with the constraints of tough financial environments – public agencies have to
focus on how they can deliver services from a stakeholder-centric (sometimes called „citizen-centric‟)
point of view, and use this perspective to drive the end-to-end integration of operations and the
sharing of underpinning capabilities across teams, departments, and sometimes agencies. We see
recognition of this time and again in studies of IT trends and investment plans which consistently place
the transition to stakeholder-centric services, enabled by business process transformation and
performance management specifically, as one of the highest priorities of senior public sector
executives in technical and non-technical roles alike.
What‟s really going on – what is it that‟s driving the pressures that we see affecting business and IT
leaders across organisations of all shapes and sizes and differing geographies? There are three large-
scale socio-economic forces in play:

 Globalisation. Increasingly global customer bases, partner networks, supplier networks, and
competition, are forcing companies to become leaner and more flexible, focus on what makes
them different, and find new ways to deliver sustainable competitive advantage. Public sector
organisations feel the benefits of globalisation through increased outsourcing options.

 The drive for transparency. Regulation is sometimes forced on private sector organisations by
governments, but increasingly industry bodies and individual organisations are voluntarily moving
to provide more information about their processes, the resources they use and the ways in
which they interact with their ecosystems and environments. Public sector organisations feel the
pressure of transparency as stakeholders are starting to demand more openness regarding
governance, the mechanics of democracy, service performance indicators, and so on; and as
regulations (such as those imposed by freedom-of-information legislation) make themselves felt.

 Increasingly smart, connected populations. The rapidly evolving and maturing Worldwide
Web is just one outcome of the explosion in always-on, global mass communication connections.
Individuals and organisations are increasingly looking to the online world for solutions to
problems and opportunities before looking to the offline world. In this environment resources
can feasibly be located anywhere: it is possible to consider that “the world is flat” (as New York
Times columnist Thomas Friedman says). Public sector organisations are increasingly finding that
„digital natives‟ have demanding expectations regarding the availability of services, as well as the
ability of service providers to personalise service delivery.



Service-orienting the public sector agency
Reacting to a changing environment
Management teams and consultants to government agencies and other public sector organisations
have been pursuing ways of reacting to this changing operating environment for many years – the
main change under consideration being the rise of the Internet. In particular, initially at least, the focus
has been on looking for ways to lower costs by delivering services to stakeholders over the web. A
number of studies have shown that if a transaction can be carried out via a website rather than face-
to-face with a customer services representative, the cost can be just 2% of the face-to-face cost
(telephone-based transactions are estimated to cost 50% of face-to-face transactions). Clearly this
represents a compelling opportunity to investigate.
However as agencies began to embark on „e-Government‟ initiatives in the early 2000s, it soon
became apparent that although taking existing service offerings and creating web front-ends for those
services might in some cases lower delivery costs, the transparency of the web meant that it also had
the unfortunate side-effect of shining a very strong torchlight onto the ways in which services and
information were just not „joined up‟. When service interactions with stakeholders are enabled by
phone and mail, the complete structure of an overall service portfolio is obscured from the
stakeholder; it‟s either hidden behind the knowledge of stakeholder-facing customer service personnel
or it‟s hidden completely – with knowledge of available services being passed around communities by
word-of-mouth. When the same services are made transparently available via the Web, the issues are
there for all to see. This disconnect is often all the more obvious where existing face-to-face and
phone-based alternatives remain.
The deeper opportunity and challenge facing public agencies following initial forays into the use of the
web – using the transparency of the web as a catalyst for transforming public sector services
fundamentally – has been part of government agendas for some years now. One example of a catalyst
for change was the UK‟s Varney Report1; and in the US, of course, the E-Government Act of 20022
drove a mandate for the creation of offices and programmes to drive stakeholder-centric service
delivery within and across federal, state and local agencies.
Across all these mandates for transformation, there is one common high-level element of change
discussed: the shaping of service definition and delivery so that it is truly stakeholder-centric – we
explore this idea below. Additionally, there are two important implications for stakeholder-centric
service delivery, which we also explore below: firstly, the integration of front-line service delivery
capabilities so they can be shared across agencies and departments; and secondly, increased
collaboration between public agencies and departments and external organisations.

The move to stakeholder-centric services and outside-in
thinking
The simple “web transformations” that took place in early e-goverment implementations were driven
by individual teams, departments and agencies with the very best of intentions. However the outcome
of a lot of this early work wasn‟t just the duplication of services to stakeholders, which could be
confusing for them; it was also the duplication of requests for information from stakeholders – which
typically leads not only to confusion but frustration. This outcome was a consequence of entirely
natural, but “inside-out” thinking: each agency and department, acting on its own initiative, considered
its own needs and capabilities as the foundation scope when analysing how it could present its
services and capabilities to the outside world.

1
Service Transformation: A Better Service for Citizens and Businesses, a Better Deal for Taxpayers – Varney
Report to UK Government, 2007
2
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=107_cong_bills&docid=f:h2458enr.txt.pdf



The move to re-imagine service delivery, taking the stakeholder‟s perspective and needs as the
starting point for service analysis and design, is the converse of the approach that‟s so often been
taken in the past. Increasingly this approach is referred to as the design and delivery of “stakeholder-
centric services”. Its importance is not tied 100% to the drive to deepen e-government commitments;
making services stakeholder-centric is a way of optimising cost and effort, regardless of the service
delivery channels used.

Co-ordinated service delivery in support of life events
The most commonly-explored aspect of stakeholder-centric service design efforts is perhaps the
definition of groups of services that need to be delivered in a highly co-ordinated way to support “life
events” shared by all citizens (such as birth, death) or most citizens (marriage, relocation). These life
events may lead to requirements for multiple services from government agencies, particularly if the
citizens in question are in receipt of benefit of some kind (unemployment, disability), which may in
many cases need to be delivered by separate agencies or departments. Figure 1 calls out a couple of
examples.

