Architecting Business Transformation – Redefining Winnipeg Fleet Management as a Shared Service

By Neil Kemp

This case study demonstrates the use and effectiveness of the evolving concepts and associated approaches that underlie a mature Enterprise Architecture practice. This chapter provides a summary of ongoing analysis conducted and applied at the Winnipeg Fleet Management Agency (WFMA) between December, 2006 and November, 2008. The purpose of the analysis was to provide the necessary information required to support the organizational transformation of the Agency, to identify the essential capabilities required to serve its customers, the governance structures best suited to its operations, the distribution of work, the requirements for information, and the automation of information management across the organization.

Background and Context

Prior to its creation as a Special Operating Agency in 2003, the WFMA was a works garage. Its primary mandate  was to provide vehicle maintenance to equipment owned by the various departments in the City of Winnipeg. Secondary services provided by the precursor organizations that now make up the WFMA included a fabrication shop that made signs and park benches, a fuel supply depot, and the Public Works Department shop which maintained small engine tools, such as chain saws and lawn mowers.

At the time of its inception, WFMA had a staff of 140 people who managed a fleet of approximately 2,300 light and heavy vehicles and specialty equipment ranging from riding mowers to front end loaders. Many of the City vehicles were past their useful life expectancy and spending excessive time in the garage, resulting in not only enormous maintenance costs for taxpayers but also lost operational time for City departments. Capital costs being saved by not replacing the aging vehicles were outpaced by repair costs and downtime. To counter the downtime, departments often held additional vehicles to cover for those vehicles in the shops.
Today (due to continuous improvement in operating efficiency) the fleet’s complement is under 1,600 vehicles and equipment, and downtime is well below what it was four years ago (with no changes to the level of staffing).
Source: George (2007)

Before the WFMA came into existence, City departments purchased, maintained and disposed of their own vehicles. The fleet support infrastructure was duplicated in each city department and there were varying business practices in use when it came to managing the different fleets. As a result, learned efficiencies did not always transverse departments and inefficiencies could run unchecked.

With the Special Operating Agency, the entire City of Winnipeg fleet administrative and logistical support was consolidated into a single entity. Whereas the mandate of its predecessors can be expressed in terms of a value proposition which only addressed the needs of the involved organizations, the creation of the WFMA provided a distinct, accountable body dedicated to fleet service delivery, with the ability to provide integrated service and comprehensive fleet management expertise to its customers.

Prior to the creation of the Winnipeg Fleet Management Agency (WFMA) as a Special Operating Agency (SOA), it existed as a works garage within the City of Winnipeg Public Works department. As a garage, the WFMA’s responsibility was limited to that associated with the restoration of vehicles. However, as a result of the restructuring, the WFMA is now accountable for ensuring that access to vehicles based on client requirements is maintained and that the ability of WFMA to operate effectively is managed with vigilance.

Restructuring equals greater accountability

Prior to the creation of the Winnipeg Fleet Management Agency (WFMA) as a Special Operating Agency (SOA), it existed as a works garage within the City of Winnipeg Public Works department. As a garage, the WFMA’s responsibility was limited to that associated with the restoration of vehicles. However, as a result of the restructuring, the WFMA is now accountable for ensuring that access to vehicles based on client requirements is maintained and that the ability of WFMA to operate effectively is managed with vigilance.

By making the transition to an organization accountable for its own bottom line and by adopting a fleet management concept of operations, the WFMA now addresses the broader needs of the city as an entity in its own right. The agency must now balance the needs of its shareholders, the City of Winnipeg, and the clients that access its service. As a result, the value proposition and focus of operations shifted drastically.

The result of this process has been a high level of confidence in the correctness, and completeness of the analysis. The use of EBA has also provided senior management with facts that have supported making some very complex and potentially difficult business decisions (not just those that in the context of this case study) very rapidly.

Overview of Government of Canada Strategic Reference Model

The methods employed in this work are all evidence based and use the GSRM extended, as necessary, with other architecture centric reference models that could both integrate with it and contribute to the pragmatic requirements of the WFMA management team.

The GRSM is an enterprise reference model, providing a simplified integrated representation of the public sector enterprise. As an enterprise model, the GSRM provides a set of concepts and tools that can be used by public sector institutions to manage all forms of business improvement more efficiently or simply as the means to provide context to describing existing or target business.

