Enabling Operational Excellence
Enabling Operational Excellence
Enabling Operational Excellence
Enabling Operational Excellence

TURNING OPERATIONAL KNOWLEDGE & COMPLIANCE INTO A COMPETITIVE EDGE

We systemize tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge

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Posts Tagged ‘metrics’

What is Business Alignment Really All About?

Business alignment is like motherhood and apple pie, no one will argue much against it.  But for all the hand waving, questions remain.  What are you aligning?  How do you align?  Answers generally center on aligning IT with the business.  But shouldn’t that be a given?!  Methodologies recommend a great many touch points with individual users and good interpersonal relationships.  But do those things ensure good business practices – or just good GUIs?  And why just IT?  Aren’t there other kinds of projects in the business too? True business alignment results from engineering real business solutions for real business problems based on deliberate strategy (in a deliverable we call a Policy Charter).  The approach should be exactly the same whether the business solution involves comprehensive automation, just partial automation – or none at all.  True business alignment is also something you can demonstrate quantitatively
  • How fully are business goals being achieved? 
  • What is the failure rate of business policies
  • How quickly can emerging risks and opportunities be spotted? 
Only metrics (key performance indicators) based on the strategy for the business solution (a Policy Charter) can reliably answer make-or-break business questions like these. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Excerpted from Building Business Solutions: Business Analysis with Business Rules, by Ronald G. Ross with Gladys S.W. Lam, An IIBA® Sponsored Handbook, Business Rule Solutions, LLC, 2011, 304 pp, http://www.brsolutions.com/bbs    

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