OBASHI can help provide the clarity you need to make better decisions. Here are just a few of its uses.

Strategic decision-making

Despite years of attempts to build bridges between IT and the business, senior non- technical managers are still struggling to understand the value of IT and remain frustrated by the constraints existing and new technologies impose on innovative plans for business expansion, consolidation or redirection.

Leveraging both a common language and a simple, intuitive diagrammatic presentation, the CIO can now truly demonstrate the role IT is playing in the business – and its associated value.

OBASHI is a powerful platform for effective business design, based on consistent information and shared language, is key to managing rapid change. And the ability to simulate the impact of operational change up and down the business provides far more support for and confidence in key decisions.

Governance and Compliance

Organisations now face an incredibly complex and wide ranging compliance landscape. For a compliance officer, the challenges associated with managing the diverse activities of different departments, avoiding overlap, and controlling cost to comply is a massive challenge. With “standards compliance” increasingly associated with the use of or reliance on IT assets and resources, the ability to capture and contextualise any data required as proof of compliance to a standard is absolutely vital.

Mapping data flows across the business enables an organisation to attribute key information and data standards directly to the people, process and technology assets and resources in their real life context, even if they are utilized across many disparate parts of the business. Using OBASHI to design standards adherence into business transformation and change control processes makes it far easier to monitor and manage progression towards achieving compliance and delivering the required proof.

For compliance officers, this approach provides a continuous, trusted knowledge base of evidence, across a raft of compliance activity, from Data Protection and Freedom of Information, to Green IT and corporate risk. Using a common language and universally understandable methodology, incorporating every aspect and function of operational delivery organisations, can overcome departmental silos and help deliver a superior understanding of operational risk.  This inter-connected approach can reduce risk, support streamlined compliance functions and drive down governance costs.

IT operations

Many IT investments fail to deliver the expected benefits. But the technology itself is rarely at fault. Instead, a lack of business understanding combined with a lack of senior management commitment and poor cooperation between the different IT functions can severely jeopardise any project.

OBASHI is a simple, accurate and easily understood tool that allows you to capture and communicate the way activities and processes link to the technical infrastructure, to deliver outputs. The ability to combine accurate data flow tracking with business processes and ‘what if’ analysis means the IT team can meet a variety of operational and strategic objectives; from proving the value of IT spend, to identifying opportunities for cost reduction and supporting business change.

Overcoming departmental and IT silos is key to minimising the risk associated with IT development. Optimisation through consolidation and sweating the assets can only be achieved effectively if organisations understand the implications of change across the entire business, not just in one area.

Outsourcing

While the shift from single to multi-sourcing continues, organisations are increasingly using a raft of external suppliers to deliver diverse support and service activities. But with many of these third parties working in isolation, there is no consistent overview of performance, or any way of mapping this activity to business objectives.

By creating the ‘big picture’ view of the business, an organisation can map consultancy activity, better assess the role and performance of these third parties and create clear direction for ongoing supplier management that reflects key business goals. This is beneficial for supplier as well as client, as OBASHI can help mitigate risk, prevent project scope creep and increase confidence in projected earnings.

Change management

Within the current business climate, rapid change is endemic. From the escalation in merger and acquisition activity to the drive towards innovation to reduce costs and achieve differentiation, organisations are entering a period of unprecedented change. Yet at the same time, this change needs to be achieved within an atmosphere of economic austerity and corporate cost containment.

Organisations now have the ability to understand the way functions link together, assess the implications of change on different functions and design new processes that leverage economies of scale throughout an organisation. The ability to track data flows, business owners and processes enables areas of commonality and overlap, across functions such as HR, Logistics, Finance and Design, to be rapidly identified. A strong delivery platform ensures best management practice can be quickly propagated across the business.

Within a merged operation, with different customer bases and core activities, the ability to create a ‘big picture’ view of the new organisation is key to identifying areas of business strength. OBASHI allows organisations to embark with increased confidence upon a consensus discussion, surrounding the new long term goals, supported by ‘what if’ analysis to assess business risk.

Transforming Productivity

Effectively managing budget cuts whilst maintaining output levels is a key challenge in the current economic climate. OBASHI allows you to model business processes and assess the upstream and downstream implications of process change which is key in making the right budget cuts and realising additional value without compromising performance in any area of the business.

Reducing IT waste, maximising IT value

Accurately modelling data flows using OBASHI means that, for the first time, organisations can accurately understand the cost and value of IT to the business. In addition to identifying the cost/benefit of IT investment, CIOs can use modelling to demonstrate the potential value of new investments whilst also identifying opportunities for reducing IT waste.

Facilitate Corporate Strategic Thinking

OBASHI provides a common language for discussion enableing organisations to embark upon cross-departmental strategic consultation with a universally agreed starting point. Business modelling, design and optimisation can be employed to support rapid corporate change and mitigate the associated risk.

Meeting Green IT Targets

The ability to map data flows, using OBASHI within a data centre, enables organisations to, for example, assess how best to reduce electricity consumption, meet sustainability targets and support ISO 20000 compliance.