"In the current budgetary climate it is getting harder and harder to prove the benefits case for a new business application to my organization."
Origin of this myth
I found this statement on several forums on the Internet. While software companies will do their best to persuade their potential customers in getting their latest software, for internal architects and analysts it is often a struggle to get things started within their own organization. In the current economic situation most CEO's and CFO's are not exactly waiting for big investments in new ICT systems, even if their internal specialists can come up with the right arguments. So how to deal with this?
The classic approach is to come up with a calculation of profit and cost, based on past experiences of other organizations in the same industry and the quick wins that you see within the own organization. A cost - profit analysis is - without any doubt - a necessity when proposing a new business application to the C-level within your organization, but will it - given the current economic climate - be enough to persuade them?
An alternative approach
What if you could prove the benefit of a driven business application to your organization by simply modeling one of your most complex processes? That would give your C-level management the opportunity to see what an effective business application will do in your organization and let them experience the promised improvement of efficiency, compliance and governance.
For software providers, like Be Informed, creating a show case with our software is something we often are eager to do. Be Informed uses the so-called "5-day challenge" to prove in a very limited amount of time and with a minimum of effort what their software could do in an organization.
The approach is as simple as it is effective. We create a draft business model for the organization and its products and create a model of it, resulting in a Target Operating Model. From this Target Operating Model we choose the most complex and inefficient case type or process. By choosing the most complex process and realizing a working and fully documented model driven business application for it within a couple of days, we have the ultimate prove for the benefits or our business application in your specific situation. With a team of maximum 5 people, typically consisting of an architect, two analysts/modelers, an UX engineer and a business consultant, we model the business application on location.
The result is an executable model driven business application containing the most complex processes and decisions, all fully documented, but with limited functionality.
With this approach you are no longer a victim of the current economic situation - waiting for changes to happen - but you are in fact using it in your advantage to get things done. During the past two years, Be Informed has performed approximately a dozen of these so called "5-day challenges". Despite the economic situation (especially in Europe), approximately 80% of these challenges resulted in a final go. The other 20% are still waiting for a decision, but chances are high that they will result in a project within the coming year.
Be Informed’s team were out in force at the Microsoft Industry Solutions University at Rome last week. The team flew in to showcase our latest Public Sector Solutions and some of the new Microsoft Integration work. It was a great event to advertise Be Informed products and what our partners could accomplish with us.
Geert Rensen and Gordon McKenzie gave an informative and entertaining presentation on ‘How we can learn from the Dutch’ as Netherlands is at the top end of the UN eGovernment charts. Rob Tuinte took charge of showing off our award winning Environment Online Solution. Which has been rated by top analyst company Gartner as a best in class example. Those visiting the stand and attending the presentation where captivated by the adaptability, versatility and practicality of Be Informed’s software. For many it was the first time they had heard of model applications driving processes and solutions in the public sector. Partners showed great interest in learning how they could benefit from this new and innovative product and how it works.
Following this we then highlighted some of the Windows 8 User Interface Solutions for the model store and also the new UI for our Multi – Benefit Solution (MBS). The Be Informed team demonstrated the capabilities of the model store on Microsoft’s very own Windows tablet. This accentuated the ability to integrate Be Informed’s products with Microsoft platforms. With many of our Partners currently using Microsoft solutions this was a huge plus.
As humans, our ability to create and use technology is one of the things that make us intelligent beings. It is also a key part of our humanity. Technology and devices help us compensate for all the things we don't have or can't do. 
Be Informed continuously determines which possible activities bring you closer to the goal, thus completing the transaction. This means there is no predetermined sequence of steps or workflows that restrict free interaction with customers. And when the case information changes, there is no need to start all over again, as the next set of possible activities is determined on the spot. 
Bottom-line improvements, such as higher productivity, higher STP and higher first-time-right percentages regularly lead to more than 30% lower operating costs. From an IT perspective, running multiple processes through the same system while having a single model to maintain regularly, leads to TCO savings in excess of 60%. Perhaps the most striking improvement can be found in the time-to-change, where a 90% reduction is not uncommon.
The laudable initiative to do something about the social and financial cost of supporting vulnerable families in the UK is a symptom of challenges facing government agencies over the world. In the Netherlands, it is estimated that up to one third of funds to support this challenge are consumed by inter agency collaboration, pulling all relevant facts and information together - this is a massive cost but one that highlights the issue that many agencies face, its not that the processes are broken in themselves, 
more that the gaps between then do not reflect the reality of life in a family struggling to deal with difficult issues. It’s a human problem, not suited to today’s systems and often ownership of the problem, or even detecting that there is a problem is a challenge for today’s silo oriented systems.
identifying troubled families, making a risk assessment of their status, and then creating a treatment plan to help them recover under the care of the local government agency and its partners in the wider community including central agencies, private companies and local charities. The power of using knowledge models for such a solution is that they are ideally suited to cross agency information sharing and analysis, and can also ‘learn’ as new patterns or symptoms can be added readily to the system.
Director of the New Local Government Network Simon Parker’s recent article called ‘
using a more innovative approach and new technologies. Take one example, the butt of many jokes about government services – the planning service. Like the UK the rules governing what you are allowed to construct and get permission for in Holland are complex and highly diverse, from recycling plants to railways – garden sheds to loft extensions, each has a set of rules governing the process that can enumerate many thousands of individual permits fora complex application. Also like the UK planning is and remains primarily a local government responsibility, and with such a complex set of policy rules to implement, the service levels and quality of information delivered were to say the least highly variable –so something had to be done, and was.
