Know Your Organisation, Make Informed Decisions

The strategic decisions any executive makes for their organisation defines how successful they are.  Get the decisions right and you are a hero, get them wrong and your credibility takes a hit, and in the worst case it costs you your job.  In the ideal world, we’d have perfect information and be able to make perfect decisions, however, in reality we don’t have that situation.  The challenge is how we can reduce the chances of making bad decisions by having access to better information, and this is where the Essential Project comes into play.

Essential is an ontology based tool with a structured meta-model that collates information about your organisation through facts and relationships between those facts, and then renders the output in visualisations.  For example, you can collate disparate information about your business capabilities, business processes, applications, and let Essential make sense of it and show you where you have inefficiencies.  As you begin to overlay more information you can get increased oversight of of your business, for example if we overlay databases, location and data classifications on top of the information in the first example, we can now understand our data privacy position.  Importantly, it’s all data driven, so you can push the data capture out to the people who know their portion of the organisation and let Essential join it all up – the support people know the servers, their locations and what applications run on them, the application teams know what databases their applications use, the business teams know their processes and which application they use, and so on.  We don’t rely on one person knowing the end to end, or having to join it all up.

For the architects, they can move away from data collation and now focus the majority of their time on the much more interesting job of identifying opportunities, inefficiencies, etc. and knowing that the basis for their recommendations is valid.  

For the executive, they now have access to the information that allows them to make those informed decisions, removing the element of guesswork that executives typically have to use when determining strategy.  Questions such as ‘What is the impact if I outsource this part of the business?’, ‘Where can I make savings if I acquire Company X?’, ‘Where do operational inefficiencies exist?’, ‘Am I compliant with regulatory needs?’, become answerable based on fact rather than assumption.  For the teams working on behalf of the executives, they have the tool and structures to allow them to deliver real value and gain the insight that their senior management are looking for from them.