Services and processes

The objective of digital and ICT strategic planning is to provide a future vision and plan for how the services of an agency will be transformed using digital technology. To do this it is necessary for practitioners to understand the current state of an organisation’s significant services and related business processes that are within the scope of the planning engagement.

A practitioner in the context of this guideline can include one or more of the following roles:

• Digital and ICT strategic planners
• Agency and service strategic planners
• Enterprise architects
• Business analysts.

The activities in this guideline provide practitioners with an understanding of the current services and business process of the agency or business area. It also highlights the significance of services and business processes with regard to their contribution to achieving the organisation’s strategic objectives or business imperatives.

Practitioners should begin by locating any existing documentation on the agency or business area’s services and business processes. Service catalogues and service level agreements can be useful sources to help you find this information.

In large agencies it may be difficult to collect information on all services and business processes. It may be necessary to reduce the scope by focusing on only those services deemed to be a priority or strategically important to the agency or business area.

Managing gaps in information

If strategic documentation is not readily available or is not available at the level required to describe the business’s strategic direction, it will be necessary to generate it through interviews or workshops. This information should then be validated with key stakeholders of the business areas.

Using a business register

You should document the services and business processes in a general register or business process register and ensure any constraints around the collection of information regarding services and business processes have been documented.

Recommended attributes to be collected for services include but are not limited to:

• organisation
• business area name
• service name
• service description
• service custodian
• service classification to an enterprise architecture classification model
• related services
• service users or customers
• frequency
• associated costs (if known).

Organisations provide value through the delivery of business services. These business services are ultimately implemented through processes. A business process encompasses tasks, participants and supporting systems that work together to produce a result that is of value to the organisation.

Recommended attributes to be collected for processes include but are not limited to:

• organisation
• business area name
• process name
• a description of the process
• process custodian
• process classification to an enterprise architecture classification model
• related processes
• frequency the process or application is used
• associated costs (if known).

There are two techniques that can be used by organisations to identify their business processes, Value chain analysis and Content diagram analysis.

Value chain analysis

Value chain analysis is the recommended technique when the business drivers for the modelling and analysis activity can be fundamentally linked to a business service. It is adapted from Porter’s Value Chain Analysis , which identifies business processes that encompass the entire lifecycle of a business service from conception or planning to retirement

The underlying assumption is that, by identifying all segments of a business service lifecycle, we can derive the underlying business processes for each life cycle segment.

Example value chain for a training service

Context diagram analysis

Business process context analysis is the recommended technique when the business drivers for the modelling and analysis activity can be fundamentally linked to the stakeholders impacted by the business processes. These stakeholders can be either people or organisations (either physical or logical). Context analysis allows you to derive a list of business processes that are triggered by stakeholders for a particular area of interest.

The organisation should identify all internal and external stakeholders that consume services or receive deliverables for decision making. Use a context diagram to identify business processes that support service production and consumption, and/or information submission and provision. In the process context diagram below, continuous flow lines represent process names and dashed flow lines represent information flows.

Example business process context diagram

Regardless of the technique used, there are a number of generic rules when naming business processes. Practitioners should:

• apply a consistent naming convention starting with a verb followed by a business object noun e.g. register customer.
• select a name that reflects the objective and outcome of the process, specify ‘what’ is being done and be precise and concise
• avoid generic verbs such as manage, process, handle, or maintain as they do not provide any indication of what the business process sets out to achieve, e.g., manage payment mean may mean receiving payment or making a payment
• not include the words to, and, for and from in the names, unless these words form part of the business object noun.

It is typical in an organisation that descriptions of similar or ‘like’ services and business processes can differ greatly. Classification is a method for quickly understanding the scope and nature of services and business processes conducted by an organisation. It provides a straightforward way of normalising business terminology when referring to business services and business processes.

Classification also enables high-level analysis to be performed on a group of ‘like’ elements rather than individual elements. This highlights potential duplication as well as areas for introducing consistency or standardisation.

Before conducting any classification activities, practitioners should engage with the business planning unit, the enterprise architecture unit or other business stakeholders within the organisation to identify any services and processes that have already been classified.

Enterprise architecture and classification

It is important for practitioners to understand which enterprise architecture classification models are used by an organisation and whether they are appropriate for the planning activities to be conducted.

Enterprise architecture classification models used for planning purposes should be meaningful to the business, have clearly defined definitions for each domain and be applied consistently across business areas within the agency.