The GSRM provides a standardized set of business centered patterns, and controlled vocabulary, that can be assembled to produce composite representations of various views of public sector organizations and their business activities. The premise of the GSRM that a consistent and non proprietary method of defining and documenting business designs and key change initiatives will be a powerful tool for increasing understanding and transparency of business operations. It is therefore believed that the various pieces of the enterprise can be aligned to each other to provide: first increased understanding of the nature and structure of the business: second better tools for making decisions, and; finally aligned plans for service transformation.

Figure 1. Key Concepts and Relationships for Modeling the Business of Government (informative)

While the concepts of a “service” and of a “service value chain” appears in a great deal of business literature, the GSRM refined these concepts to be measurable, testable and very real constructs that can be used in an evidence-based environment. This is similarly true of a “program”. By exploring the nature of: needs; value, and; accountability, the GSRM introduces new techniques that allow for the analysis of large, complex and scalable organizations. These concepts provide a repeatable method for identifying and managing the slivers and slices of the organization, for scalable analysis. They provide for the identification of reusable components that may be used to assist in the clarification or the communications of strategic ideas about the organization; its capabilities and how authority and responsibility may be assigned.

The three key ideas the GSRM brings to business analytics are program, service and value chain, all three of which center on a very formalized definition of what is meant by “service”.

Program

The idea that the essence of any enterprise is that it delivers value in response to a need of some community. The community, called a “Target Group” in public sector language, or a “Market Segment” in the language of the private sector, have needs, to which the “program” or “line of business will respond.

Service

A “service” produces a single valued output of a specific type (1), the benefit of which is accrued to any combination two other services or target groups. A service is a means to express a mandate to produce of some valued output. As such, a service is a well bounded ‘machine” capable of producing an output that is deemed by a client to be complete and valuable, is both discrete and measurable, and, from the client’s perspective, is independent from other services.

A service has a number of very important properties:

•    It hides the details of work from the client, i.e., the resources consumed or produced and the processes used in the creation of value.
•    It affects the real world through the production of some real valued result.

A service provides a fundamental capability to the organization and has the following properties:

•    One direct outcome, etc. explicitly related to the goals of one or more mandate demonstrably consistent with the desired outcomes of the enterprise.
•    One valued output recognized, resourced, and reported on, in the context of the mandate.
•    A definition of the value of the service’s output to each recipient.
•    One party can be made accountable for the service and the nature of the accountability set out in very clear terms.
•    A set of output measures that can clearly demonstrate the service output’s contribution to its intended direct outcome.

To meet some aspect of the mandate the owning program a set of services may be assembled into a value chain.

The implications of these properties are as follows:

1.    Because each member of the chain has exactly one direct outcome, etc. explicitly related to the goals of one or more mandates demonstrably consistent with the strategies of the organization:

•    The organization is partitioned based on the value produced across it
•    Each partitioned component is at the same level because each is recognized due to the fact that it is producing a single valued output

2.    Because each member of the chain has a standardized set of processes derived from a process pattern applicable to the output type:

•    A standardized set of processes exist based on the service type that can be used to test for completeness of the specification of the work

3.    As each service has only one valued output recognized, resourced and reported on in the context of the mandate:

•    Provides for a way to partition work and accountability
•    Provides a means for showing the chain of value leading to a final, desired output
4.    Because the definition of the value of the service’s output is identified:

•    The business design is constructed from the perspective of those getting value from outside the organization, not from some internal view.

5.    As one party is accountable for the service:

•    Accountability for the delivery of value and for the performance of the service can be firmly allocated.
•    Performance standards developed based on the efficiency, effectiveness and quality standards based on a horizontal contribution to the final result.

6.    A set of output measures that can clearly demonstrate the service output’s contribution to its intended direct outcome:

•    The value of each output can be clearly attributed and the contribution of each to the mandate can be established.
•    All parts of the value chain are peers, i.e. the members are defined at one level only – the enterprise level.

Because of all of the above factors members of the value chain in this structure are untangled, and do not overlap. The necessary and sufficient condition to qualify as a

member of the chain requires that its outputs must be provided to two or more independent other members to eliminate the condition where one member is in fact just a process in another member. The benefits of this are that an explicit and consistent boundary is drawn between value and other forms of work. In this paradigm, all work must be accounted for in processes and all processes exist in the context of the value they deliver.

