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My name is Jan Schilt.
I’m the founder and CEO of GamingWorks from the Netherlands.
Our profession is to design and develop
serious Business Simulations for serious business problems as we mention this.
So, on the left side you can see our world map with all our partners all over the world.
And on the right side, maybe a little bit small, is a list of our Business Simulations.
Today I’m invited at Altkom and we worked a few days
with specialists of Altkom on the simulation called BookStore.
BookStore is about Information Management.
In this presentation I will guide you through a few parts of the programme.
One is to explain a little bit more about Business Simulation,
and then step by step we move towards Information Management, and also towards BookStore.
So, first the ones that didn’t or has never experienced a Business Simulation,
this simulation is an interactive workshop.
It’s people in one room, and we put people in a very challenging and realistic environment.
“Challenging” means they have to work hard, they have to solve problems,
they have to work on serious issues,
and they all play roles, and they all play people in a company
or in a project or in any kind of environment like the Mission Control Center of NASA.
They have to work together, and experiment and experience.
So they can make mistakes, because the doors are closed,
there are no managers around, so they can easily try out new ways of working.
One of the key functions is that people can learn how to design and implement, and execute,
and improve their own ways of working which is quite interesting,
because normally they receive an email with the procedures and instructions.
But in this kind of interactive workshops we just tell them after short introduction
“Good luck! You’re now a part of this company. Start organizing your own work.”
And by this people experience how to organize their own work and to be a little more empowered
and maybe also, help the management to have better processes.
Since this is a learning experience we put people into an environment of multiple rounds.
In each round they will have time to design, to execute, and to reflect.
So, we stop the clock and we look back –
what did you do, did you achieve your objectives and we can measure the performance.
Sometimes we use graphs, sometimes we give just feedback.
So, this is a short introduction and I’d like to bring you now to the current situation,
especially in this IT information environment, and especially the Information Management area.
We will use some data from Gardner and Forrester,
and we can use it to explain why this kind of workshops are extremely important.
Of course we will come with solutions in terms of BookStore and of course we will close.
Then you have time to answer a few questions and I’m happy to answer them.
So, the first question is: Why are these Business Simulations so effective?
Because we have so many training programmes,
we have all kinds of consultants running around and helping organizations.
But why are these Business Simulations so extremely effective?
First of all, it will create Buy–in.
So, the Buy–in means that if you use this kind of workshops,
people understand why we should work differently
or why we should adopt this IT Service Management Framework or the BISL Framework or PRINCE2.
We don’t have to tell them why. They will experience this.
Still, 70% of IT investments are not delivering the real value,
because the people aspect is not really covered.
The other element of this Business Simulation
is that we can avoid resistance against this new way of working
because everybody wants to keep the work they have.
They don’t want to change – they’re happy, they earn their money,
so everybody, well, they try to protect what they have.
But we need to change.
There’s no other way of improving the organizations.
So, the only way to encourage people is to give them a good feeling that the job will be changed.
But still they can do their work in much better way.
So, if you run this kind of Business Simulations you can work on the context, the subjects, the objectives.
That really matters, because there is always an intake with the Management team.
So, there is always a question what do you want to fix
and during the day this subject will be high on the agenda
and it will help people to focus on these items.
We have an opportunity to bring END-TO-END together.
So, many of these Simulations, especially BookStore
– what we talk about today –
we bring together the Business in IT.
So, we can easily invite some people from the Business,
some people from IT and we learn together.
We are in one room experiencing the same issues to work, explore and find solutions.
As part of this END-TO-END and these relevant subjects we will start a Dialogue.
Dialogue is a way of learning.
It’s arguing, it’s discussing, it’s exploring
And this simulation leader or a game leader will facilitate a Dialogue
by asking questions or asking people how they feel or what happened today.
So, many questions to keep a dialogue up and going.
The other thing is very often the case that we live and work in SILOS.
We have this department, this department, everybody is working in his department,
but we are not one department anymore.
Every company has different departments.
They all work together.
So we have to break down SILOS.
And this kind of workshops like Business Simulations can break down SILOS,
because people can participate, can learn.
We are chain of activities, we need to work together
and we have to try to improve the chain.
We can assess weaknesses.
Imagine you think everything is going well, everybody is happy
and suddenly you run a Business Simulation and you discover many mistakes.
“Hey, we didn’t know this was happening in our team. Let’s try to improve this.”
So it’s not now the manager who tells things that went wrong,
but the team all experienced this themselves.
Also, we can teach people to develop their own procedures.
Maybe we discover a much better idea to solve issues in our work,
maybe we discover during the Simulation that we can improve the way we work.
