Confusing Business Outcomes and Treatments
JP Morgenthal
C-Level Advisor | AI & Automation Leader | Solution Design | Problem Solver |Systems & Design Thinking | Digital Diagnostician |
I see a lot of confusion by businesses around two very key concepts when it comes to digital transformation: business outcomes and treatments. In many cases treatments are being discussed as the business outcome. For example, "I want to migrate my apps to the cloud." This happens to be one of the most popular treatments today that is passed off as a business outcome. Moving to the cloud is not a business outcome. Below I have provided a mind-map that represents a set of business outcomes and the IT-oriented activities that lead to that desired state.
Obviously these business outcomes are not solely the effort of IT alone. IT is a partner in helping to deliver these outcomes along with many other functions. However, for the CIO or VP IT choosing a child of the main branch will help clarify the goals of any technology-oriented work that needs to occur in order to achieve the desired state. For example, if reducing costs is the desired business outcome, then there are four primary paths to achieving this goal. Moving to cloud could be a treatment of modernization, simplification or even consolidation, but notice it is not on the business outcome map.
Note, reducing costs does not concern itself with development of a new platform, which is directly contradictory to what businesses are doing developing out their own Kubernetes infrastructure as part of this business outcome effort. Even as you modernize, the focus should be on simplification, not complexity.
When a treatment becomes the outcome, you may achieve your goal, but you will most likely find that what you thought would be a benefit may very well become a bigger liability and worse additional technical debt. This is why it is critical to first understand what the actual business outcome desired, perform the necessary assessments of the current state and then use that data to determine the best treatment(s) that will lead to that outcome.
Even if the treatment end up being migrate applications to the cloud, there are multiple ways to approach this treatment. For example, you could lift your data center environment and recreate it in the cloud, you might re-develop and re-architect depending upon the cloud service provider chosen, it may be better to take incremental steps and keep some of the application operating in the data center and move some of the functionality to the cloud. These approaches are determined by the data collected as part of the business outcome assessment and then the treatment assessment.
All to often this confusion is resulting in misdirection and a failure of IT to meet the needs of the business in a timely manner, which results in further reinforcement that IT is not the appropriate partner to support things like digital transformation. Make sure to identify the appropriate business outcome and then limit the work effort to achieving addressing the specific tasks related to that goal.
Harnessing the Combined Power of Strategy, Architecture and Investing in Change ? Author of The Fruition Trilogy
5 年Hello JP Thank you for sharing this. ? When we're investing in change, it's essential to know whether we're primarily targeting outcomes, outputs or activities. ?Enterprises with the highest-maturity investment cultures target outcomes, while valuing activities and outputs as means-to-the-end. The outcomes from your Change Portfolio comprise: - the goals achieved - the risks taken to achieve the goals - the resources used to achieve the goals - the net impact of the portfolio on the enterprise's future operating costs The Portfolio Management challenge is to keep the probabilities of achieving these outcomes as high as possible. ?See this one-minute video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjeDurd4fog A sufficiently diverse Change Portfolio consists of 10-12 persistent goal types - such as revenues, costs, customers, employees, brands, products, structure, compliance, etc. ?They are all targeted and measured as outcomes, not outputs or activities. ?Investment is prioritised by goal, before choosing the best change initiatives to invest in. ? The best Change Portfolios are also dynamic - that's to say, initiatives are chosen just-in-time to achieve the outcomes we need, and at the speed we need to achieve them.? All the very best Chris
Enterprise Architect
5 年JP Morgenthal I would also suggest you define the terms "business outcome" and "treatment". To reference a standard, the Business Motivation Model from OMG has terms clearly defined such as "Course of Action" and "Desired Result" and this is to ensure that what an organisation wants to do aligns with what the organisation wants to be. It is used in the Business Architecture community. Nick Malik The trouble I have with Balanced Scorecard (BSC) in practice (when used by execs) is the mutually exclusive use of courses of action (means) and desired results (ends) in a single inventory of BSC "Strategic Objectives". Agree on Benefits Dependency Network which is key in Programme Management.
Fractional CTO, Chief Architect, and Digital Transformation Program Owner
5 年You’ve basically stretched out a balanced scorecard or a benefit dependency network in your diagram. You may want to look into those techniques for expressing these ideas. They are more rigorous than a mind map and business leaders are already aware of the concepts so it is easier to convey to them. For IT concerned like “move to the cloud,” the benefit dependency network is better because you can focus at any column. This allows you to demonstrate the why, what, how measured, and how performed aspects in a more rigorous manner.
Author | Educator | Principal Consultant | Enterprise Architect | Program/Project Manager | Business Architect
5 年What vs. How.? If HOW precedes WHAT, failure ensues.?