Why invest in a Business Value Model

A Business Value Model is a representation of how your organisation enables value. Value for your teams, value for your customers, value for your shareholders.

The 'how you enable value' is the important bit. A Business Value Model (BVM) should provide with enough knowledge to quantify and qualify the work that goes on in your business, providing evidence to support your decision making about which activity should be stopped, supported or invested in to increase the value created.

With this new knowledge you should be able to understand the impact that today's way of working is having on your ability to generate the value you need to be successful. Once that is known, you can respond and take action to move your organisation to a new way of working which creates the value you are looking for.

Examples of the inputs to the BVP are;

1. The data and information needed by the business to enable valuable outcomes:

• Do you have the right data and information available to the right people at the right time
• Is the content accurate and supports the work that people are doing
• Do people believe and trust the data & information they access or does it create re-work
• Is your data & information in the most appropriate format, enabled by the most appropriate system, stored securely and accounts for privacy requirements

2. The people who are doing the work:

• Are the right people doing the right work the right way
• Are we enabling people to apply their expertise, or have we wrapped them up in admin due to the nature of our processes and ways of working
• Does the business culture support our people
• Do our people have access to the best possible tools to do their work, or have you inadvertently enabled Shadow IT

3. The tools and systems used by the business:

• Are we making the most of the technology we have access to
• Do our systems make things easier or harder - do we understand how they impact the way we work
• Is our data & information secure, accessible, believable, accurate, up to date, single source of truth
• Do we know where all of our data & information is

4. The cost of working:

• How long does it take us to deliver our outcomes
• What is the cost of that work
• What is the impact on our people or business reputation as a result of the way we are operating

5. The culture of the business

• Are we enabling our teams to be high performing
• Do we have a supportive environment such as a hybrid working model to enable our staff deliver their best outcomes and look after their own and their families well-being
• Are Leadership supportive and enabling

Once you have this detail in your model, you will be able to understand how change of any aspect of the model can influence the value your organisation generates. You will also see where and how to prioritise actions which will form the basis of your new operating model.

A comparison between where you are today and where you need to be in the future provides the business case to support the change. The BVM ouputs of cost and time, data & information need, system requirements and people expertise show you what is possible and how to achieve the new way of working.

Operational decisions fall out of this process; prioritised implementation programmes of work based in evidence aligned to your strategy and business ambition can be against the context of the value they create.

You may recognise that other business artifacts are needed to ensure the journey is sucessful, such as architecture models, business process models, organisational charts, role descriptions and can capture these based on the change priorities you have identified.

The Business Value Model serves as the director of your business optimisation programme and creates inputs to your process optimisation, your IT strategy, your data or information governance programme and your on-going strategic discussions about what your business is and how it creates the best possible value for your teams, your customers and your shareholders.