Project BST: Putting Business Simulation Technologies to Work
Visualizing and Realizing Breakthrough Performance
Today's simulation and visualization technologies and techniques enable businesses both to understand and to optimize the results in a wide range of situations heretofore deemed too complex to tackle. The barriers today have little to do with technology and everything to do with organizations, their perceptions, and their ambitions. Project BST explores how to overcome the barriers, capitalize on the technologies, and optimize business outcomes.
Project BST features the participation of nGenera's leading experts in business simulation techniques, simulation and visualization technologies, and technology-enabled business optimization, including George Danner, who has built a business simulation practice engaging clients across a wide variety of industries; Howard Park, who has utilized several leading-edge simulation and analytics tools to solve complex business and management problems; Bob Morison, who has done decades of research into the evolution and management of IT organizations; and Dr. Espen Andersen of the Norwegian School of Management, an expert on the business implications and applications of technological trends.
It's a truism that businesses today face greater complexity than ever before. Break down that complexity, and you see how challenging the situation really is:
- Scope increases with new product and service lines, more customers and segments, and new roles in networked and variable supply chains.
- Scale increases with globalization of operations, online presence, and the proliferation of transactions and customer touch points.
- Information has increased exponentially with more real-time data available, the rapid growth and usefulness of external data sources, and continuing decreases in the cost of capturing, storing, and analyzing information.
- Relationships grow more complex with more interdependencies among business components, continued government regulation, and higher expectations among customers, suppliers, employees, community stakeholders, and other business partners.
Even a decade ago, gathering the right data and asking the right questions of the right people could solve many business problems. Today, no single person can see the entirety of a complex business problem, and no single group can have all the knowledge that's needed to solve it. Indeed, the most important business challenges - in customer experience, finance, supply chain, and other major processes - are so cross-functional and involve so many business components and stakeholders, that we should stop thinking about "solution" and start thinking about "progress toward optimization."
The best way to analyze a complex business situation and discover the path toward optimization is not with reports and spreadsheets, but with a business simulation - a computerized representation of the business components in motion, a platform for exploring how different scenarios might play out. And the most powerful business simulations rely on visualization to let people see how things work, not just see the data about them.
The technological tools are available to simulate a wide-range of business problems - not just in relatively easily structured processes like manufacturing and supply chain, but in more difficult situations involving customer and employee behavior, complicated logistics, and cycle time and productivity in many forms. However, three common barriers prevent most businesses from capitalizing on the business simulation technologies and techniques available to them:
- They assume that problems are too complex to model, when successive iterations of a simulation can closely approximate the ideal result.
- They assume (sometimes out of fear of being wrong) that they need complete and perfect data, when a simulation can help reveal what data is needed and how close it really has to be.
- Nobody owns the problem, because it's too cross-functional and nobody wants to drive the necessary collaboration, or because nobody has the initiative to tackle a problem that's proven intractable in the past.
Re.sults® Project BST will enable participants to overcome these barriers, to appreciate and demonstrate the potential impact of business simulation, and to find specific opportunities for employing business simulation in pursuit of breakthrough performance and competitiveness. The project will enable participants to address questions such as:
- How should we make the case for attempting a business simulation?
- How do we anticipate and demonstrate value, especially if it's our first attempt?
- How do we find the most potent applications of simulation in our business and industry?
- When and how should we collaborate with customers, suppliers, or other business partners in simulating business situations and problems?
- How can we motivate the necessary participants and stakeholders, including executive leadership, to collaborate on a business simulation?
- How should people work together in building, assessing, and employing a business simulation?
- How do we determine what data we need, what additional data might prove useful, and when data is "good enough" to employ?
- What should be in our technological toolkit for business simulation? How do we match the right tools and modeling techniques to suit a given business situation?
- When and how can we make the most of visualization?
- How should we expect to progress with a business simulation? How fast can we go? How many iterations might we need to approach optimization?
- What must we do to keep a successful simulation "healthy" over time? How can we expand the scope of a successful simulation to incorporate a more complex business situation?
- How can we encourage the kind of experimental, test-and-learn culture that can really capitalize on business simulations?
Project BST begins on May 30, 2008 and concludes on September 30, 2008. It is possible to join the project in progress. Participation in Project BST is included in all nGenera programs for CIOs. For other nGenera customers the participation fee is $7500. For non-customers, the fee is $10,000. For more information, please contact us at 281-359-3464 or info@ngenera.com