Well, experiment in a simulation and transfer this to day–to–day work.
And that’s the other bullet when we try to let people experience
how theory can be applied to day–to–day work.
You all have this experience with ITIL Foundation –
you passed the exam, you were so happy, your certificate is on the wall,
but the question is what are we going to do with this?
With these kind of Simulations we can challenge people
to use the theory and we can challenge them to practise this in day–to–day work.
And since they experience transfer of knowledge in the Simulation
maybe it’s much easier to translate this to day–to–day work.
The very famous 4 P’s of people, process, partner and product are key for good organizations,
because if you are able to connect people and process and partner and product
then you can say “We deserve the 5th P – is a P of performance”.
So, during this kind of Business Simulations
people need to link the people, process, partner and product to become successful team.
And of course we can learn them very pragmatically
how to do CSI which is Continual Service Improvement.
They can learn how to incredibly improve the performance of the team.
And of course it’s about see, feel and experience –
the benefits of new way of working, especially “the see” and “the feel”,
because that really makes people understand the reasons why we want to change our work.
So, in general you can say to empower people it will identify improvements to take away,
it creates this atmosphere of Continual Service Improvement
and it will create a shared understanding of goals
and these 3 elements are crucial for successful teams and organizations.
So, if you go now to, let’s say, the issues in IT –
we took this information from more than a 100 Business Simulations
my business partner and myself run on C level with C–managers and CIO’s.
And we just ask them every time: “What are the real problems you are facing?”
I think it’s good for you to have a little picture of their outcomes.
The first one is what I said: “Look, we have an increasing business demand and dependency
and complexity which means the Business they keep on asking all kind of questions,
new services, new products, and we need to follow”.
IT becomes a crucial element of companies.
The Business becomes dependent on IT and the quality of IT.
But the world is complex.
We have complex Business Demands,
because of this Cloud solutions and the tablets
and the fact that every person knows a lot about information technology
and they all push it to the internal IT department.
So, this requires that IT and the Business need to work together as partners.
They have to look at opportunities from both sides:
from Business perspective and from IT perspective.
IT must work on the predictability,
because if you are predictable,
then you can promise the customer or a Business a quick answer.
If the Business comes with a great new idea and it takes you two months to find the solution,
then the Business opportunity could be gone.
So, IT must work on partnership and must work on this predictability of the processes.
The other issue is that IT people said to us:
“We are on continuous pressure on money so we have to cut IT budgets.
We have to make sure that we spend our money in a good way”.
So you really need to be careful about the money.
So, that’s why IT should develop a LEAN and MEAN service and processes.
Also, agile, flexible and one of the key words in order to make this happen
is that we should become repeatable.
Repeatable means the IT people deliver the services in a very basic format.
So that means we will follow up the customer,
we will promise what we preach
and we will have to make sure that the customer gets his answers very quick and very fast.
The other element is that the IT managers are really concerned about information.
And the issue is that information is on tablets, on computers, on systems
and they are talking about the when, the why, the how and where.
So, where can we deliver the information for our people in Business?
They are focusing less on technical aspects,
because the technical part is not the real issue anymore.
We have Cloud, we have suppliers, we have enough capacity so that’s not the biggest issue we have.
So that means that IT should demonstrate their value,
they should help the customer to use the information in such a way
that they can run the Business.
So, this is just a little picture of the key aspects CIO people are worried about.
Some other statements we discovered when we worked together with Forrester
is that Forrester also said that if we ask IT leaders
they all say that, well 15%, they said we are aligned with the Business.
And when we ask the same question to the Business’ people they say, 80% say
“Yeah, we really need to align with IT, because it is very important.”
You see the difference between 80% of the Business who wants this
and only 15% of IT is actually aligned.
So that means we really need to work on this
and make sure that we create much more value to the Business.
Jerry Luftman is one of the experts in Business & IT alignment.
He came up with the discovery that the top 3 of concerns are Business & IT alignment
which is something that really should be improved
and IT strategic planning, because we have great business plans from the Business side,
but what is missing is the nice plan of IT to translate these business demands into IT projects.
Forrester also discovered that many of the framework projects fail
and 52% because of resistance to change
and 29% of the interest and involvement in Business problems.
So we were just focusing on the internal issues and less on the external issues.
Coming to the subject of today – Information Management,
almost 40% of CIO’s are willing to invest in Information Management in the upcoming years.
The first observation is that at this moment
most of the IT departments are a little bit focusing on a lower part of this maturity model.
So they focus on technology, and process, and services.
