The success of your business relies primarily on the operational efficiency of its core business processes and the accuracy of its information. For services-based industries such as financial services, healthcare and insurance, this means the quality of your technology automation. Therein lies the challenge. Your business continues to expand beyond the business capabilities that your CORE was originally designed. The result is operational friction and rising costs.

Every automated solution has constraints, things it can’t do, business conditions that it can’t handle, based on what it was originally developed to do. Frequently, due to cost or skill limitations, key requirements don’t make it into the delivered solution, so you’re often behind at the start. Reinventing the core means stepping back to recognize and understand the operational constraints imposed by your business systems and data platforms.

As your business expands into new products, markets, customer segments, and distribution channels, the system constraints begin to be exposed. Constraints may also be exposed as you try to integrate systems with one another because their data structures are incompatible. Overtime, these constraints create operational friction and the business becomes less efficient, costs rise and service quality deteriorates.

As you could imagine, unplanned constraints are an unintended consequence of scenario or story-based development when the relationship between the scenarios is not considered or there is a push to start coding before a solution blueprint is agreed to. Removing constraints requires enhancing your data structure and since the automated business process (all the code) is intricately aligned to the data structure, it too must change. As you might expect, removing constraints once they are created becomes an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. The bigger the structural change, the greater the cost. In many cases, the cost to remediate the solution once developed can be prohibitive.

So, what is the answer? What can you do differently to drive better results? First there needs to be a greater emphasis on the business side of the business solution. The design of the business process and the structure of the data need to support the natural variability of the operations otherwise you will build in new constraints. Instead of documenting a subset of scenarios or stories and building them incrementally, you can create a business design or blueprint that enables the variety of process permutations the business will encounter today and in the near future. By definition the transformed organization that you are moving towards does not exist, therefore you can’t describe and documents it, you must prescribe and design for it.

In order to accommodate the growing operational complexity of the business, we must usher in a new era of transformation design. Design conquers complexity. You can eliminate ambiguity with design making it simpler, instead of ignoring the complexity and only building for the Happy-Path. A quality design is a collection of simple patterns that enable configurability, flexibility thereby creating agility. In the long run, Trial and Error is very expensive and often does not create the business agility you need.

If your business depends on operational efficiency, business agility, and high-quality performance, then transformation design will deliver the business solutions that you need. HCG can help you lead the way to greater business agility.