Figure 1: Example life events and their associated services and service owners

Example life event Service Department
Relocation Local taxes Tax
registration
Change of address Electoral
administration
Benefits Benefits (housing,
registration child, etc)
School enrolment Education
Death Notice Tax
Notice Benefits
(incapacity,
housing, etc)
Notice Electoral
administration

An approach to service delivery which is co-ordinated around the needs of stakeholders quickly highlights how
deep integration between agencies – some central, some local – becomes paramount.

Beyond co-ordinated delivery: service personalisation and improvement
Other important tenets of stakeholder-centric service design include:

 Service personalisation – presenting services to stakeholders in ways and through channels that
match their communication, accessibility and cultural preferences and needs.

 Open service improvement – displaying feedback from stakeholders openly, and aggregating
feedback information to improve services; then openly communicating with stakeholders about
changes and improvements made.



Deeper use of shared services as a natural consequence
Stakeholder-centric service delivery sounds like a very attractive proposition, but as we‟ve already
seen yesterday‟s “inside-out” thinking – with each agency and department pursuing its own agenda
based purely on its own scope of operation – will not get us to a stakeholder-centric future. The
delivery of true stakeholder-centric services can only come about with, at the very least, a high
degree of co-ordination between agencies to ensure that relevant information – relating to
stakeholders‟ identities, addresses, entitlements and so on – is shared in an effective and timely
manner.
However where activities and capabilities need to be tightly co-ordinated across agencies and
departments, there are likely to be opportunities to go further than co-ordination – why not examine
these scenarios as opportunities to integrate and consolidate capabilities, creating “shared services”
units that can deliver one set of capabilities to multiple internal customers?
Of course, examples of the shift to back-office shared services delivery abound. However, most
examples so far are focused on sharing of finance, human resources and Information and
Communications Technology (ICT) infrastructure services – generic business support functions, in
other words. What we‟re talking about here is different: it‟s about the sharing of information and
application services that are core to how front-line services are delivered to stakeholders. This level
of intimacy and entanglement between shared capability and front-line service delivery is a significant
step beyond the kinds of back-office service sharing that we see across many governments, where
those services that are shared can be easily considered logically separate, at least, from front-line
service delivery. In the UK at the time of writing, open debate about a proposed “G-Cloud3”
infrastructure and a parallel “app store”, providing shared access to common IT capabilities, is placing
this topic under active consideration – but there is a long way to go.
What‟s happening here is a second, deeper wave of e-government transformation – moving from cost
avoidance “at the edge” of government by changing the basic mechanics of stakeholder interactions,
to fundamental cost restructuring “at the core” of government by changing the much deeper
mechanics of how capabilities are developed and delivered as front-line services.

Figure 2: A second wave of deeper e-goverment transformation

Service Service
presentation presentation

Front-line
Front-line service
service delivery
delivery

Corporate Corporate
services services

First-generation e-government Second-generation e-government
transformation: focus on transformation: focus on front-line
service presentation, corporate service delivery sharing, external
service sharing collaboration

A second wave of e-government transformation is now needed, to shift beyond transformation at the edge and
shared services in the back office (i.e. corporate functions) towards transformation / sharing in the front office.

3
http://groups.google.com/group/cloudforum/msg/dc1b72e787ebeae3?pli=1



Another outcome: readiness for external collaboration
There‟s one other important implication of a shift to stakeholder-centric service-orientation of a
public agency, and that‟s a need to embrace closer and more timely, interactive collaboration with
external organisations, be they from the private sector or the third (voluntary/charity) sector.
Requirements that spring from service personalisation commitments as outlined above mean that it‟s
increasingly likely, particularly in countries where cross-sector partnerships and outsourcing
arrangements are aggressively pursued, that agencies and departments will have to be able to
collaborate with third parties in order to deliver services effectively.
Public sector agencies and departments have to find secure and structured, yet also flexible and
timely, ways to share information and collaborate on service case work and processes across
organisational boundaries.

Outside-in service design should drive vertical organisations to
manage horizontal operation end-to-end
So what does all this – stakeholder-centric service delivery, creation of front-office shared services,
external collaboration with third parties – mean in practical terms? What do public agencies and
departments have to do in order to move from the current state to a future state where these goals
are attained?
There are many changes to be made of course, but at the highest level the key characterisation of the
transformation that must take place is that it involves the creation of a set of practices and policies to
ensure that work is “joined up” horizontally across the organisation – so that end-to-end work is
optimised from the perspective of the stakeholder and the service that is delivered to them, rather
than being optimised from a functional, team or department perspective.
This shift isn‟t about replacing functional (vertical) organisation with horizontal organisation that‟s
100% focused on service-driven, end-to-end process. Rather, it‟s about overlaying a structure that
aims to drive end-to-end thinking on the existing functional organisation, and putting capabilities in
place to enable the two structures to work together in harmony.
Of course, such a fundamental change in the way an agency is directed and managed can‟t simply be a
case of designing the change, and then assuming the organisation will make the necessary adjustments.
The difficulty of transitioning to a „horizontal‟ process-oriented management model is well-
documented. At this point, however, agencies can no longer avoid the decision. This is a
transformation that has to be made.



Taking transformation from strategy to
execution: why is the path so complicated?
It‟s not only public-sector organisations which are embarking on this kind of transformation; as we
outlined in the introduction to this paper, organisations across public and private sectors are
wrestling with the forces of globalisation, the pressure of transparency and the opportunities
associated with smart, connected individuals and markets. Large private sector organisations have for
a few years now been heavily engaged in business transformations that seek to refocus customer
services efforts as well as consolidating capabilities and services at their core – and using this
consolidation to power more business process consistency and effectiveness, and improve customer
service as a result.
No organisation – whether public or private sector – ever finds this kind of transformation easy; it
involves big changes to systems, information and processes, and has big impacts on people. At the
moment, of course, there is a very significantly complicating factor – and that‟s the fact that shrinking
government budgets mean that prioritising transformation efforts can become complicated. Beyond
this, though, there are typically four reasons that organisations struggle to take transformational
programmes and strategies defined at executive level, and make them operational:

 Legacy systems.

