Enterprise Transformation:
Essential Elements for COTSbased business
transformation programs
Presented by David M. Fisher
Director
Business Transformation Agency
June 2010
Essential Elements for COTS-based
business transformation programs
Ensuring strategic alignment exists across all
stakeholder organizations (top to bottom and side
to side) regarding the scope, approach, and
objectives of the program.
Ensuring governance is defined, established,
and engaged in the enforcement of these
strategic elements of the program, actively
addressing program issues in a timely and
decisive manner.
Ensuring that program leadership is embodied
in a “fanatical leader” who brings an excessive
enthusiasm to the effort, and is appropriately
empowered, respected, loved, and feared. This
leader’s authority must encompass the entire
scope of effort, overcoming the often conflicting
perspectives of the sub-elements of the program.
Essential Elements for COTS-based
business transformation programs
 Ensuring that the program office not only enforces
the strategic objectives and approach of the program,
escalating to the governance bodies as necessary,
but also maintains an open and collaborative
approach with the user communities to enable a
productive environment in delivering the required
business capabilities.
 Ensuring the program office is appropriately staffed
with skilled practitioners who have extensive
hands-on practical experience in implementing large
scale COTS solutions and driving process-focused
change in the acquiring organizations.
 Ensuring that the functional communities that will
inherit the solution are actively engaged throughout
the lifecycle of the program, from the early stage
concept development, through design, solution
development, testing, and deployment.
Essential Elements for COTS-based
business transformation programs
Ensuring an end-to-end process approach to
solution design and development (vice individual
stovepiped business functions), and aligning
cross-stakeholder project teams to these
processes for effective end-to-end solutions.
Ensuring requirements and the solution design
optimize the use of the COTS product,
reengineering legacy processes and limiting
interfaces to legacy systems to the maximum
extent possible.
Ensuring requirements are based on defined
standards to the maximum extent possible, as
well as ensuring that they have been streamlined
and simplified even if it requires policy,
regulatory, or even statutory changes.
Essential Elements for COTS-based
business transformation programs
Ensuring that the program is “right-sized” to be
no bigger than what is practical to implement.
Ensuring the approach includes a phased
implementation plan that starts small, delivers
quickly, and then builds on the initial solution with
additional functionality and population over time.
Ensuring data quality issues are addressed at
the earliest stage of the program, with a relentless
effort to provide clean, reconciled data to the
program in time for multiple rounds of conversion
testing.
Essential Elements for COTS-based
business transformation programs
Ensuring meaningful incentives based on
quantifiable measures are in place for all
stakeholders (including contractors) to align to the
strategic objectives of the program.
Ensuring that periodic independent reviews are
conducted across all areas of programmatic risk,
and ensuring governance is engaged in the
results of these reviews and willing to make tough
decisions on course corrections if necessary to
keep programs on track.
YES, we can transform our business operations
via COTS implementations IF we have…
 Strategic Alignment
 Governance
How many of
 Fanatical Program Leadership
these exist in
 Effective Program Office
your program?
 Skilled Practitioners
 Engaged Functional Communities
 End-to-End Process Approach
 Optimize COTS / Business Process Reengineering
 Requirements: Standardized, Streamlined, Simplified
 Right-Sized
 Phased Implementations
 Data Quality
 Meaningful Incentives / Quantifiable Measures
 Independent Reviews