LEF’s Dynamic Workplace workshop helps you identify and design the critical success factors you need to address in any change of working practice
"The FSA significantly reduced the cost of its IT. Mapping helped us halve the cost of our underpinning technology solutions, & even with additional integration & management, we have saved 11% per annum in the running costs.”
Julie Pierce Director of Openness, Data & Digital Food Standards Agency
Enterprise applications are a common source of frustration. Their complexity frequently absorbs time and money, instead of delivering their promise of smoothly running corporate processes. Decisions about whether to shelve, extend or outsource these applications can be especially taxing for technology leaders, but mapping techniques bring much-needed clarity and simplifies complexity.
LEF’s Enterprise Applications workshop uses Wardley Mapping to break down enterprise applications into value chain activities and map the stages of their lifecycle. By moving a single component on a visual map, you can assess its impact and see the future state. Using this technique helps cut through confusion about whether to maintain, extend, outsource or replace existing applications. Maps also identify business opportunities to make applications serve the business better, and save money by removing project duplication.
Mapping provides a means for describing effective, repeatable and strategic gameplays. Once established, the map of your business can be used to support a variety of specific strategic plays as well as application optimization: reducing or increasing barriers to entry, exploiting ecosystems, using open technologies, anticipating rivals and other goals and tactics all become feasible activities.
Large enterprise applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) or customer relationship management (CRM) systems typically absorb significant amounts of budget and resource. Organizations may rely on intelligent guesswork to decide whether to build or buy specific applications, when and how. Or they may opt for an external architectural review, which is both expensive and time consuming, especially if that review is crisis initiated, for example, because of a failed deployment, lack of ROI, or departure of the CIO or CTO.
“Mapping is a very good way to determine what your current technology stack is & how you might want to evolve it.”
Adrian Cockcroft VP, Cloud Architecture Strategy Amazon Web Services
In LEF’s experience, the challenge is not to replace an entire system but to assess where short and mid-term, low-cost changes can be made. Helping an organization extract greater value from past investments may entail exploiting cloud or other emerging technologies. These fresh tactics can easily be revealed by mapping.
Constructing a simple map helps an organization identify the relative lifecycle stages of their enterprise applications, including in-house agile development, package software, outsourcing, maintenance and ‘sunsetting’. Gaining a visual perspective shows how enterprise applications, at different stages of their lifecycle, warrant different treatment and investment.
Just about every product and service can be viewed in terms of its lifecycle – from its uncertain beginnings (genesis) to eventual standardization (commoditization). As markets or functions evolve through these stages, their associated business practices and activities often change radically, but in predictable ways. In the genesis phase, for example, agile development practices are often required, compared to later, commodity markets and stages. Once an overall picture has been agreed upon, it becomes much easier to determine how each business activity is likely to evolve, and how it should best be managed. In our experience, this type of visualization helps clients make better strategic and tactical decisions, while greatly enhancing shared understanding.
In practical terms, a class of problems and inefficiencies in enterprise applications will disappear, there will be fewer failures, and things will work smoothly. Potentially, a new constraint may be identified, and the spotlight usefully shifts elsewhere. Deep understanding of Wardley Maps and involved uncertainty allows us to factor in previously invisible unknowns, and identify biases and places where the company needs to adapt.
At the end of this one-day workshop, you’ll leave with greater clarity of your business landscape and an agreed action plan of where to make changes in your portfolio. You’ll know where future business opportunities for your organization lie, and have the confidence to practice mapping in order to realize those opportunities and run your operations more efficiently.
Workshop session
Outcome
Introductions & objectives
Set expectations
Agitate: get familiar with mapping Create Wardley Maps & develop situational awareness
Level set & build confidence in language & approach
Build a Wardley Map for your unit Identify stakeholders, needs & processes, current state, drawing value chains, assessing evolution & uncertainty
Understand environment & influencing forces
Activate: remove bias in enterprise applications Best practice, creating competitive advantage, learning activities & benefits
Identifiy gaps & advantages
Accelerate: solutions review Determine which solutions, improvements & costs need to be reviewed
Develop action plan
Action: confirm what next Review outputs & next steps to progress journey
Agreed action plan
Clarify enterprise architecture decisions Simplify complexity by using mapping to plot lifecycles of application assets, optimizing performance & business value
Ditch guesswork & reduce expensive external review Manage enterprise applications & other assets to support business growth