 Existing incentives and targets.

 Lack of governance over investment in new systems, processes.

 Lack of clarity in responsibility for ultimate delivery of change.
We explain each of these in a little more detail below.

Legacy systems: the weight of history
The most obvious impediment to transforming a public agency to enable stakeholder-centric services
and all the things that go along with it is the inertia created by legacy systems and ways of working. Of
course there‟s the „drag‟ created by long-lived systems that are difficult to change to fit new
requirements – either because the technology isn‟t adaptable enough, or because the skills no longer
exist in the organisation. However, simply „ripping and replacing‟ such systems is likely to be
impractical – you have to find ways to extend and improve them without incurring major costs or
risks.
But there‟s also a challenge that comes from the dependencies that can exist between operational
systems; particularly where those dependencies reflect a functional, inside-out approach. As IT has
become more a “part of the furniture” within organisations, and as IT systems have become
increasingly interconnected and interdependent, making a change to one system can have unintended
consequences for other systems which depend on it in some way. For many organisations the links
between older systems can be as poorly documented as the systems themselves; this is a particular
risk in some parts of the public sector, which has a higher level of reliance on legacy systems than
many industries in the private sector.

Existing incentives: pulling the wrong way
Individual departments in organisations are specialised things. They‟ve got that way because in many
cases, specialisation is vital to success. Business teams have specialised skills in finance, purchasing or
marketing for example, whereas technology teams have specialised skills in systems administration or
software development. But when specialised teams become firm organisational units, they also
become budget holders with their own specialised incentives and targets. Managers become focused
on driving for optimum performance in their own area, often to the exclusion of larger concerns. As
management guru Peter Drucker famously said: what gets measured gets managed.



Of course this isn‟t a problem in itself, but if your organisation is trying to transform itself to consider
end-to-end, horizontal efficiency and effectiveness, individual focuses on area-specific performances
may actually work against the transformation.

Lack of governance over investment in new systems, processes
The problem with a laser focus on operational performance within departments is that one person‟s
„laser focus‟ is another person‟s „tunnel vision‟. Left to their own devices individual departments within
agencies are likely to carry on using their own budgets to achieve their own „local‟ goals rather than
considering any bigger-picture implications of a large-scale transformation.
A stakeholder-centric services transformation and the associated moves towards shared front-office
services and open collaboration require a number of systems and process investments, most of which
are going to need contributions – in terms of money and resources – from multiple teams and
departments. Quite apart from helping to resource collaborative endeavours across an agency, there‟s
also the issue that a stakeholder-centric services transformation will probably also need to spawn a
number of local projects with departmental scope which will need to be prioritised appropriately.
Without a governance framework in place that‟s designed to help realise the goals of such a
horizontally-focused transformation that cuts across departmental boundaries, together with senior
executive sponsorship of that framework, organisations find it very difficult to sustain any kind of
transformation momentum.
In the public sector, the creation of a robust governance framework is particularly important because
the level for ongoing change in requirements (particularly, but not exclusively, concerned with
implementing changing legislation) can be so great. Without governance frameworks that can impose
certain approaches on the procurement and implementation of systems, opportunities for sustainable,
flexible solutions are often missed.

Confusion over responsibility for ultimate delivery of change
Public sector agencies are typically highly dependent on external resources for development and
delivery of IT systems. Outsourcing activities are notoriously complicated to manage even when those
services being outsourced are focused on ongoing operations (such as IT administration, customer
services, payroll, and so on) but in the context of outsourced supply of services to assist with
transformations, the complications are compounded.
For example: although an external provider may be able to develop and deploy new IT systems or
changes to existing systems to meet a set of predefined requirements, it‟s very unlikely they‟ll also
have responsibility for making sure that people in your organisation have the skills and inclination to
work within the changed environment in the right way. Change management associated with IT
investment is something the customer has to be very focused on. Cases abound where public agencies
have employed contractors to implement new systems as foundations for business process
improvements, but where responsibility for managing the organisational change around those
improvements has not been clearly assigned or communicated. These situations always end badly.



Making the shift: key capabilities you must pull
together
In making the transformation to stakeholder-centric service delivery, the four challenges highlighted
above – legacy systems, existing incentives and targets, lack of governance over investment in new
systems and processes, and lack of clarity in responsibility for ultimate delivery of change – can only
be overcome with the smart, connected development and application of some key IT and business
capabilities. They are:

 Business process management (BPM), supported by business analytics. These
capabilities will help you analyse the work that currently gets done in the delivery of services to
stakeholders; and then analyse opportunities for improvement – drawing out how this work
should best be executed and managed as part of end-to-end processes. A pair of BPM and
business analytics capabilities will help you plan calculated improvements – to eliminate risk and
cost, speed service delivery and improve stakeholder satisfaction with personalised services.
They‟ll also help you prioritise changes in a world where overall resources are increasingly
constrained – helping you understand where the greatest opportunities for improvement, at the
lowest cost, are located.

 Agile, actionable enterprise architecture (EA) and business planning. This capability will
help you build a „big picture‟ view of how a stakeholder-centric service delivery strategy needs to
be supported by particular business and technology capabilities, how key business processes align
with those capabilities, and how IT should be marshalled to support the capabilities in different
ways, within the current operating and financial constraints that exist. This capability will also help
you take the „big picture‟ created by EA work and make it real, by setting and enforcing policies
that drive IT project investment to meet the needs of your transformation strategy – and helping
you clarify responsibilities for managing the delivery and acceptance of transformation projects.
These capabilities are intertwined and interdependent so it‟s a little difficult to discuss them in any
particular order, but below we dig into each of them in turn.

