During the exclusive IFS Cloud launch event March 10 and 11, one thing you would have heard about is how IFS is driving its Business Value Engineering and Value Assurance process deep into the new product.
Several years back the company launched a service to proactively help customers spot ways to take advantage of their change projects with IFS software to grow revenue, mitigate risk, improve operating costs, deliver excellent customer experience, and achieve other strategy-level goals. The pandemic encouraged us to speed up the development of a digitized version of this process, and the IFS Digital Business Value Assessment (DBVA) tool is now available.
This is a straightforward, proven, and transformational approach that identifies areas of focus, business, and technology landscapes – as they are and as they could be – creating a model of the specific organizational steps necessary to achieve the targeted state. Importantly, the process we use helps identify areas of value that can and should be delivered first to ensure stakeholder buy-in.
The next step is to drive this approach into our core software product on an enterprise level and give our customers these abilities for their own business to execute with. This has always been part of the plan since IFS gained its IFS Enterprise Operational Intelligence (IFS EOI) software through the acquisition of Visionwaves. This product was inspired by the work of military strategist Colonel John Boyd, who devised the OODA loop concept to describe the continuum of steps required for rapid, real-time action, as in an aerial dogfight. Real agility requires we:
- Observe what is happening
- Orient ourselves in a more optimal way than our competitor
- Decide on a course of action
- Act
Our current software delivers on this by providing real-time input from transactional systems to support observation, and deep hooks into those software systems where value is created so you can steer your processes, key performance indicators, risk tolerance and goal structures to effect a course correction.
We have happy customers on, and have learned a lot with, IFS EOI, including the fact that it needs to be more natively interoperable with the rest of our offering. In March, we see the start of a new EOI product embedded within IFS Cloud. This lets us leverage data in an evergreen fashion with minimal cost and inconvenience as each system is upgraded or reconfigured over time.
The release of IFS Cloud sees the first critical steps to move capabilities of IFS EOI within the IFS Aurena user interface as a new IFS Business Modeler. The IFS BVE team will start to pilot the new IFS Aurena-based DBVA solution internally as they complete value assessments with our customers. In the IFS Cloud release in the second half of 2021, the IFS Business Modeler DBVA tool will increase in functional depth and be made generally available to the market.
As we make this journey, we ask our customers (and partners) to help guide our investments into a library of standard, flexible templates and benchmarks that solve real-life business problems with this new tool. For example, if a customer needs to measure execution against a servitization strategy, we can identify elements of that project that are widely applicable and develop the right tool. We can test things thoroughly with customers even before we code. This means we can quickly develop and test IFS Business Modeler with our customers through a design sprint process.
Google describes this workshopping process as covering “ideation, design, prototyping, and testing — all with a user-centered focus. This allows us to condense months of work into two weeks, minimize the risk of failure and only a fraction of the resources it would have used otherwise.”
An opportunity for customers
The marriage of our Business Value Assessments and IFS Business Modeler product with our transactional software presents an opportunity for customers. Together, we can create a world where the enterprise resource planning, enterprise asset management and service management software we sell becomes a business value-based digital twin of your organization. Rather than conform this software to each customer environment in a bespoke model though, we know we need to offer standardized content that speeds time to value.
This work cannot happen in a vacuum. We must not go off into “an ivory tower” and do this—we need to do this collaboratively with our customers. In this regard, there is now a significant opportunity for IFS customers to influence the direction of this product, and although we already have several pioneer customers engaged, we are looking for more.
IFS Business Modeler will be a central conduit for Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in our product going forward and the opportunity this new product presents for our customers to help them sell to their own customers is huge. To those who want to participate, please contact IFS Vice President of Business Modelling Reporting and Analytics Iaian Sherwell who will enthusiastically engage with you.
What is a Digital Business Value Assessment? Find out and get a sneak peek from @MattSOASmith in this blog. https://t.co/e81FBoC1AB
— IFS (@ifs) May 20, 2020
See you soon!
In the meantime, read more about our business value assessments. These are exciting times for IFS and our customers. The IFS team feels that we are at a watershed moment in the enterprise software industry – no one else is doing customer work the way we are in Business Value Engineering. We’ve looked. ? So, I hope to see you soon!
Do you have questions or comments?
We’d love to hear them so please leave us a message below.
