A Prescience Review

Executive Summary

At a recent Gartner Summit on Financial Services Technology, the primary theme focused on Financial Institutions need to adopt a “F.A.S.T” methodology (Flexibility; Agility; Simplicity & Transparency)

Whether an organisation is re-engineering their business processes, undertaking an SOA programme, documenting to meet regulatory compliance or defining a Service to Business from the IT division, the Gartner keynote speakers all concluded that Financial institutions should;

• Map their Business IT environment
• Identify Primary Business Processes
• Define Business IT dependency
• Align Business and IT to ‘change’
• Strive for ‘Agility’
• Define Governance

They also concluded that, without a framework to drive the initiative, a methodology to identify and map the components of the business IT environment, and a governance model that defines ownership and control, these paramount corporate initiatives can stall and fail to deliver the anticipated benefits.

The Prescience methodology has been specifically designed to provide the core framework for such initiatives, and coupled with ADaM, our landscaping knowledgebase, we can deliver the essential business map and governance model that integrates with the corporate structure to provide transparency, control and flexibility.

More importantly perhaps is that Prescience and ADaM define the landscape for Business IT Dependency so that the FAST principals can be practiced.

Background

3di has established itself, over the last six years, as one of the leading front office consulting companies providing IT services and solutions to global customers.

We have inherited invaluable domain knowledge and a strong grasp of business fundamentals from our engagements with prestigious corporate clients. Our teams use this knowledge to craft robust solutions for knowledge management and; in particular, Business IT Dependency management solutions.

Financial Organisations should avoid thinking about operational risk losses as point-in-time events. Operational risk is best understood as an end-to-end process which is inherent within the business.

Operational Risk managers need to be thinking about how to aggregate the information and analyse the information in order to determine the inter-relatedness between various activities within the end-to-end process.

At 3di we create a dialogue, a language and a reporting capability that stakeholders within the Business/IT Landscape (or framework) can relate to. This we refer to as an integrated framework or Business/IT Landscape and it is the foundation for longer term success in the objective of creating a discipline known as;

Business IT Dependency Management.

With the 3di approach, organisations can see the inter-relatedness between control breaks, control gaps and impact analysis prior to implementation of change within the framework.

We have developed the Prescience Methodology for mapping the Business IT landscape and providing a structured approach to planning, controlling and measuring Business IT Dependency.

We have also created a knowledge management Portal, ADaM - (Automated Dependency analysis Manager,) that records all relevant data within the Landscape, records all subsequent changes and related authorisations and provides Change Decision Support in the form of Impact reports, Conflict management and Dependency analysis.

Objective

The objective of a Prescience Review is to identify the principal business processes, the resources involved (internal and external), the technology utilised and the frequency and relative business criticality of each component within the Business IT Landscape.

There are four elements of a Prescience Review; Assessment, Analysis, Awareness and Audit. These four elements are referred to as the 4 A’s Principle.

• IT Systems have become distributed, complex, interconnected and endemic
• IT Systems knowledge is distributed, vague and unstructured
• IT and Business are under increasing regulatory pressures

In particular, in order to manage Business IT Dependency one needs the knowledge in terms of the interdependencies between Services, Processes, Applications, Hardware and Network components along with the People (“Resources”) that are responsible at the different layers within the operations.

Once this information is contained in a structured knowledgebase any changes can be planned, controlled and recorded for audit, regulatory reporting and business impact analysis.

LANDSCAPE

A Prescience Review gathers knowledge from the organisations Business IT Landscape. The information required includes;

METHODOLOGY

Our methodology for collating and analysing the information involves a series of meetings with Business and IT, a sequence of iterative questionnaires that deliver the detailed information into a structured set of tables to store the information for risk analysis, reporting and production of topology diagrams and dependency trees for the Business IT landscape.

The landscape can be broken down into layers within the organisation. These layers could include, for example; Services, Processes, Applications, Hardware and Network. The resources involved at each layer are an integral part of the data gathering exercise.

Our consultants work with your team to understand the impact of Business and IT dependency and using the tailored Landscape Questionnaires we can rapidly document and assess the gaps in terms of Business IT Dependency.

The Prescience 4 A’s Principle

The Prescience Methodology is based on the 4 A’s Principle; Assessment, Analysis, Awareness and Audit..

Using the 4 A’s Principle the knowledge can be gathered, made available to all and audited on an ongoing basis. This defines the framework that underpins the Landscape, and establishes ownership and control for governance and compliance.

The 4 A’s Principle phases are;

Why does Prescience help you ?

Whatever initiative your organisation is planning, from Service Oriented Architecture, process re-engineering to System Migration and Business Service Provision, the establishment of an operational framework for dependency, transparency and governance is a cornerstone to a successful implementation.

Prescience and ADaM provide you with this framework, together with the methodology to capture and map the business IT landscape with a governance model that defines ownership and control.

Once the framework is in place, it empowers an organisation to use it as a platform to extend awareness and understanding of the business IT landscape so that the goals of the initiative can be achieved.

How does Landscape Dependency Simulation help you ?

The ADaM Universe is the environment and therefore it provides complete transparency of the potential business impact right up to the end business process.

Both IT and the Business can make a full assessment of the impact of changes to either the business processes or the applications and hardware upon which they depend.

Simulating the Business Universe enables all parties to have visibility and transparency of the true dependencies, and thus highlight operational and technical risk.