Results: The New Critical Path

t Business Architects, we have a singular focus on delivering substantive and measurable business results. It is surprisingly easy for efforts to lose sight of this simple goal. Our mission is to bring the sense of urgency back to your critical efforts and refocus the initiatives on delivering business results.

We believe that strategic initiatives must maintain a rapid pace to accomplish this. Efforts that move too slowly fail: Enthusiasm wanes, resistance builds, and an initial sense of urgency is replaced by indecision and second-guessing. Newly-launched projects are especially vulnerable and often fail to achieve enough momentum to succeed.

To establish and maintain this rapid pace, successful projects must continually deliver results sooner rather than later. We are convinced that the common refrain that "interim results undermine the overall effort" is simply false: It is imperative to focus on early, tangible results rather than on a single, "big bang" implementation. Incrementally delivering results rewards the organization for its efforts and helps build momentum.

Process: How the Business Works

There are two core disciplines that Business Architects brings to bear on all of its engagements: an emphasis on business process and information technology expertise.

The key to lasting business results lies in your ability to improve your processes: To succeed, you must achieve significant improvement in how your people work together and, as a result, deliver increased value to your customers more quickly and more efficiently.

Historically, reengineering efforts have struggled to deliver process redesigns quickly enough. The often quoted failure rates of reengineering efforts is a testimony of the difficulties in this area. One of Business Architects key strengths is its ability to rapidly redesign business processes and, more importantly, implement those redesigns aggressively.

Process improvements also open the door for much needed organizational change. As Michael Hammer and James Champy pointed out in 1993 book, Reengineering the Corporation, there are linkages from business processes to the jobs and structures (e.g., what people do and how departments are structured), management and measurement systems (e.g., how performance is measured and is compensated), and ultimately, the organization's values and beliefs. Attempts to address these other sorts of organizational change in isolation of the business' processes are often unsuccessful.

Technology for Business' Sake

Frequently, delivering results through process improvement requires the strategic use of technology. Too often, though, the inability to deliver on technology's promises hampers these efforts. Technology projects often run astray, becoming efforts in technology for technology's sake.

Business Architects addresses these challenges by leveraging years of practical, real world systems development experience. Business Architects' principals have led efforts ranging from traditional client-server projects to complex Internet solutions. This, combined with our experience in legacy technologies, make us ideally suited to enable process improvement through the strategic use of technology.