Continual Business Transformation Technology

Enterprises always have to pursue for profitability while maintaining long term competitive advantages. Today, this task becomes more challenging due to globalization and dynamic changing business environment. For each enterprise, this task can not be fulfilled without changes to its business infrastructure and IT systems. That is, enterprises need to transform themselves to adapt to both external and internal changes. This kind of transformation is not simply any transactional act, but rather a never-easy journey. In this paper, the concept of continual business transformation is introduced with key challenges identified. Based on experience from practical cases, we propose a set of business transformation technology framework that incorporates component-based approach and business-driven architecture. In the framework, CBM (Component Business Modeling) method is to identify transformation opportunities and provide guidance to IT architecture design from business perspectives. As transformation needs to be conducted in a holistic view, IT Blueprint in the framework is to provide an enterprise-wide IT design and governance model. To avoid building more silo applications as happening today in many cases, the IT Blueprint can be used to guide solution development for better alignment among different applications as well as across various stages during the transformation. Another keystone in the framework is Assetization, which is proposed for quality improvement and cost reduction from harvesting and reusing artifacts built in the transformation journey. Furthermore, we also illustrate how these methods and technologies were validated in a transformation engagement with a leading international bank in Asia-Pacific with satisfactory results. Please use the following format when citing this chapter: Li, T., Ding, W., Tian, C, Cao, R., Yang, S., Zhu, J., 2006, in International Federation for Information Processing, Volume 205, Research and Practical Issues of Enterprise Information Systems, eds. Tjoa, A.M., Xu, L., Chaudhry, S., (Boston:Springer), pp.85-95. 86 Research and Practicial Issues of Enterprise Information Systems