After years of focusing almost entirely on cost-cutting due to the recession, CIOs are now being asked to help the business find better ways to use technology to drive efficiencies that lead to competitive advantage and to implement technologies to improve customer acquisition. As a result, CIOs are increasingly demanded to be “more innovative,” “more collaborative” and to “add value” through the adoption of technologies such as cloud computing, mobile technologies, social networking, and business analytics to measure customer and market shift, all while concurrently driving down costs.
Changing the cost-cutting mindset to delivering innovation and value will be challenge for many CIOs. There is an emerging view that IT should actually consist of two distinct yet integrated organizations: “Innovation IT” and “Operational IT.” They are conflicting in nature and responsibilities, underscoring the dilemma that IT organizations have today. Operational IT is less strategic than Innovation IT but the need to provide resilient, cost effective and reliable infrastructure to the business is critical and often takes precedence.
As a consultant, I have advised many CIOs on strategy and business alignment. I have always been a proponent of innovation and business value and know that these objectives represent the real payback opportunity from IT. For example, in most organizations, IT spend represents about 4% of the total. A cost reduction in IT spend of 10% represent a total reduction in cost of .4%. This is relatively small compared to the benefits that could be obtained from other strategic initiatives that could for example increase revenues by 10%, reduce product costs by 5%, or reduce the cost of business processes by 10%.
As the team lead for strategy for the Enfocus Requirement Suite, I want to provide a product that helps organizations deliver increased value and innovation to the business. In developing this product, we chose to focus on requirements management because most organizations do not do a good job in this area. In fact, incomplete or poorly documented requirements are the number one cause of project failures. It is actually pretty simple to understand. If you don’t get the requirements right, then no matter how good your team is or how hard they work, you are not going to have a successful project.
Further, forty percent of the cost of the project is rework; the majority of the rework is caused by missing or poorly written requirements. Good requirements are crucial delivering value and innovation to the business. The payback from having good requirements is amazing.
In approaching requirements management, we deliberately deviated from our competitors. We decided to provide both content and an automated tool. Our content consists of, among other things, example requirements, best practices, and training videos by industry expert Karl Wiegers. In addition, we are developing Business Process Innovation Guides and Solution Roadmaps. The Business Process Innovation Guides provide guidance to the team on industry best practices, key performance indicators, and a set of elicitation questions to identify areas for improvement within a selected business process. The example requirements and the Business Process Innovation Guides are organized by business process using APQC’s process classification framework. The Solution Roadmaps provide a similar structure but are based on technologies such as cloud computing, mobile, and social networking. The purpose of this content is to help subscriber organizations quickly and efficiently find ways to provide innovation and deliver more value to the business.
In developing the tool, we decided to use the Cloud. The Cloud enables the application to be accessed from anywhere and enables us to provide a much better user experience. Our focus is on stakeholders instead of developers. Recognizing the importance of stakeholder communication and continuous collaboration, the Enfocus Requirement Suite™ provides subscribers the Web 2.0-based Stakeholder Portal.™ No other requirements management service offers a similar capability, that is, providing access and transparency to users and other stakeholders throughout the software development and implementation process.
The Stakeholder Portal™ is a secure cloud-based service dedicated to the myriad of interested parties that goes beyond meetings and shared word processing documents to truly connect stakeholders – including users, suppliers, customers, and consultants – no matter where they are located. It’s an easy-to-set-up, easy-to-use interface that makes conversations happen among business leaders, developers, project managers, and most importantly stakeholders about information that’s key to project success, including goals, needs, challenges, and opportunities.
Most requirement management tools only focus on technology or software issues. We believe that requirements must address people, process, and technology issues. Technology simply provides automated support for the process. If the process is not designed correctly, then the automation does little but simply the “pave the cow path” as we say in Texas. We place major focus on business process analysis and provide meaningful content and automated support to improve business processes.
An incredibly high percentage of projects do not achieve the benefits envisioned by the sponsor. These initiatives do not usually fail because of technical reasons; they usually fail because of human reasons. This happens when the project team does not attend to the real and predictable reactions of people to disruptions in their routines. Without proper planning and intervention (i.e., cultural change management), the people that use the system each day may never fully accept the solution. You can have the best software in the world, but if the users do not like it or accept it, it is not going to work very well.
Just talk to most organizations that have installed a large ERP system. These failures to adopt and trust the new application create large losses of time, productivity, and morale and as a result prevent the business from obtaining the objectives it intended when the project was undertaken. The Enfocus Requirement Suite™ has significant functionality to help in this regard. First the StakeholderPortal™ keeps key users and stakeholders involved and informed about the project. Next, the system allows a Stakeholder Analysis to be performed which allows to the team to capture and analyze questions such as:
- Who will be impacted by the project?
- How many people will be impacted?
- Where are the people located?
- What are the key changes for the stakeholders?
- What are the gains (real or perceived)?
- What are the losses (real or perceived)?
- Who are the key influencers or change agents?
- How should leadership be involved to support the changes?
- How should people impacted be kept informed?
- What organizational changes, if any, need to be made?
- How will job responsibilities change?
- How much training will be required?
- How can we improve user acceptance and adoption?
After the stakeholder analysis has been performed. The stakeholders can define their needs in their own terms using StakeholderPortal.™ Organizational change specialists or business analysts can specify organizational change requirements which can be validated in a manner to similar to software requirements. The organizational change requirements provide the foundation for creating an organizational change and communications plan.
The Enfocus Requirement Suite™ enables IT organizations to deliver more value and innovation to the business. To find out more, please download our factsheet.
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