An additional feature of this is that each member of the value chain is subject to a set of measures developed from a uniform measurement policy defined for and by the enterprise, and based on its output. These output measures relate explicitly to the sponsoring mandate of the larger enterprise.

While the GSRM was specifically designed for government it contains unique features which permit it to be customized and implemented within and across public sector organizations.

Scoping the Problem – The Garage Model

The scope of the transformation planning began by seeking a clear understanding of the value of the existing operation, the garage.

Every department is an island

Table 1. Tabular view of the Garage (Works Department) Mandate

The above table, called a Program Service Alignment Model (PSAM), summarizes the mandate and value proposition of the Garage, showing services (or business lines) recognizing and responding to the specific needs of the operating departments, unconstrained by the need to be accountable for the way the services are delivered. This table captures the target groups (collectives deriving benefits from the agency) and their needs as recognized by the agency. This perspective sets the value context of the organization being evaluated and provides the justification and motivation for everything that follows.

The table shows that, as a works garage, the resource and care and rehabilitation functions recognized the needs of the operating city departments solely as being a question of care for and operate their vehicles. The works garage existed as “just another department”. Its value contribution to the organization was seen as being the same as what existed for any of the other operating departments within the city. The works garage, having no direct accountability to the city, was largely invisible from that perspective and the fabrication, fuel and small engine serviced provided through these facilities because of affinities in the products.

Defining the Transformation Approach

The project was essentially divided into three phases. In phase one, we approached the problem as an architectural question with the fundamental issues being: “What is the source of value of the transformed WFMA?” “What capabilities are required to deliver the desired value proposition?” “What constraints or requirements will these impose on the structure of the agency?” During the second phase the question was essentially, “What is the best design for deploying these capabilities that will allow the agency to perform as desired?” In phase three, we are actively using the insights gained from the documented EBA to design work and enabling systems, and to manage the ongoing transformation of the agency. Because the output of this latter phase is being done very much in the context of the EBA, we have been able to retain a high degree of coherence between the system design, the activities the system supports and the agency’s mandate and strategy.

The reasons for using the GSRM should now be evident; it provided us with an organization independent means of capturing and describing the capabilities requisite to both the current transformed Agency; and of clearly exposing and understanding the gap between the “as is” and the options related to the desired “to be” states based on value proposition the agency sees for itself. It also gave us a means to “chunk out” parts of the business for special attention while always knowing where we were as we “sliced and diced” the work. As a scalable framework for dealing with ideas about the organization, of exposing and aligning in a logical and structured manner allowed us to keep an overview the use of the GSRM was seen as an efficient means for communicate clearly about requirements, intent and options without either getting into the “weeds”.

Analyzing the Environment

The ability of the WFMA to deliver a high quality, efficient and cost effective service to both operating customers and the City will be driven by its ability to respond to the factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieving them. These factors were captured through an analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) that the WFMA faces.

These factors will be relevant to the potential structure of the WFMA and the strategy it pursues (Chandler, 1996) as it seeks to leverage strengths and mitigate weaknesses in the way that authority is exercised.

Table 2. WFMA SWOT

Establishing the WFMA vision, mission and strategy

The ideal structure of an organization is the instantiation of its strategy through the deployment of resources organized to maximize the ability to achieve the stated ends. The structure of an organization is in many ways driven by its strategy. The essence of strategy is that it is a means by which any organization seeks to position itself to provide a unique and valuable position rooted in its systems of activities that are such that others cannot match. The organization is the structure given to the people, resources and processes that deploy them to maximize the ability to achieve the stated ends.

Mission: To deliver the highest quality and most cost-effective fleet management services to City of Winnipeg departments and other public organizations.

Vision: To become the best public fleet service provider in North America.

Strategy: To exploit all strengths and opportunities to the greatest extent possible and similarly minimize all threats and weaknesses.

Table 3. WFMA Strategy

Defining the Business Model

Having established and defined the larger context of the WFMA, the nature of the market and its value in that market, as well as it’s positioning in this environment, the analysis focused on how the Agency would engage the Market and deliver value. This was done using a business model to provide a simplified representation of its business logic. A business model describes what a company offers its customers, how it reaches them and relates to them, through which resources, activities and partners this is achieved, and ultimately, how it earns money.

