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As many much smarter than I have observed, we have never had an economic climate like today. Many of our tried and true approaches don’t seem to apply. But, I believe strongly that the fundamentals of business process analysis and design do still apply and need to be revisited during this turbulent time. I just as firmly believe that now is the time to look for ways to inject game-changing technology into our business processes, to permanently transform them in terms of efficiency and effectiveness.

The knee-jerk reaction in times like these is to look for things to cut. Firms can cut staff and try to deliver the same service levels with fewer people. Without supporting changes, this is sustainable for a limited time, and it burns employees out. Firms could also reduce services or cut back on service levels. This is sustainable, but not a model that will endear the firm to its customers. I could give more examples, but you get the idea.

The firms that will emerge stronger from this downturn, and any challenging economic period, will be those who use the times as the “burning platform” to made radical changes to the way they deliver their products and services for sustainable efficiency. A key to discovering the right things to change, and to make changes that will have the highest probability of improving organizational performance, is to understand the “architecture” of the organization (including the information technology components).

Here are some fundamental principles that form the underpinning of enterprise architecture analysis and modeling.

• There is no reason to invest in change to information technology or business processes unless there is promise that the change will result in improved organizational performance, or the game has changed and the organization no longer has the “price of admission”.
• To change organizational behavior (and therefore performance), one must change the structural relationships within the processes of the organization. Exhorting employees to be more efficient and effective won’t change behavior. And just providing new information or direction, while important, is not sufficient.

With this in mind, to effect behavioral change, we need to change a component of our business process, like adding a new information system, a machine, or a new incentive plan. Or we need to change the process itself by adding, changing, deleting, or combining steps.

I’ll give an example from a prior life in the hospitality industry. We wanted our sales people to sell meeting space across all brands and hotel properties. In so doing, we wanted not only to increase individual hotel revenue and profits, but also to maximize revenue and profit across all hotel properties

To effect this change in salesperson behavior, among other things, we needed to:

• Provide background knowledge of a broader range of “product”, e.g., the types of available inventory;
• Give access to what inventory is available at any given time; and
• Give access to rate programs available for that particular inventory for that particular customer.

That was the information side of things. But, as I said earlier, we needed more than this to change behavior. We also needed to:

• Change the compensation plan;
• More robust processes and procedures for consistency and fairness across hotel properties; and
• Give real time electronic access to inventory information for all properties to all sales people.

Processes all have critical results to be improved. In my example, the critical result of the business process was the “yield” in terms of revenue and profit generated from hotel meeting space. Another critical result of this changed process was strengthened customer loyalty and increased brand awareness and preference.

But, how do we know that what we are doing will have the desired effect? At the risk of becoming really academic, I will get into a bit of the “how”.

The real enabler of organizational change is an enterprise architecture model and a proactive plan to evolve the actual processes and results of the organization to those depicted in the model and proven through simulation prior to implementation.

Enterprise architecture is a true depiction of all of the “components” of the enterprise (i.e., resources, management controls, environmental factors, products and services, and external agents); their persistent inter-relationships (i.e., those that are “designed in”); and their behavior within the processes of the enterprise (i.e., the “transient or transaction” relationships over time) that provide the firm’s products and services to the marketplace.

Academic sounding, yes. But it is also practical. In simple terms, we should be always looking for design changes to the business (including information technology) that have a direct and lasting effect on the firm’s performance in delivering products and services to customers.

One might ask, isn’t creating an enterprise architecture hard to do? Yes. But that doesn’t reduce the need for it, nor does it make it less valuable.

The good news is that it is possible through a technique known as “middle-out” to initially create enterprise architecture models for only the most critical aspects of the business, or those that seem to be either “most broken” or “most promising for improved results”. The totality of all business processes within the company need not be tackled all at once.

As the business world becomes increasingly dynamic and unpredictable, a solid enterprise architecture model becomes absolutely essential to thrive, and perhaps even to survive.

Sadly, keeping the model current also becomes more challenging during these critical times. But, in times like we are facing today, organizations that do have this view of their business will have an incredible advantage in speed and appropriateness of change to meet the challenges of a changing and increasingly uncharted world.