Welcome to the Biz4ge (pronounced biz-forge) website – dedicated to the success of business transformation efforts in organisations of all types and sizes, but especially to those who must manage much of it without the benefit of expensive external specialist support!

The content of this website has been forged by the decades of collective experience it’s authors have (see About Us) of working with and for large organisations around the globe and in most sectors on their change management efforts.  This website assembles our extensive knowledge of business transformation and business architecture techniques.

Very importantly, it does so in a way that cuts through much of the technical jargon and complexity surrounding them thereby making them more accessible, relevant and an essential performance improvement and benefits delivery tool for mid-market and larger organisations.

Our target audience are those who have the same responsibilities and the need to solve similar challenges as their cousins in major governmental and multi-national corporations, but NOT the same budgets, or the same accesstoexpensive consultants or specialist support staff.

We believe that the material presented on this website will help make the business transformation and change management endeavours of these managers and practitioners, who will typically have an appreciation but often not extensive expertise in this subject matter, more manageable, successful and rewarding!

We know the amount of knowledge and material contained on the Biz4ge website may at first seem a bit daunting, especially to the novice or non-practitioner.  However, we assure you it is worth persevering if you are at all serious about successful business transformation.

It is similar to the exercise advice of ‘no pain, no gain’……..there is never a completely ‘free lunch’ and to get something out you must usually be willing to put something in.  In this case an investment of time in understanding the key concepts and techniques that are essential to the success of almost every business change effort.

If you broadly follow the advice and guidance on this website, intelligently choosing and applying its methods and techniques in light of your own situation, we GUARANTEE you that your business transformation efforts WILL be better positioned to be successful in meeting its goals and outcomes than 80%-90% of similar initiatives ongoing on the PLANET today!

If you want to know why we say this just have a read of some of the articles on our Biz4ge Blog which will give you no shortage of insights into why this is an absolute fact.

Now, lets move on and begin by asking what is business transformation?

Well, there are a number of different interpretations depending on who you ask, but for our purposes we will define it as:

“A key executive management initiative that attempts to coordinate and align the People, Process, Technology and Infrastructure initiatives in an organisation with its business vision and strategy so as to successfully meet and sustain its performance objectives.”

Business transformation can take many forms, each having its own goals and reflecting differing management philosophies and constraints.  Some of the more common include:

• Performance Improvement – optimising the reach and performance of the current organisation, often with a cost containment or reduction agenda.  This category includes such activities as Insourcing, Corporate Restructuring and Operations Rationalisation.
• Growth Realisation – extending the reach and performance of the current organisation though organic growth, often with a market share and sales turnover increase Growth & Diversification agenda.  This category also includes the act of Start-up in which the current organisation sets up an entirely new entity within or outside the existing entity, often to seize a new market opportunity.
• Mergers & Acquisitions – extending the reach and performance of the current organisation through takeovers, then seeking to optimise the new entity to benefit from its new scale advantages.
• Joint Ventures – extending the reach and performance of the current organisation through structured formal partnerships, which may or may not include optimisation work.  This category includes the burgeoning activity of Outsourcing.
• Corporate Turn-arounds – making changes in management and corporate structures that bring about substantial and sustained positive changes in organisation performance.  This category is sometimes also referred to as a Business Rescue or Makeover.
• Risk Mitigation & Audit Management – the identification, assessment, prioritisation and ongoing management of key ‘enterprise-level’ business risks such that certain pre-defined parameters (e.g. statutory compliance, financial limits, etc) are not violated while at the same time the chances of business success are maximised within that context.

Whilst all of these business transformation types have their own underlying logic, each of them also shares a common objective……to move the organisation from a current state ‘A‘ to some desired future state ‘B‘ as rapidly as is feasible.  We believe that in today’s global competitive landscape that this is not only an essential capability, but one which will become increasingly commonplace and frequent in its practice as the rate of marketplace shifts and disruptions increase!

To be agile in this way is the only realistic and sustainable answer to this challenge, and one of the best ways to achieve agility is to have a rigorous, structured and well-practiced approach to viewing and changing your business. One in which you can readily and confidently reconfigure the constituent components of your organisation back into optimal alignment in response to marketplace and competitive turbulence as depicted in the figure to the left (click on it to see an enlarged version in a new window).