To fully appreciate the nature of the WFMA’s business model and the related factors driving the design of the organization, the following factors were included in the analysis of its business operation (Osterwalder, 2007).

Table 4. WFMA Business Model

Based on the above information, the agency can draw its key operating doctrines. These are:

•    Transfer services to low cost providers whenever this can be done without impacting service delivery (i.e. use commercial automotive maintenance service providers for oil changes, or tires).
•    Make extensive use of information at all levels of operations to identify patterns and make decisions about sourcing options, fleet value, etc. and educate clients.
•    Treat all aspects of the business as valuable assets and manage them accordingly; the fleet, the processes, the organization, the information, are all tracked, and subject to change management.
•    Whenever possible, exploit the value of automation (RFI technology is used to track fuel consumption, GPS to track vehicle locations, drivers are issued key cards for various functions and the agency has and is continuing to invest in information technology).

The concept of WFMA’s new business model is simple – operate a newer reliable fleet, manage all purchases, maintenance and disposal from one central hub, and utilize concrete data to manage fleet operations. “Our focus in the shop has been steadily changing from corrective maintenance to preventive maintenance.” WFMA Chief Operating Officer Yvan Lupien.
Source: George (2007)

Understanding the Capabilities

Executives attempting to reorganize their business face an ongoing dilemma. They are aware that their organization is not structured to meet present and future needs, but they are unclear as to what organizational capabilities (2)  currently exist or will be required. While they may have compartmentalized insights into which structure might achieve strategic goals, there has been no concrete means to determine if that structure has all the capabilities needed for success. As a result, organizations often undergo one unsuccessful and expensive reorganization after another as frustrated executives try to find a solution. However, an organization’s structure is only half the problem; the other half having the requisite capability. For these reasons, there is a tendency for organizations to more or less randomly reorganize as they seek to find the appropriate structure to meet their requirements, when often the underlying issue is that the organization is actually missing the capabilities required to get the job done. Failure to recognize and address both problems simultaneously practically ensures that no organization will ever meet the actual requirements.

In the case of the WFMA, a significant part of delivering value was centered on the requirement for new capabilities and an effective organizational structure in which these capabilities would operate.
A “zero based” capability assessment approach was taken, and through a structured value chain analysis, all of the capabilities needed for the WFMA to achieve its mandate were identified.

Figure 5. WFMA Concept of Operations

There is no purpose to doing work if it serves no value

Starting with the public facing services we worked backwards in the value chain to identify the network of accountability relationships needed to deliver the desired value propositions. Using a Service Integration and Alignment Model (SIAM) we identified the accountability relationships between the services to show both how value is accumulated in the organization and the capabilities required to produce the value.

The key purpose of this analysis was to identify candidate capabilities that might exist or need to exist in the value chain. It showed the contributions of value required to produce the final valued output (3) by considering only those capabilities that are deemed both necessary and sufficient to deliver the desired value. Without this analysis there was a high likelihood that the business would overlook a capability requisite to achieving the mandate, resulting in and incomplete and incorrect organization.

By using a structured approach to analysis, the organizational capabilities required by the WFMA to achieve its mandate were identified. This information was then used to set the context for, and provide the justification of elements of the organization, including but not limited to, its processes and performance measurement.

The Target Value proposition

The WFMA perspective: Working for the greater good

When the WFMA was created, the value proposition of vehicle service changed from focusing exclusively on care and rehabilitation (i.e. mechanics maintaining vehicles), to a value accrued by ensuring access to vehicles was granted and maintained. The value proposition is now based on all operating departments having access to the lowest cost vehicular resource meeting operational requirements. In addition, by changing the corporate accountability to an SOA, the WFMA received a new mandate, one reporting directly to the City of Winnipeg. This mandate recognizes the need for vehicles to be managed and sustained in an effective manner to ensure that the city has reliable access to a cost effective fleet. The fact that the Agency is recognizing this need and contributing to it through the changes in its governance and conduct are quite significant. With the creation of the WFMA, the Public Works Department, which was previously the largest owner of vehicles, became “just another customer”. As a result, behavior and expectations have shifted.

