Business Performance Modeling
Investments in information technology usually have far-reaching impacts beyond simply speeding up or lowering the cost of businesses processes. They can also enable new products or ways of working that can take companies to new levels of achievement. In cooperation with business groups within IBM, we developed a Business Value Modeling Tool (BVMT) that expands upon traditional, project-oriented return-on-investment analysis to include enterprise-level and strategic impacts that eventually result in financial gains. This tool enables IBM to perform systematic analyses on proposed investments in business transformation using new technologies, on behalf of our clients. The tool also acts as a knowledge repository of how the value proposition of our offerings can be modeled quantitatively on a client's profit and loss statement.
Since its inception several years ago, BVMT has been used in value modeling of supply chain initiatives (Grey et al. 2003a) and more generally e-business initiatives (Grey et al. 2003b). More recently it has also been applied to help clients estimate the value of specific IBM offerings, such as those offered by IBM Global Services (Bagchi et al. 2005) and by the Retail EBO (e.g., Bosche et al. 2005). We have also combined the use of BVMT with other techniques to provide a comprehensive analysis of the benefits of new technologies such as Radio Frequency Identification (Leung et al. 2007).
People:
Ying Tat Leung
Business Value Modeling
Our research aims at developing the science of managing service businesses in particular, and gaining a deep understanding of business ecosystems in general. Therefore, business performance is one of our central areas of study, since every business manager aims to maximize the 'performance' of their organization. Performance means many things, ranging from common financial metrics such as revenue and profit, "organic growth" (which attempts to measure the 'true' growth of a company, ignoring manipulations such as stock repurchases and acquisitions), "balanced growth" (which reflects an intuitive sense of balance that one element such as revenue should not come at the expense of another such as profit) , to "intangibles" which are not formally measured, but perhaps ought to be (e.g., "human capital", "innovativeness", "brand", and company values). Even more difficult than defining and measuring performance is the question of what drives it, i.e., what factors make one business successful and another fail? There are many theories, but there aren't any comprehensive scientific models of services businesses and their ecosystems. which explain the causal mechanisms underlying successful performance. Our research aims to produce such models, utilizing advanced techniques from several disciplines in the social and mathematical sciences. We are also developing software tools that will help our Strategy & Change consultants analyze the performance of IBM's clients, which in turn will enable them to devise more successful business strategies.
People:
Joseph Kramer,
Ying Tat Leung,
Kelly Lyman,
Jorge Sanz
, with collaborators from the ARC Computer Science Department and the IBM T. J. Watson and China Research Labs.
Enteprise Portfolio Management
While for quite some time enterprises have realized the importance of capturing and modeling enterprise assets such as projects, applications, or human resources, often they do not have tools that allow them to analyze this data in concert. The need exists not just to perform project analysis but to more profoundly link the enterprise project portfolio to business strategy and to treat the business ecosystem in a non silo-ed way. Enterprise project portfolio management needs to consider tradeoffs in multiple dimensions (silos) and the metrics like costs, benefits, schedules, resources and strategic alignment. EPMH encompasses a set of analyses and methods that can be used to achieve these goals. This tool takes a unique approach to business alignment by leveraging the Component Business Model (CBM), an IBM business decomposition method. The tool breaks down the silos by linking projects, human resources and the business strategy through the CBM business model.
People:
Joseph Kramer,
Vijay S Iyengar,
Ignacio Terrizzano,
Dan Milch,
John Vergo
Business Architecture Assets
This Services Research project adds impactful business architecture contributions to the IBM patented Component Business Modeling (CBM) approach for business strategy. It integrates new value propositions gleaned from Research activities in business services, enterprise project portfolio management, business ecosystem & value network analysis, business performance modeling, and business content & industry standards. It adds practical feature, content, and usability improvements to the assets toolkit facilitating the success of Global Business Services (GBS) consultants on CBM projects.
People:
J. Sanz,
R. Akkiraju,
V. Becker,
A. Biem,
J. Cappi,
N. Caswell,
A. Chandra,
J. Kramer,
J. Lee,
Y. Leung,
K. Lyman,
N. Nayak,
P. Pesce,
I. Terrizzano,
C. Tian,
J. Vergo,
H. Zhang
Composite Business Services
The Composite Business Services (CBS) JP focuses on the foundational structure that leads to the discovery and design of a set of methodologies that enable "end to end" Composite Business Service (CBS) development. CBM is used as the starting point followed by traditional SOA development processes for Services Identification, Process Modeling, Repository and Discovery, and culminating in the deployment of CBS' using WebSphere Business Services Fabric.
People:
Valeria Becker,
Juan Cappi,
Nitin Nayak,
Jorge Sanz,
Ignacio Terrizzano
|