The Dutch government therefore initiated a new act (the so called Wabo Act) to simplify this situation. The act enables members of the public and companies to use one transparent procedure to apply for licenses for activities that have an impact on the physical environment to one competent authority. The new act has replaced around 25 separate licenses and 1.600 application forms for matters such as construction, demolition, spatial planning, listed buildings and the environment by a single one-stop-shop license covering all activities. With the new act, the complexity of the situation is the government’s problem; when someone applies for a license, it’s the responsibility of the government to sort things out. Citizens no longer need to be experts in how the government operates. The Wabo and its accompanying processes and systems came into force on October 1st, 2010, which is supported by the 
The plea by Maude’s office to become ‘digital by default’ is to be lauded and should be seized not only by individual departments but across whole service areas, by following the Dutch example here, we can learn not only on the playing field with Cryuff’s ‘
In the 
Since the time Martin Fowler introduced the concept of Continuous Integration the software industry has come a long way. Originally, the concept aimed at the early detection of software integration problems, but soon it grew into one of the pillars of Agile Software Development movement. Development teams experiencing the power of daily builds soon grew accustomed to the practice. Other teams grew anxious to implement the practice too. In short: the software integration problem got solved in many different ways over the recent years.
The most elegant way in which it was solved is undoubtedly with Model Driven Engineering. Working jointly around a shared model banishes the integration problem altogether. In traditional development environments, the compilation of code by it's nature is a batch process. Eliminating the compilation as part of the development cycle therefor is a fundamental solution to the integration problem.
More recently, the thought leaders at ThoughtWorks upped the ante with the concept of Continuous Delivery. This seemingly small step has an important implication - it offers the client the option to be more closely involved into the development cycle. This is no small thing - the sooner mistakes and misinterpretations in the development efforts are caught, the cheaper it is to correct them. Again, with model driven engineering this practice is simple to organize.
In my view, Continuous Delivery has already bridged the gap between the development team and their client. But this bridge is designed as a one-way road only. We simply need to add a lane for the traffic from the client to the developers to deliver them the feed-back necessary to further improve the process. Just imagine: delivery of instant feed-back as a standard functionality of the system under development. Report anomalies and requests from within the very system you are reviewing. Why not? What is the advantage of using a separate system? Why shouldn't we integrate that function in order to improve the mutual communication?
With modern technology like model driven engineering, this need not be anymore. We can - and in my humble opinion should - change the process in a way that will closely align the system development with the way the business itself develops. I propose a mechanism in which an initial operational capability is delivered as early as possible in the development cycle. Ideally within weeks after the start. Simply because there is no better feed-back available than the one from practical usage. It will focus the efforts of the developers to the real needs of the user population and - maybe even more important - it will facilitate the ongoing continuation of the dialogue throughout the entire life cycle of the system. Sure, it will be necessary to rescale the development effort from time to time, but the Continuous Delivery should end no sooner than the end of life.
Many of us live our lives increasingly in what I would call the "digital world": we meet in social media like facebook and google+, we read our news items in twitter, we exchange ideas in forums and blogs, we shop online, and last but not least, we communicate large parts of our business through emails, documents, spreadsheets and databases. The objects of communication may be of physical nature (ourselves, machines, supplies, clothes etc) but also these objects turn out to be of digital nature increasingly: I think of ebooks, software, games, money, contracts, data. You could therefore say, in my opinion, that we are creating a 'digital world' next to our physical world. With 'world' I mean an environment that has its own characteristics, and that has its own boundaries and restrictions. These restrictions are highly important and have a significant influence on our behaviour. I would like to explore this in this blog.
The law of semantic erosion. While memorizing and keeping things in the physical world are directly related to the erosion characteristics of the used material (you can keep things in rock much longer than wooden objects), digital objects do not erose or deteriorate, unless its physical barriers (hard disks e.g.) do. Digital data can become useless, however, in two ways: or the data are not accessible anymore in a meaningful way because the software/algorithm to access it is lost (think e.g. of encrypted data), or the data refer to concepts that are passed or considered useless (think e.g. of a database field that sets the customer's fax number). In both ways the semantics are eroded, while the data still exist. Erodition time in the digital world is releated to semantic relevance.
By: Frank Buytendijk (
Machiavelli contradicts Plato in a number of cases. The "kings" aren't philosophers at all... Machiavelli is supported by an even older philsopher and strategist: Sun Tzu. How is "The Art of War" related to governance?
Last week there was a meeting in the Plato room at the Be Informed headquarters, a good chance to check out his quote. It read:
After a heavy loss with AZ (1-5 at home against Roda JC), has a true Platonist, he said that judgement based on the numbers alone is “Scoreboard journalism”. In his opinion, there is much more to a game. Maybe he meant that journalists need more football knowledge, just like Plato. But what is knowledge?
but my focus is on cycling and football. Every year in july, my cycling team is competing against thousands of others in the Tour de France and during the football season I manage a virtual team in the Dutch league; both with variable success.
You need what the Germans call fingerspitzengefühl, a combination of wisdom and luck. Just like the sportsmen themselves.
I wish you all great wisdom. And good luck.
By: Frank Buytendijk (