The PSAM can also be expressed in a graphical form. The PSAM for the transformed agency is set out in Figure 6. In this form, the mandate of the agency takes on a very different flavor. No longer are the target-group facing services (vehicle access, fuel access, access to small equipment and custom fabrication) effectively processes within their parent organization. They now must show not only value in providing access to their respective products, they must also address the risk to the city that would accrue from the loss of access. When making decision, not only must the agency address the short term, operational needs of the city’s operating departments, they must consider the longer term risk implications and the relative value that follows. Further, the WFMA executive team now bring an entirely new value to the city; in response to the city’s need for assurance that the fleet operation is being carried out in a cost effective manner, the executive now bring a focus on the need to manage the agency’s assets across all stages of their life cycle.

Figure 3. Graphical view of the WFMA mandate

This new mandate also creates very important and powerful business pressures for the WFMA. They must strive to provide high quality and efficient service to operating customers, while continuously seeking to reduce cost structure as required by the needs of the city. They must also ensure that access is maintained to fuel, fabricated items, small engine equipment items and vehicles required by the City of Winnipeg to meet obligations to its citizens.

The change in structure from a garage to a fleet management agency transforms the value that is seen to come from the organization by its stakeholders. This change influences the relationship the organization has with both its clients and the city, as well as the way it is measured. These changes will therefore affect the capabilities and culture of the organization if it is to be seen as a success.

To fully understand the organizational capabilities required of the transformed organization we used the Governments of Canada Strategic Reference Model (GSRM) service models to explore and understand what these might be. Because the GSRM gave us common and reusable business components and a standardized set of patterns we were able to quickly build a complete picture of the features needed in the new business operation.

Operationalizing the Transformation

The GSRM service models provided a strong specification of the capabilities we needed to place in the transformed agency and the confidence that all the required capabilities had been identified. Using this information we were able to move very rapidly from a purely architectural perspective to consider the shape or design of the organization that would be needed to carry out the strategy.

Overview
After understanding the strategy and the capability profile necessary to achieve the results needed in the market, the first thing to consider is the approach to departmentalization (4). Departmentalization provides the basis for classifying the specialization of work so that common tasks can be coordinated.

Geography and customer differentiation played no role in the WFMA so these methods of departmentalization did not provide the WFMA with an opportunity to be unique in the marketplace. Similarly, “process” offered no opportunities for taking a strategic position through the organization. However, a “function”-based departmentalization was well suited in that the advantage of this type of grouping is obtaining efficiencies by consolidating similar specialties and people with common skills, knowledge and orientations together in common units (5).

The focus of the WFMA is providing value to the client, achieving low vehicle ownership maintenance costs, and optimizing the life cycle value of vehicles. Therefore, the structure of the WFMA was based on the following factors:

1.    The functions are designed to recognize the key priorities of the Agency and to give attention to these areas, each through a single manager that focuses solely and wholly on a single area.

Based on this strategy, the areas requiring focus are:

•    Service to clients
•    Maintenance of vehicles
•    Management of the fleet
•    The infrastructure needed for operations

2.    Use of service partners where cost effective.
3.    Ongoing support and planning for the management of change.
4.    All supported by a common set of support functions.

Information Technology is primarily an enabler of timely and efficient access to information and secondarily a means of reducing work by automating processes. WFMA uses a Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) product and, as with other corporate support functions such as Human Resources, Material Management and Finance, draws on City of Winnipeg Infrastructure for the remainder of these capabilities. At present the organizational requirement in each of these areas is minimal.

Organizational Design

To organize the vertical and horizontal structure of the WFMA there were five issues:

1.    The task complexity of the COO role including the nature of the decision-making required of him to successfully pursue the mandate and strategy, to manage the deployment of resources, and to engage in significant investment in the transformation of the Agency.

2.    The size of the WFMA, which dictates which of the roles the COO must delegate to others and therefore which functions will exist in the organization structure (derived from the task complexity at which the COO is making decisions).

3.    Which functions does the City of Winnipeg perform that should otherwise exist in the WFMA, have been retained by the City of Winnipeg.

4.    Which functions are necessary to carry out the WFMA strategy, and how can they be used to maximize its strengths and opportunities, or to minimize weaknesses or threats, and how the capabilities required of the organization map to these functions.

