Technology Change Without Business Process Improvement Is Not Modernization (Part 1 of 5)

This article is the first of five in our series “Improving IT Modernization Outcomes,” which unpacks the key strategic and operational characteristics that distinguish successful modernization programs from those that fall short of their potential.

Leaders in charge of high-profile federal IT modernization programs face significant pressure from the White House, Congress, and the public to deliver long-deferred next-generation solutions on aggressive timelines. This pressure can drive leaders to deprioritize activities not seen as directly improving the technical capabilities available to the program—including those related to business process improvement. The result can be a “rip and replace” mentality, which may automate legacy processes and practices without taking advantage of a once-in-a-decade opportunity to rethink how the organization does business and, more importantly, serves its customers.

When programs embrace this opportunity, however, what emerges is an improved understanding of the program’s risk profile and greater insight into the requirements and priorities it must fulfill to be successful. These insights enable not only superior solution design and improved change management, they also reveal how process change can contribute as much (if not more) to effective IT modernization as technology updates alone.

What Is Business Process Improvement?

Done properly, business process improvement enables a potential reimagining of the workflows supporting key business functions. These workflows encompass all of the steps, tools, systems, inputs and outputs, and roles that the program engages to provide value to customers throughout its life cycle. Starting from a well-documented as-is process—which has the buy-in of key stakeholders at points within the workflow—the process improvement team can identify lag times, delays, redundancies, dependencies, and more that can drain resources and defer or prevent the timely delivery of desired program outcomes.

Working from this shared baseline, stakeholders can design new target processes that prioritize strategic business needs and address organizational impediments to improved performance that may fall beyond the technology sphere. By focusing on these organizational (and customer) needs first, the modernized solution will be built to serve those needs across the breadth of the workflow; therefore, it is less likely that either the current or target processes will need to conform to constraints imposed by the IT solution itself. In the latter circumstance, there is a risk that business processes may actually grow worse.

The Risks of Forgoing Business Process Improvement

In the rush to realize the benefits of IT modernization, program and business leaders may minimize the risks of deprioritizing business process improvement. This can be especially true when leaders have a general sense that current practices are serving them well enough. However, program leaders should test their assumptions about the efficiency and effectiveness of as-is processes and consider the following risk-related questions:

The Benefits of Exploring Business Process Improvement

In assessing the risks outlined above, program and business leaders may determine that their as-is processes require more retooling and rework than anticipated. However, they have trouble justifying the time and investment for such rework to executive sponsors, who are often fighting political fires both inside and outside the organization and want the legacy system redevelopment to begin as soon as possible.

While it is essential to establish the future business process vision up front, it is not strictly necessary—or even desirable—to define those processes exhaustively as the program starts. Working from the vision, program leaders can prioritize the process areas most in need of reform and leverage Agile frameworks to design and implement those areas first, usually in parallel with supporting technical capabilities falling under the IT modernization umbrella. This approach not only prioritizes improvements with the most prospective value, it also ensures that they can be tested early enough in the program life cycle to assess their usefulness and altered if they fail to deliver on target business outcomes.

By employing this phased and iterative approach, the IT modernization program’s priority business processes can more easily realize the following benefits:

1. 1. Clearer and cleaner business processes aligned to the future needs of the business;
   2. Better requirements prioritized by projected business outcomes and value;
   3. Improved buy-in from diverse stakeholders and easier change management implementation;
   4. Earlier identification of risks, dependencies, and impediments for early and active management; and
   5. Increased adaptability and scalability as the program evolves within a changing business context.

Summit Can Expedite Your Process Improvement Goals

Defining current and desired-future business processes can be time-consuming, involve political entanglements, and dredge up complications that program leaders may find difficult to manage. Summit Consulting has experience working in such complex circumstances and has had success helping large agencies like the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid and U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service and Office of the Chief Information Officer navigate their process improvement challenges in the context of yearslong IT modernization efforts. Our Agile-enabled approach ensures that critical business processes and functions are continually reexamined for fit with current, projected, and emergent business needs and help our clients achieve business process improvement iteratively as priority and performance dictate.

Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash