Business Transformation and Business Analysis

Business Analysis Workshop Italy 2014 – October 2014

(Prassede Colombo, IIBA Italy Chapter President, CEO PMProgetti)

BAWI is the annual exclusive workshop in Italy dedicated to professionals and managers in organizations that deal with Business Analysis. BAWI 2014 allowed us to understand the relevance of the Business Analysis Capabilities for the organizations in “the Internet of Things Era”. Organizations need to think different, transform, manage change, be able to understand customers needs and to deliver before they ask. Organizations need to generate insight from the data, delivering their business value as quickly as possible. “Business Analysis supplies the indispensable skills and capabilities to all organizations to innovate and implement the necessary changes for creating value and succeed in the current business context”. BAWI has highlighted the necessity of organizational cultural change for innovation.

“The importance of developing and aligning the organizations resources and talents, information infrastructure, use of analytics and technology with the required processes and culture in order to create business insights that strengthen its competitive advantage. Organizations need more than technology, a team of consultants, or a visionary data guru, they need a comprehensive approach to evolve their current information management practices to generate insight. They need to introduce new talents, new processes and a new culture approach to evolve the culture” (Source: Business Transformation – A roadmap for Maximizing Organization Insights” – Aiman Zeid).

Business Analysis professionals create value by acting as integrators among different organizations and stakeholders, supporting the decision making processes, and fostering Innovation. Business Analysts play a fundamental role in reducing costs and increase potential benefits. But in order to be effective, Business Analysts must improve their ability to liaison with all stakeholders - internal and external - understand the needs and propose great creative solutions.

• “Big Data can unlock value by making information transparent, but there is lack of competencies (in the US market): Data-savvy managers and analysts, capable of posing the right questions for analysis, interpreting and challenging the results, and making appropriate decisions …” (“The Value of Business Analysis Professionals for the Enterprise”- IIBA)

• Employment of management analysts is projected to grow 19% from 2012 to 2022, faster than the average of all occupations”

The Business Analyst role has already moved from Bridging the gap between Business and IT (Past), to Bridging the gap between Projects and Operations and now is working to Bridging the gap between Strategy and Operations.

Organizations need a Business Analysis Center of Excellence in order to put together BA professional capabilities and technology and evolve the culture for innovation, as demonstrated by the four cases

presented. One Size Does Not Fit ALL and organizations need to understand how to bring out their talents and focus on the value. They need to assess their position and gap to reach the right BA maturity for a competitive focus that integrates Business, Technology and Innovation. (“The Value of Business Analysis in the Organization: BACOE and Maturity Model” – PMProgetti).

The use of Big Data changes the traditional enterprise business model, because they expand the range of information used in decision making. New business value is created when enterprises can now leverage

sources of data that were previously hard to access because of challenges with high data volume, velocity and variety. Companies are asked to be pro-active, that is, to anticipate the behavior and preferences of their customers and the market, so it is important integration with predictive analytics on Big Data.

For most of companies it is important not only having internal resources ready to implement this change, but it is also necessary to choose the right partner that can help them to achieve the expected change. In this perspective not only new technologies are needed, but also new business models, new processes, and particularly "new" professionals. The Project Business Manager is the business professional who, integrating together the expertise of the Business Analyst and Project Manager, can help the enterprises to achieve business goals necessary for their survival. (“How to orient a customer in the era of digital revolution”– Telecom Italia).

Organizations needs skilled Business Analysts, BA processes and BA tools, technologies because they need to perform quickly, to anticipate or create needs, services, products not yet required. Market, technology and laws are more and more demanding enhancements of the Business Model and consequently, of its enablers: organization, processes and information systems. Hence, Business Processes should be analyzed and implemented in a dynamic way as well as integrated with information systems, in order to rapidly respond to a continuous changing environment. Reply’s Business Process Improvement & Management (BPI&M) solution allows the stakeholders to achieve such result, by flexible linking the organization with processes and information systems. Through a deep analysis and BPI&M functionalities every organization will be able to promote a greater awareness of the objectives (roles, activities and purposes), of the process stakeholders, of the performance evaluation methods and of the business benefits. (“Business Process Improvement & Management for Business Transformation – Reply Consulting).

Time to market is everything for today organization, in the Italian Utilities industry today more than ever, as presented together by ENI & SAS Italy. A big transformation took place in recent years and deregulation brought to the end of old monopolies. ENI, with its 110+ bln € turn over the biggest Italian corporation at all, took the strategic decision to address its Gas & Power market with a renewed customer-centric data-based approach. The capabilities required to support di Business Transformation took the name of ‘Data Garage Initiative’. In this context best Business Analysis competencies and

practices, before, during and after the project have been key for the success of the initiative. ‘Data Garage Initiative’ has been transformational if not disruptive at all for ENI G&P and its ICT traditional practices: not the usual attempt to deliver a multi-year enterprise data-warehouse project but an agile yet huge initiative that in less than 6 months brought in the hands of Marketing Business Analysts terabytes of Customer Data, from CRM to billing, passing through contact center and metering info, to be surfed in-memory through SAS big-data in-memory technologies. Such real big-data in-action are a tremendous opportunity for ENI to make each customer the King, or the Queen, by superior Customer Relations Management.

Data Garage project speed and agility in the delivery of multiple releases was possible thanks to three tricks in requirements management: 1. Requirements reuse, 2. Perfection vs Quick & Good-enough concept, 3. Savy guidance during user acceptance process

ICT and Business have complementary point of views, but their alignement has been the key for for the success of the project and for ongoing processes. ‘Which came first the chicken or the egg’? BA brings

value to both the parties: in this case BA helped a Big Data Business Analysis project to suceed, and the project success, on the other hand, enabled further and deeper ongoing Business Analysis!

Traditional Business Analysis lessons learned from the initiative: stakeholder analysis & buy-in, elicitation strategies, ‘communication’ key competency. And new ‘Big Data’ Business Analysis lessons learned from the initiative: Data Scientist a.k.a. Big Data Business Analyst role and its Data Mining Lab or ‘Data Lake’ playground. Concepts that have strange name that we will be heard more and more in the future. Concepts, that are not even in BABoK version 3, not yet!

(“ENI DATA GARAGE: transforming marketing through Big Data Business Analysis – ENI – SAS Italy)

Business Analysis is key as well, in the Business Agility Transformation. Very often the implementation into R&D organization of new development models or methodologies is driven following a just-do-it or silver bullet approach, meaning very poor analysis of business opportunities, of stakeholders involvement and of capabilities of the organization to apply the new model. Simplistic approach leads to ineffective or limited application of the methodologies, and when the change is radical and it requires time, as passing from traditional model to Agile or to Lean, it could result in abandoning it. Using a structured approach as the Business Analysis, will help the organization to have a complete picture of the business needs driving the change, to identify all the stakeholders to get their view, to have and understanding of the capability gaps and how to address, as well as eliciting requirements to identify the right solution and how to plan its implementation. A real case on how Business Analysis can support in driving changes to Agile/Lean is presented in detail. (“Beyond Software Agility, how to drive Business Agility Transformation – HCL).

During the Round Tables with key stakeholders we have also seen that all the organizations are facing similar problems and opportunities and are looking for “Business Analysis Capabilities”.

Our conclusion is “There is not a common recipe in the path for Innovation. Best talents, competencies and capabilities are requested to create value and Business Analysis is becoming the key enabler”

You can find presentations and BAWI outcomes at www.bawi.it