Business Transformation Workbench: A Practitioner's Tool for Business Transformation

Business transformation is a key management initiative that attempts to align people, business process and technology of an enterprise more closely with its business strategy and vision. It is an essential part of the competitive business cycle. Existing consulting methods and tools do not address issues such as scalability of methodology, knowledge management, asset reuse, and governance well, to name a few. This paper presents Business Transformation Workbench, a practitioner's tool for business transformation addressing these problems. It implements a methodical approach that was devised to analyze business transformation opportunities and make business cases for transformation initiatives and thereby offering decision-support to the consultants. It provides an intuitive way to evaluate and understand various opportunities in staff and IT consolidation and process standardization. It embodies structured analytical models, both qualitative and quantitative, to enhance the consultants' practices. BT Workbench has been instantiated with data from finance management domain and applied to address a client situation as a case study. An alpha testing of the tool was conducted with about dozen practitioners. 90% of the consultants who tested the BT Workbench tool felt that the tool would help them do a better job during a client engagement.