Introduction To BizCasetm Software by Paul A. Strassmann BizCase As the Key to Alignment of Information Technologies "Aligning information systems to corporate goals" has emerged as the number one management issue for 1992, 1995, 1996 as well as the number two management issue for 1993 and 1994 in a poll of 500 information systems executives. How does one demonstrate that information technologies are aligned with the business plans of an enterprise? Recognizing that all alignment efforts are a contested process, how does one make it constructive and verifiable? How does one remove from any disputes the biases that are always present when competition takes place for new project funds? How do computer proponents deal with probing inquiries from financial executives if it has become increasingly clear that information management is not primarily a technological but a scarce resources allocation issue? To line up information technology plans with business plans requires the adoption of the language, style and measures used in business planning. It requires the use of consistent metrics to check whether the vision, faith and technological accomplishments contribute to the measurable goals of the enterprise. While companies may pay lip service to customer satisfaction, quality and other trendy indicators, they rarely evaluate how specific information technology investments have influenced changes in non-financial measures of performance. Meanwhile, CEOs still evaluate their companies the old-fashioned way, on the basis of profits. Therefore, useful alignment metrics must relate to accepted measures of financial performance. The BizCase package is a response to the top corporate executives' years of frustration with poorly structured investment proposals. It is the absence of a generally accepted standard investment evaluation practice that has hindered the realization of the value of improvements through information technology investments. The BizCase offers a consistent way of documenting the risk-adjusted discounted cash flow of a proposed business improvement project. It displays the high and low expected financial returns - elements that add to the credibility of any planning effort, since every operating executive realizes that changes in business processes are risky ventures. Most importantly, BizCase delivers analyses in a format that can be directly translated into operating budgets and into financial plans. In this way, operating executives can be held accountable for verifiable outcomes, as by-products of conventional monthly and quarterly budget reports. BizCase as a Project Information System All project plans are subject to change. Approval of a proposed investment is the beginning of a continually widening drift between the stated objectives as compared with the capacity to deliver the promised results. There are no plans that remains unchanged while a project is on its way. Customers are always discovering new ways how to improve their operations. There are no resource commitments that remain fixed as the scope of a project changes and as new implementation problems are discovered. All cost estimates and schedules for technology investments are uncertain. The reception of business process innovations is subject to unexpected challenges. This may come from hundreds of conceivable sources, such as resistance to changes in operating procedures, difficulties in training people or from outright sabotage from entrenched stake holders. The recriminations, misunderstandings and confusion that accompany project reviews as they evolve from desirable plans into uncompromising reality have undesirable consequences. Careers are destroyed. Budgets are summarily cut. Projects are canceled because they are tagged as being "out of control." The fault lies in the disconnect between what was assumed and committed at conception of the project and what is found, controlled and scheduled during the project execution. Project plans are defined in general terms, because that is all that is known. The tracking of project events during the execution is always detailed. Telescoping planning and microscopic execution assures that conflicts will escalate as a project progresses. BizCase offers a way how to maintain the project plans continually updated. As conditions change, the assumptions and dependencies became available for conforming examination and adjustment to reflect what has been learned. That is perhaps the most important benefit of BizCase. It offers the capacity to display a perspective that links goals, programs, measures of performance, projections, expectations and actual results in a consistent way. The BizCase software also links financial and performance objectives with quality targets. It makes it practical to keep up with changes that allows comparing actual with promised results. Therefore, it qualifies as an EIS (Executive Information System) for assessing the likely consequences of improvement proposals as the project progresses. A Short History of BizCase The origins of BizCase can be traced to early 1988 when I wrote a program that subsequently became Chapters 9 and 10 in my 1990 book The Business Value of Computers. In July 1991 this method was introduced into the U.S. Department of Defense as Functional Economic Analysis. It was embodied into operational software largely as result of work done by the Institute for Defense Analysis. Late in 1991 the CIM (Corporate Information Management) program of DoD made Functional Economic Analysis one of the primary underpinnings of its ambitious business process reengineering effort. The CIM staff became the key proponents and movers in this endeavor and deserves the overwhelming credit for linking formal project planning methods with formal structural analysis (IDEF) techniques. The combination of Functional Economic Analysis and Structural Analysis ultimately resulted in a stream of BPR (Business Process Reeengineering) and Functional Process Improvement techniques. Many consultants participated in assisting staffs throughout the Department of Defense in taking advantage of these methods. More than 60 government organizations participated in these efforts, culminating in the receipt of the coveted National Performance Review award in March 1996. The considerably world-class experience accumulated by the Systems Research and Applications Corporation (SRA) during this period exceeds anything available for private sector project managers. Although a number of consultants offer versions of financial analytic programs derived from experiences with machine tool investments, to my best knowledge none of these techniques satisfy the needs for assessing the benefits, costs and risks of large business process improvement ventures. It is this understanding of the current state of the art that led me to encourage the SRA organization to venture into applying their insights in the construction of the BizCase software package. [ Back to Top | About Bizcasetm | Background | Download Demo ] (c) Copyright 1999, Strassmann, Inc. Go back up to the Strassmann, Inc. home page.