Week 4 - Value Chain Use Case Driven Modernization

Having the ability to map an organization end-2-end Value Chain and visualize Value Chain Driven Use cases allow us to really?understand?how the organization works, and more importantly what it really needs to operate in the future. I have seen many business transformation programs fail because they started with the premise that all business problems would get resolved once the existing applications were modernized...

Depending on how long the organization has been around, there might be legacy applications that are 20, 30 even 40 years old. It is not that these applications don’t work today, but they have been changed, patched, even "hacked" so many times over the years that it is difficult to understand what is really needed and what is there, just because it has always been there.

Let me share a story which hopefully will illustrate the point, one experienced engineer oversaw keeping a coal operated power plant in the 70s, when the power plant broke and nobody could figure it out, they brought the engineer and asked him to diagnose and fix the problem. The engineer did not have any tools (as they rushed him directly from a party), and asked for a can of baked beans, put the lid aside and used the open can it to listen to different parts of the machinery. He then adjusted some of the settings using the lid. Many years after his retirement the engineer visited the power plant and was surprised to see many cans of the same baked beans he had used to diagnose and repair the power plant problem years earlier. When he asked the maintenance team (all new engineers) why they had bean cans in the toolbox, they were told him that it was standard procedure and had been in the engineering manual for the last 10 years. Nobody knew what it was used for, but nobody wanted to get disciplined for not having it.

We can laugh about it, but organizations continued to do things just because they worked once before; nobody wants to be the guy/gal who breaks something which was working before just because insert your favorite rationale here. This is a natural (even expected) human behavior which prompts IT teams to carry many features, lines of code, that perhaps one day had a purpose, but now they are just old bean cans in the organization’s legacy pantry.?

The Value Chain Driven Use Case approach forces us to really understand what is required for the organization to perform its purpose. Yes, it does require us to take a more holistic approach, first understanding the organization’s objective, and then working across departments to stand-up the Value Pools and properly visualize the major organizational processes.?

This presents the perfect opportunity for everybody in the organization to put aside “that is the way things work today” and be part of the vision on “how things need to work for us to be more efficient and - more importantly - compete effectively in the market”. This exercise is about building the future without the unncesary constraints imposed today.?

Further, once we start segmenting the organizational value chain into meaningful chunks that we can modernize together as a single unit, then we really get to what will constitute the Value Chain Use Cases; continuing the mapping of the end-2-end organizational value chain, defining what data elements are required and understanding how these data elements will be created, modified/enhanced, deleted and shared with upstream and downstream processes. Allowing us to achieve a greater, end-2-end, understanding of the organizational way of working, its data elements, core processes and dependencies across the board. Once we overlay the Value Chain Use Cases with the existing technology footprint, it will allow us to document what is really needed, what can be optimized and what can be left alone in the “legacy pantry”.

In summary, the Value Chain Use Case Driven modernization approach will help us optimize our future state across applications and drive a better user experience by not focusing on the existing application/ways of working, but rather taking a fresh look on what is needed and setting a true modernization end state beyond the span of individual legacy applications.I have seen it action and can attest that it is a very powerful (and insightful) technique and should be evaluated by all organizations looking to implement technology modernization programs.