A common theme: building bridges across the IT-business
divide
It‟s perhaps too easy to place the blame for today‟s challenges in translating strategy into execution at
the door of business executives – and sympathising exclusively with the poor, put-upon IT teams
which have to cope with increasingly unreasonable demands from business departments.
But this isn‟t the case. The truth is that both business and IT departments have historically been
complicit in creating the headaches that many organisations are saddled with today. Much of the time,
strategic IT investment mistakes turn out to be masked by what seem at the time to be tactical
successes. And these mistakes are made not as the result of real negligence, but as the result of IT
and business people failing to work together to drive consensus that consideration of a bigger picture
is necessary.
As the IT industry has matured over time, and as IT practice has matured within organisations, we‟ve
seen attitudes and approaches change – slowly. At first, IT organisations were managing IT
investments for their own sake. There was little in the way of a real relationship between those
responsible for managing IT investments, and those making the investments (and receiving the
benefits). Then, eventually, IT organisations began working to manage IT investments for business. The
relationship between investment makers and investment managers was one of customer-supplier.
Truth be told, most organisations are still in this mode of working. But this will not do. Now, the
baseline that we all have to aspire to is managing IT investments within business.



Business Process Management (BPM) and business analytics
An effective Business Process Management (BPM) capability will deliver you the analysis and design
underpinning for your transformation to stakeholder-centric service delivery; it should also help set
the strategic context and mandate for you to re-factor front-office services and drive towards
integration and sharing of capabilities to drive down costs and maximise citizen satisfaction. BPM,
combined with business analytics tools, can also create an IT-based platform for automating and then
monitoring and optimising the integrated business processes that will power your stakeholder-centric
services.
By itself, a BPM initiative supported by business analytics will not deliver you the transformation you
need; but it forms the design core around which Enterprise Architecture, Portfolio Management and
stakeholder engagement need to fit.

BPM: improving the process of process improvement
The practice of business process improvement has been part of the business and IT management
landscape in one form or another since the Industrial Revolution; and BPM specifically as an approach
to process improvement has been with us for over a decade. Against this backdrop, it‟s sensible to
ask how BPM specifically differs from earlier process improvement methods and tools.
One answer is to say that a key differentiator is BPM‟s central focus on enabling continuous change
and improvement. Another and more enlightening answer, though, is that BPM is fundamentally about
“improving the process of process improvement”. For a BPM initiative to really deliver value, it
has to pull together a number of process improvement capabilities and skills that
probably already exist in your organisation in new, more effective ways.

BPM is about more than agile, iterative system development
To really deliver value, BPM requires you to develop and marshal a group of practitioners from
multiple IT and business disciplines, and give them access to some specialised tools and practices.
Because BPM initiatives often involve the development and delivery of specialised „process
applications‟ that coordinate and track work across teams, departments and existing applications and
systems, it can be tempting to think of BPM as simply a flavour of software development or
application integration that encourages agile, iterative delivery of application capabilities; however this
is not the case. There are two main reasons.
The first reason is that in order to improve the process of process improvement, effective BPM
practice embraces the whole lifecycle of process management: from initial discovery and analysis of
business process improvement opportunities, leveraging business analytics insights, through detailed
process design, development of process applications, deployment of those applications, process
monitoring, and optimisation. BPM works at a higher level than simple application development, and
links intimately into issues of business change management. Management of performance and
optimisation – not of a process application, but of the business process that the application helps to
improve – are absolutely central to the practice of BPM, and this has not traditionally been a concern
for those focused on business software development.
The second reason is that looking specifically at the software that‟s developed and deployed as part of
BPM projects, it‟s actually quite different from „traditional‟ application software. Today‟s process
applications aren‟t like the workflow applications of old which were monolithic, hard-coded
interpretations of strict rules; instead, they provide collections of software tools to help process
practitioners (customer service personnel, HR personnel, benefits case workers, service delivery
managers, and so on) with assistance and guidance to complete case and process work. These
applications can be highly flexible and dynamic, and in many implementations their structure and
behaviour can be extensively reconfigured by business analysts or process administrators.



Driving efficiency, supporting service promises and personalisation
Much of the available BPM research literature – driven perhaps by the high visibility of the process
improvement approaches of Six Sigma4 and Lean5 – focuses primarily on process efficiency and quality
as being the sources of BPM‟s value. However there‟s more to BPM‟s value than that.
Of course, effective application of BPM, supported by effective business analytics, does drive
operational efficiency and quality – and thus enables public sector organisations to pull people and
systems together across traditional boundaries to efficiently and effectively deliver services to
stakeholders. By providing tools and techniques to help organisations discover current processes,
measure their performance, analyse opportunities for improvement, prioritise opportunities bearing
in mind cost and resource constraints, and then standardise or even automate processes, BPM
initiatives can reduce waste and improve work efficiency – either increasing the amount of work that
a team can do, or enabling the same amount of work to be done with a smaller team.
BPM can also help public agencies take a step further, though, and enable organisations to make clear
service commitments to stakeholders; and also deliver services with unprecedented levels of
personalisation – „taking the service to the stakeholder‟.
By integrating disparate business systems, improving the way that teams work, reducing latency, and
making it easier to change the way that processes are carried out, BPM initiatives provide great
foundations for agencies looking to improve the speed with which services are created and deployed.
By introducing performance measurement frameworks, BPM initiatives can also create supporting
environments for organisations wanting to drive satisfaction and transparency by offering services that
have guaranteed quality levels – for example, offering (in the case of a hypothetical benefits office) a
guarantee that all enquiries will receive an initial response within one day.
A BPM technology platform will also capture the identity of every stakeholder interacting with a
service and make that an integral part of the context of a business process instance or case. Through
this feature, agencies receive the ability to mix-and-match stakeholder service interactions across
channels (web, call centre, physical branch offices), case work teams, team locations and worker
shifts. This means that individual stakeholders can make much more flexible choices about when,
where and how they interact with public agencies; they experience true customer service.

