Foundation for execution – A case Study

Foundation for execution is defined as the IT infrastructure and digitized processes automating a Company’s core capabilities*. In order words the collective use of business processes, technology, infrastructure and governance that will support a Company’s strategic goals.

You cannot have a good foundation for execution if a tight alignment between strategic business outcomes and IT capabilities are not in place. IT will continue to be a Cost Center and value will not be generated through the implementation of Technologies.

In this and subsequent Blogs, I will try to focus mainly on midsize Construction Companies (anywhere from $75 M to $ 500 M in annual revenues) and attempt to build the architectural framework for a Foundation for Execution.

Typical midsize Construction Companies have a framework somewhat similar to the one I show on the Figure below where a set of core business processes are supported by technologies, applications and data silos that all seat on top of the Corporate Infrastructure.

This approach seemed to work fine in the past, but with recent advances in technology and organizations trying to gain competitive advantage through innovation and the leverage of smart business aligned IT solutions, companies are looking into building better and more advanced architectures that will allow for more agility and effectiveness.

Some of the flows of this Model are as follows:

- Applications work fine individually , but they do not interact between each other

- Company’s data is located in information silos, is error-prone and not up-to-date

- Strategy is not clear to act upon

- Company builds IT solutions to solve certain business needs instead of building IT capabilities based on sound strategy.

The next step towards a Foundation for Execution is shown on the figure below

This model is similar to the one above with the advantage that attempts have been made at integrating the different applications and technologies that support the underlying processes and the data with an integration middleware, and the data have been somehow warehoused.
Although this approach is a step above the previous one, still have some flows as are depicted below:

- The Data warehousing is only useful as a reference

- There is no real-time data transfers across applications

- After the fact integrations are always complicated , costly and prone to errors

- Integration depends on actual and future releases of the different applications used, so the bigger the application pool the most complicated the integrations becomes.

Despite these flaws, this Architecture still brings value to companies that are using it due to the fact that

- It will allow reporting across multiple processes, thus being able to track compound Performance Indicators that are dependent not just on one process but on multiple ones.

- Efficiency will increase due to the fact that multiple key entries are practically eliminated.

- Data can be are manipulated, rearranged and presented to the knowledge users with the use of the Integration middleware without user input, saving costs due to data manipulation or moving it between different systems

- Information needed to make key decisions is more easily available, and less difficult to find.

I think that there is still room for improvement, and I will continue in the quest of exploring a more effective Foundation for Execution.

*Enterprise Architecture as a strategy. Creating a Foundation for business execution by Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David C. Robertson