5.    Which functions or parts of functions have been transferred to service delivery partners.

Organization Size and Hierarchy Layers

These days it is very popular to talk about “delayering” organizations or the “flattening” of hierarchies to eliminate middle management, but this is done largely without an understanding of the role of the manager/subordinate relationship, or any framework that allows decision options to be tested. Different levels of managers must work at differing levels of decision complexity and each level must work with those “above” and “below”. Failure to take this factor into consideration when establishing vertical structure will result in pay issues, turnover and frustration within the organization. Jaques (2006, p. 14).

The COO (Yvan Lupien) is the senior executive at the WFMA. As such, he must be able to judge the downstream consequences of his decisions in order to allow him to shape operations (Jaques, 2006, p. 69). This dictates which functions must be instantiated at the WFMA and are therefore delegated by the COO (ibid, p.45).

While the COO retains accountability for integrating all aspects of the organization, due to the scope and volume of this work there is a requirement for others to take on some of the responsibility through separate accountability for classes of outputs. This requirement to delegate increases as the size of the organization grows (ibid, p.45).

With a total staff of approximately 150 full-time employees and because of the complexity of the decision making being driven by the aggressive transformation agenda, a five-tier hierarchy was recommended (6). This structure became the framework into which the organizational units were placed.

Functions

In the evolution of an organization, certain functions naturally appear in the structure as separate units as the senior executive reaches a point in decision-making where specific work must naturally be delegated. This information, the conclusions drawn from the vision, and the strategy derived by way of the business model and concept of operations, led to the following conclusion: The natural structure that would maximize the ability of the WFMA to exploit its strengths and opportunities and minimize the impact of threats and weaknesses was a functional organization that recognized service to the customer, the value of the fleet, the role of safety in operating the fleet, and provided appropriate focus on the care of the fleet. Due to the demands of the transformation, a change management role was also recognized.

Of the proposed units, most required that staff have high decision making capabilities or the units are so small that they allow the manager to direct all subordinates within the function. The only unit requiring further decomposition is “operations”. To determine the units within operations, the full analysis (except for the capability analysis) was repeated. This resulted in the operations function being segmented based on “product”.

The value of this approach is that the executive can see just how his organizational structure supports the strategy and, should the strategy or environmental factors change, what stresses or opportunities this might create for the design.

Figure 4. Key portions of the Proposed Organization Structure for WFMA

Once the authority structure was defined and accepted we allocated each of the previously identified capabilities to one of the organization units. Once again, this provides the executive with confidence that not only does the organization have all the capabilities needed to support the value proposition and the strategy for delivering it, but that the capabilities are clustered together based on their relative affinity to each other as a reflection of the business strategy.

We would observe that modeling “to be” process without first determining the “to be” roles needed to execute the target capabilities is likely to lead to ambiguous results as many required roles may not initially exist or be understood.

From this, it was now possible to identify the complete and authoritative roles, and the set of connected behaviors, rights and obligations required within the agency to actual deliver the full set of capabilities within the identified organization structure. Having this full classification of responsibilities proved invaluable in determining how the activities would need to be executed to deliver the desired outcomes.

Operationalizing the Business

Another value that may be derived from the capability (service) analysis is that each service establishes the value, the scope and the context for the required operational capabilities by specifying the associated processes, resources and the information needed by that service. This definition includes details concerning the behavior, the status and the semantics that make up any business capability. These exist in the GRSM as patterns. Because they exist as reusable patterns, we were able to draw on this information to guide various decisions about processes, horizontal accountability and so on.

Using the capabilities as a context we were able to draw on the service process patterns of the GSRM to establish both the required processes needed by the agency and to establish the contribution of each process to a final valued output and ultimately their contribution to the value proposition. This enables the agency both to identify processes that are candidates for removal and to detect processes that were lacking. Whenever we found a process that did not contribute to a final valued output or have a specific goal relative to that value we were able to eliminate it. Similarly, the process patterns of the GSRM helped to identify processes that would have value, and what their overall contribution would be to the transformed agency. It also positions the enterprise to verify the need for existing processes and/or to identify missing processes as each capability required by the enterprise is realized through a pattern of processes based on its type of output. This is a far cry from the practice of trying to design and manage processes in isolation, as is currently employed in many organizations. It is the organizing framework provided by the capabilities as a context that makes it possible to design efficient, effective and coherent process and governance architecture. Further, each process can be evaluated as an independent “thing” in order to determine that it is complete, welldesigned to ensure it is efficient and effective, and to verify that good separation of accountability exists between each activity.