Critical success factors
Many organisations pursue business process improvement exercises with the tools and approaches
that they‟ve used for years: indeed our own research shows that the majority of organisations are still
in this mode of working. In a recent major market survey carried out by MWD Advisors, for example,
the vast majority of respondents (over 90%) cited tools like Microsoft PowerPoint and Visio as their
primary process modelling tools; and cite „traditional‟ approaches to application development and
delivery as being the principal ways that process improvements are implemented. There‟s no doubt
that you can still get process improvements using these tools and approaches: but you won‟t get the
full value that BPM can offer.
Technology alone won‟t deliver you an effective BPM implementation. However there are things that
the right technology can do which will make delivering business value from your BPM work much
easier:

 A collaborative discovery and design space. A shared, easy-to-access and easy-to-use
graphical environment that BPM stakeholders of all skill levels can use to explore process
problems and opportunities, and link them to the organisation‟s strategic context is a valuable
tool for boosting stakeholder engagement and helping to ensure and maintain buy-in. The best
tools place graphical models at the heart of specification work, and as well as providing
requirements documentation, these models also form the foundation for the logic within the
running system that‟s eventually created to manage work.

4
http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/six-sigma/overview/overview.html
5
http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/lean/overview/overview.html



 Role-based, flexible interfaces for participants, administrators and stakeholders. Once
models are taken through design and development and translated into a running software system,
the runtime environment should be flexible enough to deliver any mixture of work management,
administration, monitoring and configuration features to any stakeholder – within a role-based
framework. Flexibility in delivering “content” and functionality to particular people and groups is
vital, because every organisation has unique requirements.

 Rapid transferability of models through the process lifecycle. It‟s not enough to have
design tools that allow process analysts to map out business processes in detail if creating a
running process then requires multiple further complicated steps. It‟s also crucial to be able to
take those same design models and use them as the context for operational monitoring tools:
only by showing operational health and performance in the context of business-meaningful
processes is it possible to deliver metrics that can quickly deliver feedback and enable further
improvement.

 Well-bounded integration and other technical activities. BPM tools can be great at
translating graphical process models into running process logic, but „finished process applications‟
need more than just process logic – and it‟s unreasonable to expect that any tool will enable
complete software applications to be delivered without someone having to do some technical
work. BPM technology offerings should help you draw clear boundaries around technical work
(such as integrating processes with back-end resources and systems) – clearly separating
configuration work that can be done by non-technical people (possibly business stakeholders, in
the case of business rules and policies) from work that has to be done by technical specialists.
BPM technology that can work seamlessly with integration platforms like Enterprise Service Buses
(ESBs) have a great advantage here.

 A foundation for governance and change management. Many BPM tools can enable
customers to build new process applications quickly; but in order to support the value
proposition of BPM over the long term, tools that can manage development assets centrally, with
easy-to-use change management facilities that help co-ordinate the work of teams and highlight
dependencies between components are essential.

Agile, actionable Enterprise Architecture and Business
Planning
An effective Enterprise Architecture (EA) and Business Planning capability is a way to bring IT and
business strategy together, and will help you build a „big picture‟ view of how stakeholder-centric
service delivery needs to be supported by particular business and technology capabilities, how key
business processes align with those capabilities, and how IT should be marshalled to support the
capabilities in different ways. Crucially, an EA and Business Planning capability should provide
important context for the core „engine‟ of your transformation – your BPM initiative – by linking your
BPM work to both business and IT strategy.
These linkages provided by EA and Business Planning are vital because without them, BPM initiatives
that start off with clear objectives and strong executive support can quickly lose momentum. Business
and IT strategies change, and the role of EA and Business Planning in the transformation to
stakeholder-centric service delivery is to make sure that those changes don‟t make transformation
projects that are in-flight irrelevant. It‟s important, though, that the EA and Business Planning practice
you create and leverage has the right kinds of priorities.

A brief overview of Enterprise Architecture
Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a business-IT capability that large organisations have used for decades
to bridge their business and IT strategies, and many large public- and private-sector organisations have
an EA programme in place, staffed by dedicated roles and personnel. Despite that, there‟s still
considerable industry debate about the EA term and what it refers to, its scope, its value and the best
approach to take.



The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) makes one of the clearest attempts at a definition of EA to
be found in the public sector: “Enterprise architecture is a comprehensive framework used to manage and
align an organization's Information Technology (IT) assets, people, operations, and projects with its operational
characteristics. In other words, the enterprise architecture defines how information and technology will support
the business operations and provide benefit for the business. It illustrates the organization’s core mission, each
component critical to performing that mission, and how each of these components is interrelated.”
Most practitioners today agree that EA isn‟t purely an architecture activity focused on the planning of
IT systems, but an activity that seeks to map and connect models of business activities and capabilities
with definitions of essential enterprise information and IT systems and capabilities. Generally speaking,
today‟s EA frameworks (specifications for carrying out modelling work and for classifying and relating
models) have also coalesced around four different types or levels of modelling: business architecture,
information architecture, application architecture and technology architecture. Although different
organisations use different frameworks, and a sizeable portion use some kind of „home-baked‟
framework; however in the public sector we see more and more firm guidance on the use of
particular frameworks (the use of the Federal Enterprise Architecture Framework, FEAF 6, is a good
example).
There is one major area of practical uncertainty that‟s separate from a choice of framework, though,
and simply put it boils down to a short question: with EA, what‟s more important – the deliverable
artefacts (the models) or the process by which you arrive at those deliverables? This is where the idea
of „Agile EA‟ comes in.

