In the article “What is a digital enterprise? And why should you care?” I wrote that “Business needs must be catered for by defined business processes (“the way we work”)”
The needs of the business may be in support of strategies, so plans for how we intend to achieve a certain goal or mission.
Such strategies are typically there so that we may reach some vision we have of what our enterprise should be in the future.
Furthermore, as business is also conducted in the digital realm, we need to capture business needs to support the enterprise’ policy for IT security. Such a policy or IT security strategy also influences budgets and resources.
Questions like: “Can we move to cloud to diminish the need for hardware and resources?”. The answer to this may depend on regulatory requirements as well as industry requirements.
We may see clear business needs that we wish to solve in the best possible way, however we are more often than not restricted by available budgets and resources.
But how do we identify business needs?
Even in well established organizations I’ve found that performing so called “business requirement elicitation” initiatives or projects regularly (at least every 3 years) across the departments of an enterprise is very useful. Not only to capture the business needs within departments, but also needs regarding what each department need from other departments to effectively do their work.
When the needs are validated, verified and communicated to all stakeholders it becomes a very effective way of communicating why for instance engineering need this and that information from sales, or why manufacturing desperately would like to have information they know engineering has, but is not provided.
I was once responsible for an enterprise-wide business requirement elicitation initiative regarding an end-to-end process for facility assets. The lifecycle of assets were defined as “from a need is identified in the facility to decommissioning of the physical asset” needless to say it spanned pretty much all departments and functions in the company from engineering through procurement, manufacturing, supply, installation, commissioning, operations, maintenance and ultimately decommissioning.
Some key stakeholders clearly voiced their discontent with the initiative saying it was a complete waste of their time, and that it was a classical case of shooting sparrows with cannons… Nevertheless, after a bit of persuasion they went along with it.
After the elicitation exercises, the business requirements from all departments and functions were verified, validated and mapped towards an overall end-to-end business process. The findings and recommendations based on the findings were presented to all stakeholders involved.
Interestingly the very same stakeholders who voiced discontent, now saw the benefit of the exercise and wondered why we had not done it sooner.
When the business needs are identified, it becomes a question of how we can fulfill them. How can we organize our way of working to fulfill the business needs?
This leads us to the next level in the pyramid, namely business processes.
Bjorn Fidjeland
In the article “What is a digital enterprise? And why should you care?” I wrote that “Business needs must be catered for by defined business processes (“the way we work”)”
The needs of the business may be in support of strategies, so plans for how we intend to achieve a certain goal or mission.
Such strategies are typically there so that we may reach some vision we have of what our enterprise should be in the future.
Furthermore, as business is also conducted in the digital realm, we need to capture business needs to support the enterprise’ policy for IT security. Such a policy or IT security strategy also influences budgets and resources.
Questions like: “Can we move to cloud to diminish the need for hardware and resources?”. The answer to this may depend on regulatory requirements as well as industry requirements.
We may see clear business needs that we wish to solve in the best possible way, however we are more often than not restricted by available budgets and resources.
But how do we identify business needs?
Even in well established organizations I’ve found that performing so called “business requirement elicitation” initiatives or projects regularly (at least every 3 years) across the departments of an enterprise is very useful. Not only to capture the business needs within departments, but also needs regarding what each department need from other departments to effectively do their work.
When the needs are validated, verified and communicated to all stakeholders it becomes a very effective way of communicating why for instance engineering need this and that information from sales, or why manufacturing desperately would like to have information they know engineering has, but is not provided.
I was once responsible for an enterprise-wide business requirement elicitation initiative regarding an end-to-end process for facility assets. The lifecycle of assets were defined as “from a need is identified in the facility to decommissioning of the physical asset” needless to say it spanned pretty much all departments and functions in the company from engineering through procurement, manufacturing, supply, installation, commissioning, operations, maintenance and ultimately decommissioning.
Some key stakeholders clearly voiced their discontent with the initiative saying it was a complete waste of their time, and that it was a classical case of shooting sparrows with cannons… Nevertheless, after a bit of persuasion they went along with it.
After the elicitation exercises, the business requirements from all departments and functions were verified, validated and mapped towards an overall end-to-end business process. The findings and recommendations based on the findings were presented to all stakeholders involved.
Interestingly the very same stakeholders who voiced discontent, now saw the benefit of the exercise and wondered why we had not done it sooner.
When the business needs are identified, it becomes a question of how we can fulfill them. How can we organize our way of working to fulfill the business needs?
This leads us to the next level in the pyramid, namely business processes.
Bjorn Fidjeland
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