The Value Discovery Service is one of the Value Realization services that we mentioned in our earlier post, Welcome to the Value Realization Blog.
Many large enterprises, given the complexity of their business environment, operating model, and IT infrastructure find it difficult to visualize how best to use IT to achieve business goals of agility, cost-effectiveness, stronger customer relations, relevance, competitiveness, and, ultimately, improved shareholder value.
The Value Discovery Service helps to create consensus between business and IT stakeholders on what IT-enabled initiatives should be prioritized to generate the greatest business value and create desired capabilities within the organization.
When performing the Value Discovery Service, an Enterprise Architect and team first identify initial ideas and leads about the business’ priorities, tactics, and relevant scenarios that will likely deliver value to the business. These value-delivering scenarios are referred to as “hypotheses.” The Enterprise Architect then tests these hypotheses with business and IT stakeholders in the context of a one-day workshop, further developing scenarios, translating them into possible IT initiatives, and determining the priority of these initiatives.
The Value Discovery Service:
The Value Discovery Service can explore a single initiative, or many initiatives in which an enterprise is interested. The service produces a mutually agreed upon prioritized list of opportunities described by scenarios and value estimates, and provides recommendations about possible Microsoft’s involvement to maximize value.
A Summary Report documenting (i) the prioritized list of initiatives agreed upon by business and IT stakeholders at the workshop (with rationale), and (ii) initiative overviews describing initiatives’ objectives, future capability vision, key business/technology/people changes required, and value estimates.
Through the Value Discovery Service enterprises obtain:
Using information obtained from the enterprise, and expertise and proven practices from Microsoft, we:
Bank X has participated in mergers and acquisitions to increase their client base and portfolio of offerings. Over time the systems at the bank had become overly complex, with much duplication.
The bank decided to rationalize, simplify, and standardize its IT environment, but needed to define a way for implementing this change. The Value Discovery service from Microsoft helped to formulate and evaluate the possible approaches:
Not surprisingly, the final answer chosen by the bank mixed the approaches, but evaluating them initially in their pure form helped the stakeholders to crystallize their priorities, make the trade-offs, and build consensus.
Microsoft has increasingly put focus on value realization over the past few years. Our team has been at the forefront of this journey and we’d like to share what we’ve learned with the broader community of practitioners to help bridge the gap between the state of the art and the state of the practice, as well as move the ball forward.
Our Value Realization Framework (VRF) team is part of Microsoft’s Enterprise Strategy Program The VRF team creates methodology, tools, and prescriptive guidance to help our Field practitioners to plan for and execute business value realization and business value acceleration. (More on this below.)
For clarity, in our context “Value Realization” is value extracted from a business-focused technology initiative. (And a key concept here is that value is in the eye of the stakeholder.)
The purpose of this blog is to give you a behind-the-scene look at how we support our Enterprise (large) customers in achieving Value Realization and to share stories from our Field practitioners around driving business outcomes through business capability transformation underpinned by technology.
You can think of this as opening up the doors and windows to our workshop, where we’ll share the raw, the real, and sometimes the radical, as we continue to learn and improve our Value Realization techniques. It’s an ongoing journey of learning and improvement.
Here are some of the types of things we’ll share on the blog:
First, for a little bit of context -- The mission of Enterprise Strategy is to help customers maximize value of their investments in our technologies. When customers sign up for the program, they get a Microsoft senior architect who helps them plan their strategy and execute programs of change. The architect leverages our methodologies, collective know-now, and unique access to Microsoft’s internal resources making sure that every customer gets the benefit of “100% of Microsoft.”
As you can imagine, there are a lot of Enterprise customers considering how to respond to and leverage Cloud, Mobile, Social, Big Data / Analytics. They are also thinking about how to adapt their business to a digital economy and how to digitize their processes and products accordingly. This is where an architect can help envision the future possibilities for the business and how an Enterprise can innovate and use technology for a competitive advantage.
But ultimately the value is in the change – we don’t stop at value identification or planning for value, we differentiate ourselves by emphasizing Value Realization. Our architects support customers through the entire lifecycle of initiative definition & prioritization, solution implementation, adoption until the anticipated business value is realized.
Our architects take a “business before technology” approach. They are chosen for their industry expertise (banking, healthcare, retail, etc.) and experience of linking business priorities to enabling technological solutions. They understand market drivers and business imperatives, and can rapidly help customers to build consensus around investment objectives, business benefits, required business change, and possible technological solutions to support the change.
Importantly, our architects never focus solely on technology. Even when the initiative moves into the solution implementation phase, we look at it as a holistic program of change with technological, people and process components, since for the business benefit to materialize all these dimensions need to be addressed. Of course the architect utilizes other, more technology-focused resources within Microsoft, but she herself remains the champion of business value realization with focus on business capabilities and business outcomes.
To help customers make the most of their investments in Microsoft products and technologies we need a “method.” That’s where the Microsoft Value Realization Framework comes into play.
In the simplest terms, it’s a value-driven, repeatable approach for our architects to identify, prioritize, and execute programs and projects that will help the customer realize and accelerate more business value. As mentioned earlier, we go beyond technology and consider other aspects of change (e.g. governance, adoption) to help reduce, as Gartner would put it, “value leakage.”
Specifically, the Microsoft Value Realization Framework helps Enterprise customers:
The Microsoft Value Realization Framework helps customer executives address the following questions:
An important aspect of the Microsoft Value Realization Framework is that it’s a multifaceted, multidiscipline view that connects technology to business outcomes and business transformation. The Microsoft Value Realization Framework effectively balances and blends a technological perspective with change management perspective and, most importantly, ever-present focus on business value.
We’ll be covering the Microsoft Value Realization Framework in more detail in future posts.
Value Realization Framework guides end-to-end advisory engagements that we undertake for, or rather, in partnership with our customers. In addition to that we have also uncovered a set of more granular services that could help our customers with specific aspects of their business-focused, but technology-driven initiatives. Having a defined set helps us get specific about the inputs, the outputs, the flow of activities, and helps customers understand what to expect.
Here is a brief summary of each Value Realization service:
Most of what you’ll see in this blog will be coming from our practitioners, so we felt it would be helpful to introduce them. We represent a team of seasoned experts with business acumen and architect backgrounds who can drive our “Business Before Technology” approach
With their industry focus and expertise, our practitioners can provide unique insight on the trends that matter in a highly relevant way. Instead of a generic discussion around Cloud, Mobile, Social, Big Data, they can talk to with great specificity how those are impacting the retail industry or the banking industry or healthcare, etc. They can share stories of what others in the industry are doing, and how technology is helping achieve business outcomes and business capability transformation.
And of course, as part of knowing the business, our practitioners know the KPIs that count, the value drivers that influence them, the pitfalls that lead to “value leakage.” This makes it a lot easier to connect technology back to the business in relevant ways, while accelerating business value and optimizing our customers’ investment in technology from both an economic value and from a strategic perspective.
This is probably enough context.
In subsequent posts we will share more detail on how our approach and services are working in the real-world, what Enterprise customers are finding most useful, what key learnings our architects are sharing. As this blog is meant to be for the benefit of the broad practitioner community, we will welcome your comments, inputs, posts that could advance our mission of helping businesses realize maximum value from their technology investments.
Please add your comments here and send your suggestions/submissions to vrblog@microsoft.com.