The value of an agile approach
At the dawn of EA as a recognised discipline, the vast majority of research and practical activity in the
area was focused on the act of documentation – the creation of static and stand-alone models that
described „as-is‟ states of collections of IT systems, and perhaps models that described „to-be‟ states
based on EA practitioners‟ understanding of transformation programmes. This kind of activity
represents a sizeable portion of the EA work still that‟s done in the public sector today.
This is perhaps not entirely surprising, given that EA as a discipline originally grew from large-scale
software engineering methodologies that were popular in the 1970s and 1980s – when business and
technology change happened at a pace that was glacial compared to that of today. In the last few years
it‟s become clear that the pace of business and IT change means that a documentation-focused EA
effort – where what‟s measured and appreciated is the completeness of the models as descriptions of
enterprise IT estates – is unlikely to add very much value at all. The danger of EA irrelevance is
compounded by the fact that when EA teams focus exclusively on the quality and completeness of
documentation, they can end up working in insular teams, isolated from other groups.
An agile approach to EA turns this documentation-focused approach on its head, and sees the process
of discovering and analysing an organisation‟s structure, strategy, dynamics, priorities and capabilities –
when it‟s done through discussion with internal and external stakeholders, rather than in isolation –
as more important than the completeness of the ultimate record of that understanding. In agile
approaches to EA it‟s conversations with stakeholders that are the focus; Agile EA is first and
foremost a process of learning from and influencing stakeholders to make better decisions about their
planned investments and projects. It‟s particularly critical in the public sector because of the wide
variety and diversity of stakeholders that exist.
Of course models and presentations of those models are a key tool in having those all-important
conversations with stakeholders (every conversation needs a common language, after all), and the
models help provide that important context for BPM and other transformation work; but the models
are a means to an end rather than the end itself.

6
www.cio.gov/documents/fedarch1.pdf



The integration of Portfolio Management with EA practice
One of the primary ways that EA work needs to have an impact, as mentioned above, is in highlighting
how “strategy needs to be supported by particular business and technology capabilities ... and how IT should
be marshalled to support the capabilities in different ways”. It‟s all very well to highlight these things, but
how can you take action based on high-level guidance? The answer is to extend EA practice with
aspects of portfolio management, and use the result to guide individual project and operations
investments.
Portfolio management is an approach to investment management that‟s very well established in
general business circles; but its application to IT investment is still comparatively new – particularly in
the public sector.
In general, portfolio management practice seeks to analyse a set of investments and optimise them (by
buying, selling) according to stated goals. In the context of IT projects and services, goals are typically
stated in terms of costs, business value, and risk; optimisations are expressed in terms of accelerating,
refocusing, decelerating, or killing projects. Portfolio management is absolutely crucial here because
the resources available to any organisation are finite (and of course, becoming more constrained);
portfolio management practice helps senior IT decision-makers understand how they can balance and
prioritise business demand to achieve the „best outcome‟.
In the context of a transformation to stakeholder-centric service delivery the combination of EA with
portfolio management practice – to create EA practice which is able to inform and drive business
planning as well as tune the details of IT investments – is crucial. Without links to the processes and
organisational bodies that are tasked with green-lighting projects and maintaining project oversight,
EA may be agile; but it will not be truly actionable.

Critical success factors
There are five factors to consider if you want to build an EA and Business Planning practice that is
agile and actionable, and that will help you create and maintain links between your BPM work and
business and IT strategy efforts:

 Make EA a formal practice. It‟s not good enough to have EA as part of your organisation‟s
agenda that you „get around to when you have time‟; you need to have a formal EA practice in
place with established roles and a named leader. It‟s not essential that all or indeed any members
of your EA practice are working on EA full-time; but EA work needs to be a formalised part of
their responsibilities. What‟s more, you can‟t outsource EA work: in fact, when you outsource a
significant proportion of your IT delivery work, having an EA capability becomes even more
important because it helps maintain the business context for that IT outsourcing work and keep
outsourcing providers‟ services aligned with your organisation‟s overall needs.

 Use EA to reinforce the value of BPM to business and IT stakeholders. Don‟t set up EA
practice so that it can exist as an isolated, inward-facing activity: specify its mission in the context
of linking your transformation projects to business and IT strategies – and providing the context
for your core BPM initiative.

 Measure the performance of your EA practice by asking its customers. You have to
track progress of your EA initiative so you can assess its value and appraise and reward those
people working on EA – but be sure to use externally-facing measures to track progress. Centre
your measurement of the value of EA practice not on documentation created, but on the
opinions of project teams and stakeholders with which the EA team has worked. Do they feel
that the EA team has understood their perspectives, and that it has in turn influenced them to
consider the big-picture implications of certain project approaches and technology choices?



 Put governance in place to encourage action from findings. If you‟re going to make an
investment in EA and Business Planning practice then it makes sense to put a structure in place to
ensure that the output of the EA and Business Planning capability will actually be used in practice.
This might not require a significant capital or personnel investment; it‟s more a matter of ensuring
that the effort is visible and has support from senior executives involved in your transformation
programme, and then that there‟s a forum where the outputs of EA and Business Planning work
are used to inform programme investment controls. In practice this might be simply a matter of
ensuring that your EA capability has a „seat‟ on your Programme or Project Review Board.

 Enable EA practice with smart tools. Last but not least, in order to practice EA in a way that
fosters shared vision amongst stakeholders and ensures that your process transformation work
remains clearly grounded to your business and IT strategies, it‟s really important to select the
right tools for the job. There are many EA tools available, and most of them provide rich
modelling capabilities and sophisticated repositories to allow you to link and visualise architecture
models across different views and perspectives. What‟s important above this, though, is the ability
for EA tools to enable your EA practice to open up, and become directly actionable. Specifically,
look for tools that can provide links into your portfolio management work (see below), as well as
exchange process models with tools you use for business process analysis and management (see
above). Look for lightweight publishing and collaboration capabilities that make it easy for EA
specialists to share models and analyses with non-specialists, and explain the implications of them.
And look for tools that don‟t just enable EA practitioners to create static models, but models
that have real-world attributes associated with them that can be aggregated and analysed using
business analytics tools – enabling, for example, financial analyses of the impact of a proposed
project to consolidate a set of systems.