But currently a lot of companies are internally focused, poor customer service and focused attitude.
So, only solutions are over the wall.
So you can say we are all here in this area in the technology process and service area.
But if we really want to align with the Business much more,
then we need to change this to a more external focus
and understand Business impact and priorities and see ourselves as a strategic capability.
So we need to learn how to help the Business improve the Business outcomes.
The question is: Are we ready for this?
Is this not a step too far to make this transition to more business and value oriented approach?
And the only way to get on this level is to work on new knowledge, new skills and new capabilities.
We need to train our IT people to make this step to a higher level.
We have to take care of the customers and the users, because they don’t like to change.
So we have to find a very clever way to move forward.
We have to really work on Business and IT alignment
and we need to improve the demand and supply chain from the Business till the IT delivery.
We should come predictable and repeatable to make sure that we deliver the services as agreed
and we should start acting like a real partner of the Business
and work together with them much more closely.
Of course, the focus should be on information needs and less on information technology
like computers and systems and that kind of stuff.
Well, this is an introduction to BookStore,
because BookStore is one of our simulations we use
in order to teach the people the Information Management principles.
Before I go to BookStore I want to give you a few bullets on what is Information Management.
One of the items is collection and management of information.
So, collection from your sales people out in the field,
collection from your CRM system and the management of this.
That means the storage, the distribution and it’s coming from different sources,
so we have to work on different systems like laptops and tablets and Internet.
We have to take care of the right distribution,
because we need to distribute data to the right people who can make the right decisions.
And that’s also part of Information Management.
Management means that we have to organize information,
we need to control it, we need to plan organization.
So, it’s always on the right time, the right moment, for the right person.
Everybody is in a hurry, everybody needs quick answers.
So the management aspects of Information Management means we have to organize,
that information is available anytime, anyplace, anywhere.
And everything is focused on meeting the client’s objectives.
So, the client of IT could be a Business Manager or a Business team.
And of course, we have to support the Business functions like:
sales and maybe factory or training.
So, this is a general observation of Information Management.
And one of the models that is very popular right now
is called BISL – Business Information Services Library.
It’s a kind of framework that can inspire you to organize your Information Management.
This is a quite heavy picture, so I will help you through it step by step.
One important thing is that you can see we have this strategic area.
On the top we have the middle area
which is called Management processes in the middle
and Operational processes in the center.
That means that we have to implement this model on all three levels in organizations.
Of this type is the first one – the strategic processes.
Then we need to organize information.
So we have to set up the roles, responsibilities of people,
make a table showing who is the owner of information,
who needs the information and that’s the important activity in the first place.
Secondly, we need to create an information strategy
which means we need to know the Business plans,
we need to know which information we need, when and where and how.
This is all done on strategic level of the company.
Then we have these management processes and they will be on the central line.
They focus on planning and control.
So, the planning of information, the of control information,
the Financial Management, to make business cases
and find out what does it cost to fulfil the information strategy.
We need to do Demand Management, because we need to talk to the Business
and try to understand which information they need
and transfer this demand to good solutions in the IT.
And we have to manage the contracts, because when we have Cloud supplies,
when we buy data sources from third parties,
we need someone who will take care of these contracts.
On the operational level we can identify Operational Management
which is Help Desk, Operations, the development of new applications.
And we have Functionality management which is the process to help the users
to use information and create value out of the information.
So we can help them to build reports,
we can help them to identify requests for change on applications or data sources.
So, that’s the role that will support the Operational functions.
Finally, Change and Transition Management
which are the processes to make sure that
any change in the infrastructure and in information sources
will be planned and implemented right on time.
So, BISL is about these key processes
and they will identify some guidance how to organize your IT and Business processes.
If we go back to BookStore, BookStore is all about Information Management,
all about the Biz and IT alignment.
So, we put the students in the BookStore bookshop
and it’s a very famous BookStore selling books all around the city or a town,
but there is a big issue –
they are not selling books anymore or not the right levels.
So the Business has decided to make a new business plan to recover from this crisis.
This business plan is the plan the team should work on during the day.
So, there’s a need for Information Management, there’s a need for Biz and IT alignment
and they have to build up a process to identify the demands of the Business
and translate them to IT solutions.
In fact during the simulation they will use the Information Management principles
and they will use the BISL principles.
So, it’s becoming more alive.
There are many objectives to achieve this workshop, but I just put a few of them on this list.
The first one is about exploring the roles within Information Management.
So, we just put people in all kind of roles
and we let them experience their role in terms of activities, responsibilities and tasks.
