Refining the operating model concept to enable systematic growth in operating maturity

Abstract

To stay competitive, enterprises of today need to rely on a sound foundation for execution that incorporates the infrastructure and digitised processes for automating a company’s core capabilities. Once this foundation has been established, management could move their attention away from focusing on lower-value activities to innovative ways to increase profits and growth. The Business-IT Alignment Framework (BIAF) defines business-IT alignment in terms of a paradigm of alignment, three dimensions for alignment, and mechanisms and practices. The BIAF could provide a business-IT alignment perspective on the foundation for execution approach. Using the BIAF perspective, this paper comments on some of the deficiencies related to the foundation for execution approach regarding the systematic identification of opportunities for enterprise-wide process standardisation. The goal is to define a list of requirements that should direct the design of appropriate mechanisms and practices to address the identification of process re-use opportunities for multiple levels of operating maturity.