Business Transformation: A Roadmap for Maximizing Organizational Insights

CHAPTER 7

Starting the Journey: Developing a Strategy and Roadmap to Guide Your Business Transformation

What we've learned so far: To improve an organization's maturity level, a business transformation effort is required to improve and align the capabilities of the organization's four pillars: people, information processes, technical infrastructure, and culture. Structuring and launching a business transformation initiative is a journey that should be well planned and executed. To plan the journey, organizations need to address three key requirements:

1. Secure continuous executive sponsorship.
2. Assess current capabilities and dynamics of the four organizational pillars (people, processes, technical infrastructure, and culture) using a structured maturity model to determine the starting/baseline and target points.
3. Align the capabilities of the four pillars with the organization's business objectives with the support of a Center of Excellence to develop the four pillars.

As you've read throughout this book, a business transformation strategy is necessary to make this happen.

KNOWING WHERE TO START

It is not easy to transform an organization, especially as it relates to information maturity. When an organization makes the decision to embrace information maturity, the “where to start” question isn't simple to answer. Should a Center of Excellence be chartered? Are there people on staff who can guide us? Will this require the help of an outside consultant? Everyone nods eagerly when ...