They can reflect on this, they can check if they do the same in the day–to–day work.
If not maybe we can improve.
We also explore all these key processes on strategic level, management level, operational level.
We just let them experience what are the processes you need.
How can we do Demand Management, how do we organize Change Management.
We also let them experience how to make decisions, because the Business wants a lot.
It’s a lot of projects, a lot of workload, but there’s a limited amount of money.
So, we have to make priorities,
we have to work together with the Business in order to plan the right changes.
So, that’s a lot of objectives we can achieve in the workshop.
If you look at the roles in the workshop,
you can see here that we have these nine areas where we have all kind of roles
So, we have: CEO, the Business Manager, Information Manager.
All these roles are in the Simulation and they will all work together.
You can imagine if they’re not organized, then this could be a real mess.
Everybody’s talking to everybody, everybody goes from one place to another and it’s very uncontrolled.
The question is: can we still be successful with our projects?
Well, that’s a big question.
During the simulation they will try to find out how should we get organized in this model.
Here’s a little impression.
You can see some people here who work on the simulation.
You can see the two Business Managers on the right planning their projects and translating the strategy,
see some people in the IT department planning all the changes and working together
and the centralized room planning all the information requirements.
If you look at some of the key elements of BookStore,
then one of the key elements is to perform the Information Planning.
In order to do this the team needs to work together.
So, the Business on the left side – they have a strategy and some Business projects.
We need to translate this to Information Planning in the center.
So, they have to talk, they have to explore,
and the Information Manager should identify which pieces of information we need to implement.
Then the IT Manager should define his IT projects.
Maybe we need to buy an application, maybe we need to extend the capacity in our servers
or maybe on a totally right side we need to connect to our supplier
and see if we can buy some sources in Clouds or any other way.
So, this process we just see here
is the strategic process of aligning the Business strategy
via the Information Management plan to the IT planning.
Then we need to improve our infrastructure.
One of the key roles is Change Management,
because there are so many demands coming from different places:
the Business wants a new application,
the IT Manager wants to add extra disc capacity or upgrade a system
or people want to get fixes on all kind of Software applications.
So, in the center this Change Calendar will grow and everybody wants its changes
and the question is: What is the highest priority?
So, the team needs to work together with the Business
to find out how can we plan the changes in the right order
and then,of course, new opportunities,
because it’s not just the internal IT Department that you deliver the services,
but we all know that Cloud is coming and there are so many good solutions.
So, that’s why in this simulation we also introduce Cloud solutions like
Cloud CRM or Web Sales
or any kind of tool that can help the Business to make more money
and lower the cost on IT and make IT more agile and flexible.
If you look at the total then in this simulation there is a big infrastructure
which is in the center with all the applications and all information sources and systems.
This infrastructure becomes more and more complex.
As a result it’s very hard for the team to deliver TIME TO MARKET solutions.
So, the only way to make this more agile and more flexible
is to remove certain elements from the infrastructure and replace it for better versions,
Cloud solutions, or upgrades to new versions
to get rid of all these, let say, fragmented applications which all need resources to maintain.
So, during the simulation they will also learn how to make the infrastructure more flexible and more agile.
Well, it’s just a brief overview of BookStore.
There’s many more to talk about, but maybe it’s better to talk with the people from Altkom.
The game is...well, you can play it with 9, 10, or 11 people.
So, we say 8 to 12.
Target audiences are very diverse.
We have great experience with just IT Managers, with just Business Managers or mixtures of Managers.
It’s a very nice way to assess the current way of working.
Well, it’s one day hard work from 9 to 17 with some breaks in between.
But after the day everybody is excited and has a lot of good improvement suggestions.
We don’t need real basic knowledge to apply,
because if you know the IT Service Management basics
like ITIL Foundation and limited experience in IT, then it will work.
If you have passed the BISL Foundation exam
or you have general Information Management knowledge, then you can run the simulation.
Because it’s not a very complex simulation.
It’s more complex to get organized and great value.
Many ways to use it, create awareness in your company
to start with this Information Management project
or you want to practise the BISL theory after the Foundation,
kick off new projects to create awareness and understanding.
Of course it’s a great way of putting your I – team for one day in a room
and just assess the current way of working.
So, this is just a brief overview of the concept of BookStore.
Both training programmes: the BISL Foundation and this BookStore exercise
are both available in the Altkom Akademia portfolios.
So, you can contact them and you can ask them for more information.
Thank you very much for attending the session.
I hope you found your answers or maybe some triggers to make next steps
and we are already happy to welcome you in one of the workshops.
Thank you very much for joining us and maybe till next time.