Transformation Management and innovation; Part Four: Analyse the As-Is solution, central requirements and principles

Eventually, everything that a shared service IT organisation as IT does has to serve the greater good of the whole organisation and a large number internal customers like business units, other shared services, and individual end users. Whilst it is the responsibility of the various stakeholders to communicate what the solutions are supposed to do for them functionally, it is IT’s challenge to balance all the different needs and to drive the evolution of the non-functional requirements.

In the context of new technology, security threats, compliance requirements and business requirements, IT has to define new principles and underpinning policies, which are shaping the properties and boundaries of a future solution. 

Besides driving the strategy for a future solution and parallel to this, IT has to deal with the challenges of the current solution. Over time, many IT organisations find themselves with a solution architecture that reflects the different states of the art across many years with changing requirements of different stakeholders. In today’s world, solutions that were previously used as an enabler can turn into an obstacle. Especially, in the case of business critical solution elements. This requires attention and will consume scarce transformation capacity, if business continuity is not to be put at risk. Even if the current solution can be upgraded or maintained to solve imminent issues or functional gaps. This usually comes at the cost of growing complexity, vulnerability and increasing cost, which when combined with declining performance, leads to situations that create more urgency. Examples of areas and aspects that deserve attention in fuels retail are:

• Central systems as a key enabler can be a significant limitation. Especially for capabilities that require low latency and real time processing. The broader context of the corporate technology roadmap has to be understood, which is also the case for other corporate infrastructure such as networks, front end processors and middle ware. Depending on the degree of change, site systems architecture can also be a limiting factor, which decreases the options for transformation, if not upgraded…
• Especially in large fuels retail station networks with locally deployed systems, organisations need to manage hardware refreshes, database and operating system updates and upgrades, new application releases, plus on-going maintenance and monitoring. This can be triggered by compliance related issues like legislation, fiscal laws, internal guidelines and by end of life related situations. This leads to a situation where replacements become imminent.
• With more and more sensitive and personal data being owned and used by fuels retailers, the requirements of IT security has become paramount. In case of incidents, potential vulnerabilities of the legacy solution might a threatening to the company’s reputation.
• Whilst cost levels move out of the range of benchmark data, IT operational performance is declining in critical areas of systems uptime, speed and capacity.
• Large part of cost are fixed and non direct costs. This results in significant cost allocations from central units to local businesses, little cost transparency and even lower ability to influence and manage local IT cost based on consumption. From a business perspective, this translates into a perception that IT costs are too high and allocation is not fair. At the same time there is little incentive to mindfully use scarce resources.

To identify the most effective balance between the current challenges and transforming initiatives: Firstly, a baseline of all the aspects of the current position has to be discovered from an IT perspective. Secondly, there needs to be an investigation of future aspirations and non-functional strategy.

As a result, there is an understanding of how well the current solution and the services provided fit the strategy of the IT organisation and areas for potential gaps. Comprehensive data collections enabled by standardised questionnaires and templates are a mandatory exercise. This is to make sure that all necessary information, including architectural designs, service performance assessments, non functional principles and along with priorities are captured effectively. Interview schedules help to keep track of progress and to identify all necessary data and information providers. If the data is collected in such a structured and standardised way across the different units/ markets of the organisation, it is comparable and clean.

Information capturing at should cover data on the following layers of IT:

• Central IT at corporate level
• Central IT at fuels retail HQ level
• Internal and external interfaces and network infrastructure
• Solution ecosystem and composition
• Local retail site systems

Transformation Management needs to have the necessary tools and templates and should oversee or run the process of comprehensively capturing, reviewing, cleaning, and documenting the data. Understanding the priorities across the various business units and markets is a separate exercise that needs to take place at a similar pace. The goal needs to support business units to provide the right information and data that helps IT to understand what the business really needs. This will be discussed in the following article.