Our objective is to set out on this website, clearly and concisely, the most important and useful elements and practices of business transformation, and most specifically to focus on what we believe to be the single most important, and often overlooked and under-appreciated factor in achieving real agility – business architecture.

We define a business architecture as being:

“The coordinating framework of an organisation that documents and provides a common understanding of how the People, Process, Technology and Infrastructure capabilities and assets (existing or new) of the organisation will be structured so as to align with and achieve the objectives set out by its vision and strategy as well as satisfying nearer-term tactical imperatives.”

At its essence the core concept behind a business architecture is that it represents the overall plumbing and wiring schematic of your organisation…….how you would like it to be, how it needs to be and how you will achieve migrating from the current state to your desired future state.

It acts as a powerful detailed interpretation of an organisation’s vision and strategy, a ‘translation layer’ moving the organisation’s thinking onwards from a conceptual vision to a practical roadmap for sustainable delivery and performance.

The Biz4ge Transformational Change ‘V’ Model in the figure to the right (click on it to see an enlarged version in a new window) illustrates the context and critical importance of business architecture to the success of transformational change initiatives.

The business architecture, with its multiple business blueprint layers representing different and interconnected aspects of the change journey serves to orchestrate, communicate and foster a common understanding of what needs to be done among all the stakeholders involved.

A business architecture gives an organisation ‘big picture’ confidence and control over how all the pieces fit together to deliver the whole.

Most importantly, today the cost of getting it wrong in terms of loss of time, money, opportunity and customer satisfaction are no longer affordable.

We believe the salient question now is can you afford NOT to use a business architecture as the coordinating centre-piece of your next business transformation initiative?!

There are a number of viewpoints regarding how to approach business architecting – of which we believe our version is one of the more accessible, pragmatic, and effective.  We believe the key strengths of the Biz4ge take on business transformation and business architecture are:

• • Represents a true fast-start, fast-track, ‘value-led’ approach by leveraging existing knowledge and standards, but that can still be customised by you to meet your exact requirements as needed.
  • Reflects tremendous added-value by prepackaging man-years of research, learnings and experience into a clear, concise and accessible format.
  • Benefits from our pragmatic and non-technical 80/20 style that maximises the re-use of existing materials and tools, and minimises the risk of the  ‘analysis paralysis’ fate suffered by many architecting approaches in the wild.
  • Promotes industry accepted good practice, the globally recognised APQC Process Classification Framework (PCF), and the internationally acclaimed EFQM Excellence Model.

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• Is equally relevant to cost down or revenue up agendas.
• Applicable to all sizes of organisation apart from the smallest, who may find it ‘overkill’ for their more limited needs.
• Enjoys multiple ways to apply it – top-down in a big bang approach, bottom-up in a ‘point’ application style, as suits your needs.  You decide, no particular style is forced on you.
• Method and tool agnostic.  Use the most relevant and cost-effective combination of methods and tools of your choice.
• Has no ties to any software vendor or application – implement open source and/or proprietary software in any combination you choose.
• It is open source and free for non-commercial internal use – see our Legal page for more information about this.

To learn more about the specifics of our approach to business transformation either click on this Transformation link or use the navigation tab of the same name at the top of this page.  Once you are familiar with our approach to business transformation generally, to learn more about our business architecting approach either click on this Architecture link or again use the navigation tab of the same name at the top of this page.

Also please take the opportunity to read our Biz4ge Blog or peruse our Resources page both of which we believe are great sources of additional insight and content.

You may also be interested in having a quick read of our About page so you can get a feel for our philosophy regarding both business transformation and business architecture and see where we are coming from in terms of our approach to them.

We hope you enjoy using the information on this website as much as we have enjoyed pulling it together and trust that it will help you to make an even greater contribution to the success of your organisation’s business transformation initiatives!

If the content of this webpage makes you feel that being a member of our Biz4ge Network, or a Certified Affiliate within it, would be of benefit to you please Contact Us and we will get in touch by return. Your contact will be treated as confidential and will be at no cost or obligation to you.