The Queensland Government Enterprise Architecture contains classification frameworks for services and business processes. Each agency may also have business specific classification frameworks for services and business processes that can be used.

Refer to the Enterprise architecture classification guideline for more information and see the tools in the resources section of this page for additional support.

Mapping refers to the activity of identifying the relationships between elements either within a layer of an enterprise architecture or across layers of an enterprise architecture.  In large agencies, it may be difficult to map all services and business processes.

Mapping is an important activity to ensure:

• any gaps are identified
• the scope of information collected for the   planning process is consistent
• the significance or complexity of elements is   indicated and taken into consideration
• the scope of the mapped elements collected can   be adjusted if further analysis reveals a misalignment of elements.

Services and business processes are typically mapped to each other as well as to the strategic objectives, strategies and key performance indicators of the agency or business area. This helps practitioners better understand those services that may be of strategic importance versus those that are business imperatives, such as human resources.

For example, a service that is mapped to many objectives is likely to be strategically important to the organisation. A service supported by many processes may be an indication the delivery of the service is complex and may represent a significant opportunity if the delivery of the service could be transformed to become more efficient.

Consider the information currently available and conduct only those mappings that represent the greatest value or provide the greatest support for the objectives of the planning engagement. Mappings can be increased and revised over future planning engagements if required.

See the list of recommended mappings in the Enterprise architecture mapping guideline.

Assessment helps practitioners and business representatives understand the relative importance of services delivered as well as the potential risk to the organisation that may result if those services cannot be delivered or are inefficient. Based on results of assessments, corrective actions can be proposed and be carried forward to planning activities with the business.

Practitioners should consult the relevant resources available in their agency with regard to the assessment of services. All service assessments should be conducted in consultation with the business representatives from the agency or business area.

Assessing risk

Specific risks can be identified that may threaten the effective and efficient delivery of a service. These risks should be assessed and rated in terms of the consequences and likelihood of the risk or threat occurring, based on the agency’s specific risk matrix. An overall risk rating the extreme, high, medium or low can assigned to service based on the combined assessment of risks.

Use the Business Queensland resources below to help assess potential risks:

• Identifying business risk
• The PPRR risk management tool

Assessment tools

Assessments should be conducted using surveys, interviews or workshops with representatives from the business as well as application and information asset experts and support staff.

Business continuity planning frameworks or best practice methodologies may also contain specific business impact assessments for services.

Practitioners can also assess the business impact of services within the guidelines of the agency’s risk management framework. Strengths, Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis is a commonly accepted method to analyse business impacts.

Refer to the Vision guideline for details on how to use SWOT.

See the Enterprise architecture assessment guideline and the resources section of this guideline for more tools to help you assess information assets, applications and technologies.

Practitioners need to analyse the classification of the business services or processes and identify and document any apparent gaps that may be relevant. You should analyse the mappings to identify any services or processes that are significant (e.g. those that support many objectives, strategies and key performance indicators).

During your analysis it is important to identify and document:

• domains in the classifications where multiple services or processes have been classified to a single domain as this may represent an opportunity to standardise services, processes and supporting systems or the centralise services, processes or systems
• any services that seem significant in terms of the number of business processes supporting the service, as these may require further investigation when examining the number and complexity of information assets and applications that underpin these services and processes
• any services considered to be of a high business impact, noting any mitigation strategies that may involve the support of technology.
• any final gaps in mappings for discussion with the sponsor or business stakeholders and if these gaps represent an opportunity to introduce new services.

After completing assessment and analysis, practitioners should summarise and present the overall findings of the analysis of services and processes to the sponsor. Alternatively, you can present your findings as part of digital and ICT strategic planning workshops and interviews.

Presenting as part of a workshop will give the sponsor and business representatives the opportunity to confirm the business organisation’s services and processes. It also provides an opportunity to discuss business services and processes that represent the highest business impact or significance to the organisation.

When conducting planning workshops with the agency or business area, ensure the agenda analysis results, points for discussion and planning activities have been endorsed by the sponsor beforehand.

What to include in your presentation

Provide a summary of both the strategic intent of the organisation and well as the priority services and business processes to effectively set the scene for the digital and ICT strategic planning activities.

Practitioners should consider engaging marketing and communications unit or strategic planners in your organisation to develop a simple but engaging model for presenting the strategic intent, business services and processes of the agency or business area.