Case study: City of Corpus Christi, Texas
Over the past few years, the City of Corpus Christi has used IBM‟s Maximo technology as part of a
foundation for transforming asset and service management processes across a number of its
operations, particularly those associated with water and wastewater provision, utility provision and
public works.
Prior to 2000, the City‟s work orders were all manually processed and there was no IT system to
track work progress, service levels or costs. Then, however, a structural shakeup placed the threat of
potential water utility privatisation at the door of the City‟s administration. To prepare itself to be
able to counter this threat, the City embarked on a programme of work to modernise its utility asset
and work management processes. Over the next three years the City rolled out updated systems
across its water treatment and wastewater plants, and updated the management of other crucial
utility services in 2004. Once the internal management practices were systematised, the City of
Corpus Christi then set about creating a unified „One Call‟ access point for citizens that would allow
it to respond quickly and effectively to any service request. The resulting system assists with the
creation and distribution of work orders to the relevant field staff in response to citizen alerts and
requests, and also tracks the progress of work.
For the first two years of the implementation, the City outsourced the development and operation of
the system – only bringing it in-house once the implementation settled down and internal staff were
sufficiently familiar with the system‟s workings. Crucial to the success of the programme was the
creation of project champions in each department; these champions helped to drive up-front
workshops with the departments to help refine system, process and business information
requirements and gain a degree of up-front buy-in from users. Now, the City‟s administrators can
track work performance against pre-defined SLAs – and this performance information helps to set the
context for ongoing improvements. To date, the City has focused most of its efforts on measuring
and managing responsiveness; now it‟s starting to spend more effort on providing more detailed cost
analyses.
When asked to share insights that would be useful to other organisations undergoing similar
transformations, Steve Klepper, administrative superintendent for the City, highlighted two key items:
Firstly, you must realise that technology can only ever be a tool; you mustn‟t view it as an end in itself.
A corollary of this observation is that it doesn‟t make sense to expect your IT department to be
responsible for the success of an initiative like this – it‟s the business‟ responsibility to ensure
acceptance and embrace of a new system or process.
Secondly, convincing people to embrace a new system or process can take concerted effort over a
long period. Within the City of Corpus Christi, although the City leaders understood the rationale for
change, senior staff were less convinced – and this became more obvious once the initial threat of
privatization receded. Working to ensure that staff avoid falling back into old, comfortable (but
inefficient) ways has been something that‟s required continuous attention.



Case study: Municipal Information Systems
Association, Ontario, Canada
Ontario‟s Municipal Information Systems Association (MISA) is part of a national Canadian not-for-
profit association which brings together regional associations of municipal government representatives
and others engaged in, or interested in, the development and operation of municipal information
systems. MISA has been incorporated in Ontario since the 1970s. MISA runs industry conferences and
negotiates preferential supplier discounts on behalf of its members, as well as facilitating more specific
knowledge sharing.
In the 1990s, MISA members started a collaborative programme of work to develop best practices in
information and business modelling for municipal government agencies, specifically relating to
improving public asset and infrastructure management. After some years of work, the outcome of this
effort evolved into the Municipal Reference Model (MRM) – a comprehensive and sophisticated
catalogue of around 150 services commonly provided by municipalities that models mandates,
programs, outcomes, outputs and their inter-relationships from the perspective of citizens, which
helps municipalities more clearly understand the value that their own services provide.
In the past few years, following its extension to both the provincial and federal levels in Canada, this
work has been given a further boost because of increased pressure on government budgets. Now,
budget pressures are leading agencies to have to think about tradeoffs between services and
associated service levels. Understanding how services contribute to government mandates and
outcomes for citizens makes it much easier to make informed decisions about investment priorities –
or at least to ask informed questions about costs and benefits from the citizen‟s perspective. As a
result, many municipalities are now using the MRM as a foundation model for more rigorous service
planning and service-based budgeting; as well as continuing to use MRM to help provide investment
context for ongoing development and management of IT applications.
With the increased development and use of the MRM by MISA members, so the need for more
sophisticated tool support for MRM use has grown. As well as using MRM as a reference for their
own internal use, municipalities have become very interested in benchmarking their own services and
capabilities against those of other municipalities – from both cost and performance/results
perspectives. MISA members are now piloting the use of IBM Rational‟s System Architect, combined
with Lotus Quickr, as a platform for sharing models, metrics, contextual reports, best practices and
background documents, as well as carrying out and sharing benchmarking analyses. MRM‟s service
catalogue provides a common reference model for all this work. Now the ability to share strategic
and financial insights, based on a common business reference model and benchmarking database,
provides a foundation for advanced planning and evidence-based budgeting options that municipalities
can readily take advantage of.
transformations, Roy Wiseman, CIO for the Region of Peel in Ontario and a champion of MRM for
many years, highlighted two key items:
Firstly, be prepared for a long haul. Developing comprehensive business architecture models that are
going to be shared and used by groups of independent authorities can take a lot of effort over a
considerable timescale. You have to be prepared to „plant the seed‟ of the idea, and take time to
develop good levels of awareness within all stakeholder groups.
Secondly, getting the right people to commit to such a project – and stay committed – means you
have to develop a compelling answer to the question “what‟s in it for me?” When initiatives like this
start they‟re carried by enthusiastic individuals for whom the benefits are self-evident; but for them to
build over the long term and become embedded into an organisation, you need to hone your pitch so
that it‟s attractive to new audiences.



