Where did the Tools come from?
Most of the tools are not new. Versions of them are being used in both the public and private sectors, and by other governments including the UK, the US and Australia.
BTEP’s Transformation Framework is a modified version of the Zachman Framework, which has been used for decades by sophisticated industries with a high degree of discipline and rigor in their design and production processes. Aerospace companies, for example, produce detailed plans and “blueprints” for absolutely every aspect of design, development, and production of advanced aircraft. Hundreds if not thousands of highly specialized personnel spanning many different disciplines are involved. Risk-tolerance is as close to zero as possible. A rigorous, step-by-step planning and design process is essential to control costs, leverage the right expertise at the right time for the right purpose, manage risk, and ensure the highest possible product quality. Detailed schema and models are produced iteratively documenting every stage of work from the design lab to the production line, which has the added and essential benefit of enabling “root cause analysis” in the event that a problem occurs with an aircraft.
The Governments of Canada Strategic Reference Models (GSRM) builds on a common inter-jurisdictional language for public services that has been evolving in Canadian municipalities and some provinces since the mid 1990s. Municipal and provincial levels of government are more “service intensive” and have found reference modeling extremely useful. The City of Winnipeg, for example, began developing service profiles in 1997 and identified 141 internal and external services, spanning everything from animal control to street cleaning. This has enabled the city to manage its business more strategically and efficiently, and to identify and rapidly exploit opportunities to reduce costs and improve service. More recently, initiatives involving representatives of the federal, provincial, regional and municipal levels of government have used the GSRM to define opportunities to transform services to seniors and new business start-ups in the restaurant sector.
Meanwhile, the Federal Enterprise Architecture Program Management Office (FEAPMO) in the US is promoting its Business Reference Model as the foundation for government-wide improvement in that country (www.feapmo.gov). The Government of Australia is taking a similar approach to promote interoperability and improve services.
More generally, across the private and public sectors, pressure to improve customer/client satisfaction and organizational productivity means strategic business modeling is becoming steadily more ingrained. At one time, for example, models were produced only for specific automation and process improvement purposes. Now, “whole-of-enterprise” strategic business modeling is becoming more common. It has the advantage of putting a multitude of different processes into context showing where they are inter-dependent; making “abstract knowledge” about the business explicit, and enabling change where and when it needs to be pursued in ways that minimize disruption and are far more likely to achieve what business owners want.