Practical Goal Modeling for Enterprise ChangeContext: A Problem Statement

Sagar Sunkle, Hemant Rathod, and Vinay Kulkarni

Motivation

Business Change Drivers1. Cost reduction/revenue increment2. Mergers/acquisitions/divestitures3. New regulations4. Audit findings

Changes due to Business Drivers1. Process changes2. Product offerings3. New functionality needs4. New data needs

Technology Drivers1. Vendor-driven upgrades2. Technology consolidation mandates3. Mobile/cloud presence

Changes due to Technology Drivers1. Process changes2. Product offerings3. New functionality needs4. New data needs

• Multiple change drivers in enterprise context

Enterprise

Motivation

• Effective and efficient response requires coordinated treatment of what, how, and why

Business Change Drivers1. Cost reduction/revenue increment2. Mergers/acquisitions/divestitures3. New regulations4. Audit findings

Changes due to Business Drivers1. Process changes2. Product offerings3. New functionality needs4. New data needs

Technology Drivers1. Vendor-driven upgrades2. Technology consolidation mandates3. Mobile/cloud presence

Changes due to Technology Drivers1. Process changes2. Product offerings3. New functionality needs4. New data needs

Enterprise

GORE Techniques

• Examples- KAOS, GBRAM, i*, Tropos, GRL• Advantages:

– Enable representation of stakeholder goals, relationships to other goals, alternate ways to achieve them, and consequences of choosing specific alternatives

– Analyze satisfaction or denial of goals- what-if or bottom-up analysis and if-what or top-down analysis

– Other analyses- ability, workability, viability related with a course of action to achieve goals, criticality of depending on network of actors for achieving a goal and so on

– Initial applications of planning (best sequence of actions leading to achievement of goals), simulation (goal achievement over time), and more…

• Key issue is- while intuitive and clearly useful, how to practically apply GORE techniques?

SR+SD For All M&A Problems under Consideration

Products and Services

Rationalization

Branch Consolidation

Workforce Integration

Application Rationalization Data Migration

Capacity Enhancement

Business Layer

Application Layer

Infrastructure Layer

• Merger of Two Wealth Management Banks– Real world engagement for our

organization– Merger as a change driver– Could we capture rationale of merger,

and subsequent integration, albeit in retrospect

– Use i*– Large problem, broken down into

multiple sub-problems– One key strategic goal in solving each

sub-problem– Set of rationale and dependency models

for each problem

Practical Exemplar Details

Practical Exemplar Details

SR+SD For All M&A Problems under Consideration

Products and Services

Rationalization

Branch Consolidation

Workforce Integration

Application Rationalization Data Migration

Capacity Enhancement

Business Layer

Application Layer

Infrastructure Layer

• Restricting to 3 or 4 actors [mainly at the top level of org hierarchy with only representative actors at operational levels]

• Several gotchas upfront-– How to represent two organizations themselves that

merged; how to differentiate actors from either organization? what about the merged entity?

– How to capture external drivers like market condition that led to merger?

– How to represent inside and outside of organization-essentially self + environment?

– Main problem divided into 6 sub-problems; how to put best alternatives together as an optimum solution to merger?

– Merger initiative for 5 years- how to represent course of actions over this duration-If we really want to use Whymodels!!

– Merger is often driven by existing context and ongoing goals- how to represent merger goals as not being detrimental to existing goals?

• Several hacks applied- modeling effort led to following observations

Observation I- Goals in Organizational Hierarchy

What to Model

Top

management

Middle

management

Operations

Strategic

Goals

Unit Goals

Unit

ExecutionOperational

Execution

Actors from

different

levels of

organization

hierarchy

Strategy Modeling and Execution in

Practice

Strategy Modeling with Intentional

Modeling

• Actor/agent orientation quickly identifies involved roles but the ensuing model far from reality-mainly because:– Identified roles were at arbitrary levels in organizational hierarchy- no guidelines on who to really

include and where to stop – Tough to separate out dependencies from delegation– Roles belong to specific units- this context is often lost; should there be unit-specific rationale and

dependency models? Is a specific unit an actor?

Observation II- Ownership of and Contributions to Goals

CFO

BU Head(s)

FAs

SR

SD

Rationalize

portfolio

CIO

COO

AIT

CIO’s Responsibility

CIO’s Contribution

Rationalize

Application

portfolio

Application

Rationalization

Products and Services Rationalization

What to Model

• Due to breaking down of large problem, several roles/actors owning as well as contributing to several goals– Do courses of action for owned and contributed goals affect each other? If

they do, how to model this situation? How to evaluate it? – Particularly when sub-problems are part of larger problem

Observation III- Distinguishing Current Goals from Future Goals

• Organizations exist, specific units and roles are doing whatever is required to achieve ongoing goals- business as usual (AS-IS or BAU) goals

• Merger is one change driver• What about other concomitant change drivers? Regulatory compliance for one- organizations

in the exemplar are banks with presence in multiple geographies • Existence of several change drivers is the norm• Must distinguish goals in response to change drivers (transformation goals) from BAU goals

– BAU goals in fact need to be prioritized- often the reason for merger failure is not taking into consideration the context of BAU goals when adopting merger goals

– How to ensure that actions for transformation goals do not jeopardize BAU goals?– How to distinguish goals resulting from different change drivers? How to balance them or model

tradeoff? What does it mean to balance them?

• This apart from several realities of real world: uncertainty within and in environment of organizations, negotiations-again quite prominent in merger context- to name a few

What to Model

Observation III- Assumptions and Course Corrections

What to Model

• Merger change initiative for 5 years

• In retrospect, over the duration of 5 years, several assumptions changed- there were several course corrections

• What changes between courses of actions when assumptions change?

• How to make use of knowledge that certain assumption(s) led to wrong/sub-optimal course of action?

Observation IV- Who Models the Goals and how to Keep Track?

Who Models Goals?

• Who/where are the domain experts?• For practical use, do we need to enable several modelers with knowledge of GORE

techniques? • Will CXOs help in defining the goals- ideally they should but in reality many

difficulties• Adoption is difficult in general

– The results of using GORE models will show after time- how to convince anyone to help modeling goals?

– How to keep track of all the modeled goals and synchronize suggested and real courses of action?

– How to create modeling and operationalization infrastructure suitable for entire duration of change initiative?

How to Apply the Models?

Conclusion

• To make GORE techniques practically applicable-

– Intuitive and useful but require further research in several dimensions

– Ongoing modeling efforts for large case study revealed some of these; possibly more- depending on specifics of change drivers in enterprise context

Questions?