Case study: New York City Health and Human
Services
The Health and Human Services (HHS) Domain of New York City is a group of 8 government
agencies that work together to improve agency co-ordination, maximise service levels and minimise
costs. When Michael Bloomberg first took office as New York City mayor in 2002, reducing service
and organisational overlaps in the HHS area was one of his key priorities. Although many of the HHS
agencies were serving the same clients, agency reorganisations over time had compounded
fragmentation of service delivery, and duplication of effort and information. At the start of his second
term in 2005, Bloomberg appointed a Deputy Mayor, Linda Gibbs, who developed a strategic plan for
the HHS domain and created a programme of change initiatives called the HHS-Connect programme.
The programme has three related missions: first, to improve clients‟ interactions with HHS agencies
through a client-centric approach; second, to improve workers‟ experiences in dealing with clients, by
increasing access to data across agencies; and third, to improve agencies‟ effectiveness and efficiency.
The first part of the programme – the creation of a citizen-facing portal called ACCESS NYC – got
underway in 2006, and is still ongoing. ACCESS NYC brings together client eligibility screening for a
wide variety of benefits and services across multiple agencies, and enrolment for select services, in
one place. The second part of the programme – the creation of the Worker Connect portal – was
built around the creation of a „common client index‟ (CCI) using Master Data Management (MDM)
and Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) technology. The result is a system that provides one shared source
of client data that all relevant agencies can access according to law and regulation. Going forward, the
HHS-Connect programme is now exploring how it can deliver additional value to HHS agencies. One
particular priority is in the area of case management: as individual agencies start to end-of-life their
existing legacy case management systems, the HHS-Connect programme is looking to offer agencies
assistance with deploying a standard platform. The programme is also exploring the idea of
standardised financial processing and claims payment processing platforms.
The City knew that solid evidence would be vital to justify the effort of the initiative, and to assess the
validity of the chosen priorities. It carried out an internal market research project, which clearly
showed that data sharing was a crucial issue for workers „on the ground‟ in individual HHS agencies.
The next challenge was to convince individual agencies that security risks associated with sharing data
could be managed effectively. To this end, the programme dedicated a specific team of people to
working one-to-one with key representatives of the agencies, as well as legal experts, to agree and
implement policies and technology frameworks to ensure that the agencies‟ concerns were adequately
met while at the same time working within the constraints of regulations such as HIPAA.
The HHS-Connect programme has established an Enterprise Architecture and Governance capability
to help it build and maintain „big picture‟ context for operational decision-making. However, this
capability is very lightweight: it‟s not about creating models for the sake of modelling. Instead, the
programme team has created an Executive Steering Committee, chaired by Deputy Mayor Gibbs and
other City of New York executives, to shape demand from individual agencies. It‟s paired this with a
Solution Architecture Review Board, which works with the various agencies‟ systems integration
partners to ensure that all parties involved in creating new technology capabilities for agencies have a
consistent view of key requirements and preferred architecture and technology approaches.
transformations, representatives of HHS-Connect highlighted three items. Firstly, make sure that you
have a strong risk management methodology. You must identify and document risks and identify
remediation plans, assign risks to people so they‟re accountable for their own risks, and track risks.
Risk management has to be proactive, and has to be something everyone takes responsibility for.
Secondly, make sure that you have carried out a proper business justification and that as your
programme unfolds you‟re measuring the benefits that you identified in that business justification.
Thirdly, make sure that you have a strong and engaged senior Executive Steering Committee that has
overall responsibility for the success of the programme, and work hard to make sure they stay
engaged. Without this level of sponsorship, it proves difficult to show success over the long term.



IBM Capabilities for all stages of your transformation
Government Industry Framework
IBM Industry Frameworks combine the power of award-winning IBM software with industry specific
assets and best practices specifically configured to meet our clients’ unique challenges and needs. The
IBM Government Industry Framework is a strategic software platform for implementing smarter
government solutions focused on improving citizen services, increasing transparency, enhancing civilian
safety and security, and helping achieve a green and sustainable environment.
The framework approach offers solution implementations the opportunity to accelerate time-to-value
and payback while lowering a project's cost and risk. This is because the implementations leverage
tested architectures and patterns, software components are reused across projects, and industry
specific software extensions and accelerators in the framework can be leveraged.

Business Planning and Alignment
IBM offers a comprehensive portfolio of business planning and analysis solutions designed to enable
better enterprise planning and ensure execution against specific business requirements. IBM solutions
help organizations make faster, better-informed strategic and tactical decisions, prioritize IT investments
to support business goals, improve risk management of organizational transformation, and turn strategy
into execution with measurable results.
Our planning solutions are founded on actionable enterprise architecture management to connect
business and technology capabilities through cohesive and dynamic blueprints and Portfolio
management capabilities help you collaboratively define software and product investment roadmaps to
enhance business objectives and processes while measure and manage the financial and strategic risks.

Business Process Management
A dynamic business network requires business process management (BPM) with process modelling and
monitoring, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and dynamic application infrastructure. IBM’s BPM
powered by SMART SOA™ includes all three and also these extended value capabilities for intelligence
and agility: complex events processing; analytics; collaboration; and rules, content/document and Web
services registry/repository management. IBM’s “foundational offerings” include IBM WebSphere®
Dynamic Process Edition for large scale, high-integrity dynamic process integration and automation
across the enterprise; IBM WebSphere Lombardi Edition for rapid process implementation with project
team collaboration; and IBM FileNet® Business Process Manager for content management, workflow
and collaboration.

Business Analytics
Whether town council or national agency, government organizations all face similar challenges. Guided
by their mission, they need to optimize services and programs for citizens while demonstrating good
governance. And they need to do this within budget in a climate of shrinking resources.
Thousands of public sector organizations worldwide rely on IBM Business Analytics software and
services to deliver smarter government. Business intelligence software lets you consolidate, track,
analyze and report on all relevant data. Financial performance and strategy management software
provides planning, budgeting and consolidation for linking strategy to dynamic plans and targets.
Advanced analytics software gives you the insight you need to predict trends and respond at the point
of impact. And analytic applications give you a quick start with a particular issue or domain.

Integrated Service Management
Integrated Service Management enables service innovation by providing Visibility Control Automation
across business infrastructure and the end-to-end service chain. Only Integrated Service Management
provides the software, systems, best practices and expertise needed to manage infrastructure, people
and processes—across the entire service chain—in the data center, across design and delivery, and
tailored for specific industry requirements. With Integrated Service Management you gain the Visibility
Control Automation needed to deliver quality services, manage risk and compliance, and accelerate
business growth.

© MWD Advisors 2011 RAL14032-USEN-00

Delivering stakeholder centric services: from strategy to execution

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