Business Transformation Workbench

Business transformation is a key management initiative that attempts to align people, process and technology of an enterprise more closely with its business strategy and vision (Lee, 2005). Business transformation is an essential part of the competitive business cycle. Existing consulting methods and tools do not address issues such as scalability of methodology, data and knowledge management, method enforcement, asset reuse and governance, consolidated views of upstream and downstream analyses well, to name a few. This paper presents Business Transformation Workbench which is a practitioner’s tool for business transformation addressing these problems. It implements a methodical approach that was devised to analyze business transformation opportunities and make business cases for transformation initiatives and thereby provides decision-support to the consultants. The Business Transformation Workbench builds on a component-based model of a business and offers a consolidated view into clients’ operations, organization, staffing, processes and IT. It provides an intuitive way to evaluate and understand various opportunities in staff and IT consolidation and process standardization. It embodies structured analytical models, both qualitative and quantitative, to enhance the consultants’ practices. The Business Transformation Workbench has been instantiated with data from finance management domain and applied to address a client situation as a case study. An alpha testing of the tool was conducted with about dozen practitioners. The feedback has been encouraging. 90% of the consultants who tested the BT Workbench tool felt that the tool would help them do a better job during a client engagement. The tool is currently being piloted with customer engagements in a large IT consulting organization.