To align the business model with; the E2E business process architecture, the E2E solution and template, the business organization and the reporting architecture an ADM life-cycle is required.
The ADM life-cycle consists of the following 7 domains;
- E2E business process architecture
- E2E solution management
- E2E template management
- E2E organization management
- E2E process performance management
- Business model innovation management
- BPM and ALM governance management
Many organizations have problems maintaining the ADM life-cycle because of the conflicting objectives of the employees and departments involved.
All departments should re-use the deliverables of other departments to make sure they all work with the same single source of truth. This means they all have to agree on:
1 The E2E Business Process Architecture (BPA) as maintained by the BPA architect
2 All (ERP) tools and methods as selected and maintained by the solution architect
3 The corporate template as maintained by the ALM support manager
4 The organizational structure and business controls as maintained by management
5 The E2E KPI's / PPI's and targets as defined by operational excellence manager
6 The business models and business innovations as defined by the business architect
Many companies are not able to stick to these agreements because during many ADM maturity checks the same issues keep appearing:
- Various BPM and EA methodologies and tools and no common BPA
- Limited availability of system and user documentation and associated knowledge of staff
- Various design standards for the integration / middle-ware platforms
- Limited re-usable test catalog and E2E integration test scripts
- Limited control over the company template and the sharing of best practices
- Limited alignment of the local organization structure with the E2E processes
- Limited number of KPI’s and PPI's linked to the E2E processes
- No commonly accepted business model
- Limited use of a BPM portal to share E2E processes, issues and business policies
- Limited master data governance and definition of master data fields
- The enterprise architects operate separate from the ICT support departments
- The PMO manages the progress of projects and not the quality of the content
The only way to maintain the agreements and resolve these issues is to install a strong ADM governance team which is responsible for the quality of the deliverable's and takes care of the alignment of organizational standards. This ADM team should be separate from the ICT department to make sure the ICT experts can focus on the ICT solutions.
The optimal solution is to create one ADM team in which all the roles of the ADM cycle are included with the shared responsibility to maintain the ADM lifecycle.
ADM governance team:
The big challenge for the ADM governance team is to align ICT responsibility (deliver ICT services according to SLA with low costs) with the Business responsibility (increase profitability) and get support from the management team to maintain the ADM life-cycle. Therefore the ADM governance team should get operational responsibilities with clear benefits and objectives.
The objective of the ADM governance team is to maintain the ADM life-cycle and the:
- Technical and organizational alignment with the business departments
- Integrated TOGAF and ITIL documentation standards
- Alignment of the master /product data / E2E reports with product management
- KPI's with related business ABC and benefits (value engineering) with finance
- Definition of RFC’s / projects and the quality / testing of the RFC’s / projects
- Template management/regression testing and the sharing of best practices
- QA on maintenance / release cycles and associated documentation
- E2E process optimization and operational excellence
- Business model innovations (design thinking) and business project portfolio
- Business process governance board and Business process portals
This means that roles like the PMO and enterprise architecture are also part of the ADM department which has a continuous and traceable responsibility for the ROI of project lifecycles, the impact of the design decisions and E2E KPI's.
