11.4    Defining the To-Be Future Mode of Operations

In this section, we’ll discuss the FMO, that is, how to achieve the digital transformation discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 and how to address the pain points identified there and in Section 11.3.1. We’ll discuss the principles of enterprise architecture and show you how to map a business strategy and TOM to your processes and applications. In short, we’ll show you how to plan your future landscape. This corresponds to the envision phase of the IBM Better Transformation framework. The objective of the envision phase within the digital transformation road map is to start defining the options and considerations for the target FMO.

11.4.1    Considerations

There are two key challenges in defining a successful digital transformation strategy:

• Lack of business alignment and vision
  A diverse range of perspectives from across and within organizations may lead to a lack of alignment and common vision about where the business needs to go and how it can get there. This lack of alignment can often result in piecemeal initiatives or misguided efforts that lead to missed opportunities, false starts, and regret costs.
• Lack of IT alignment and vision
  A lack of alignment and common vision about where IT needs to go to support the business, partly caused by the plethora of technologies, can also lead to piecemeal IT initiatives that fail to support the real business vision, with missed opportunities, false starts, and regret costs.

Ultimately, while technology is an enabler to achieve business outcomes and vision, a successful road map must be created to support the realization of the business strategy. There also needs to be a framework for helping customers on their journey.

11.4.2    Approach

Now we’ll look at the tasks and activities to carry out the main pieces of work during the definition of the CMO. We’ll begin by envisioning the FMO and running a series of workshops to explore the FMO in the following contexts:

• Business and IT strategy
  Identify how closely the IT strategy and business strategy are aligned, identify any piecemeal anomalies and proposals to close the gaps, and identify how the FMO fits into the IT and business strategy.
• Current pain points and business expectation gaps
  Using information from the CMO analysis (via the workshops, questionnaires, interviews, and technical assessment), define how pain points can be addressed in the FMO and how gaps in business expectations can be plugged.
• The business case for digital transformation
  Begin the process of defining the key elements of the business case for digital transformation. Identify key qualitative and quantitative measures.

The key inputs of this phase are as follows:

• Outputs from the engage phase
  The CMO analysis, pain points, business expectation gaps, and opportunities identified in the engage phase.
• Current IT landscape
  The current application landscape identification.
• IT strategy
  Description of how the IT strategy is aligned to support the current business strategy.
• SAP technology road map
  The latest technology road maps from SAP with regards to the SAP applications in the current application landscape.
• Relevant point of view
  The business case viewpoint for digital transformation.

The main activities of this phase are as follows:

• Facilitate workshops to achieve the following:
  • Present the context and business case for digital transformation opportunities to reduce TCO and better meet requirements.
  • Review the findings of the analysis in the engage phase.
  • Present initial recommendations on the opportunities for digital transformation initiatives based on SAP value engineering and the IBM CxO studies contextualized for SAP.
  • Discuss these recommendations in the context of the client’s business ambition, IT strategy, perceived business expectation gaps, current pain points, and the SAP technology road map.
  • Qualify and prioritize the opportunities for digital transformation mapping solutions to solve problems and pain points, and, if applicable, reduce TCO.
  • Tailor the initial business case for the digital transformation initiative to make it even more specific to individual organizations.
  • Plan the evaluate phase.
• Tailor your business case
  Present a tailored business case for digital transformation, including a set of desired business outcomes to be met by the digital transformation activity.
• Identify opportunities
  Identify qualified opportunities for digital transformation that include tailored use cases. These use cases identify candidate processes that can be simplified with initiatives aligned to the latest technology road maps, including industry and solution points of view:
  • Platform optimization and advanced analytics with migration to SAP HANA
  • Migration to the cloud and taking advantage of SaaS (e.g., SAP Ariba, SAP Hybris, SAP SuccessFactors)
  • Mobile solutions and UX modernization for user engagement

Some accelerators are available to help with this stage of the transformation road map, as follows:

• Target FMO reference architecture
• IBM viewpoints on the business case for implementing new technologies aligned to a technology road map
• IBM component business model (CBM)
• SAP HANA adoption scenarios
• SAP S/4HANA business case and road map creation
• SAP Journey Maps
• SAP UX Explorer
• SAP cloud computing explorer
• IBM Explore SAP HANA