Similarly, by using the capabilities as a context for the language we were able to capture all concepts relevant to the business and understand not just how information can be used on a transaction by transaction basis, but also how each concept supports day to day decision making, the verification that both internal and external policy are adhered to, and the measurement of the effectiveness of the agencies strategy. In other words, information is seen across the entire range of its value chain and explicitly managed at all stages of the life cycle, thus providing a high level of assurance that good governance is exercised across all aspects of the operation and at all levels of management.

A particularly important result of using the services to set the context for the process analysis has been that the process specifications have become very standardized and we have been able to develop standard tests for distributing work and separating authority. This has meant that not only are we confident that we have captured all the processed need for the staff to perform the required work, but that the activities are all described at a standard level, in a standard way and, it now turns out, to be quite usable in formulating job descriptions.

Moving Forward

Our next step in the evolution of WFMA is automation. Typically, when automation is contemplated it must either “assume the business” or assume that the business understands the business and can describe it. The fact that automation is rarely aligned to business requirements is demonstration that, at least in part, these assumptions are not true and that this contributes to the disconnect between business operations and the technology that is intended to enable it. The WFMA is currently modernizing and extending its existing software to exploit what has been learned through this analysis. The goal of this investment is a fleet management system that supports and enables the “best in class” practices and capabilities developed to date.

As all key aspects of the WFMA are now captured and maintained in a structured manner in a single set of interrelated views of the business, the management team is able to focus the discussion around a common frame of reference. As they learn to exploit the information contained in the models there is an increased ability to understand the relationships between parts of the business so that when changes are contemplated or made, the ramifications are more fully understood, they can be better managed, and they can be implemented faster, better and for less expense. When it comes to automation, this ability is of paramount importance, for as we progress with automation there is a tendency to set the business practices “into concrete” and without the models to support business decisions and drive automation, this would be totally contrary to the transformational goals of the agency as it seeks to set entirely new standards for fleet management services.

A key role that the models are playing in the automation process is that they provided key insight into the options and implications of the various investment options (projects), how the phasing of the investment can be managed and both the sequencing and scoping of the work.

Conclusion

This analysis provided the WFMA management and executives with a solid, coherent and evidence-based insight into all operational aspects of the agency. The significance of this was that the agency was well-positioned to improve its value proposition in order to better serve its customers. The WFMA management team wasalso provided with the ability to see business and customer relationships, and understand the landscape in which they were situated faster then before, As a result, they were better equipped to understand the significance of events that affect operations. A third consequence was improved agility; not only was the agency able to make decisions more rapidly (decisions occur faster and with greater certainty when they are based on evidence as opposed to opinion), it was also able to translate those decisions into action faster than was previously possible.

The results of this analysis are now shaping both current operations and future investment. Its recommendations have been adopted because the WFMA management and executives have realized that the evidence-based analytical approach to Enterprise Business Architecture is a necessary prerequisite to efficient, effective and coherent business design.

The GSRM is a tool for WFMA, both sped up and improved the business design because it allowed for the leverage of expertise and best practices. As a vehicle for managing change by identifying, scoping, and coordinating multiple change initiatives and implementation projects it has proven to be invaluable, often allowing complexity that would normally require executive involvement in the decision process to disappear, and simply allow the change to unfold in an apparently natural way.

It is apparent that as an EBA tool, the GSRM goes well beyond a conceptual framework in that it will supports making very specific design decisions. In an enterprise wide setting, the GSRM has been show to be a powerful framework for identifying, reviewing and evaluating selected project and program business designs, strategies and plans and/or major polices with respect to their design implications and the impacts of proposed changes

Notes

(1) There are 19 service output types in the GSRM. Together these output types and the accountabilities associated with them constitute the full range of value that a public sector organization may produce.

(2) In GSRM terms a “service” represents a capability to produce some valued output for which accountability has been delivered.

(3) The proposed output that when produced, achieves closure from the perspective of the provider and all recognized target groups, and represents the highest and best value achievable by a target group member, expressed in terms of the target group need being recognized by the provider.

(4) The classification patterns for departmentalization came from Stanford (2007, pp. 46-68).

(5) Functions: Clusters of accountability; each to be discharged in creating the same class of output. The classification of Functions came from Jaques (2006, p. 44).

(6) This is the maximum number of layers in the hierarchy. Some organizational units may not require this depth, but the full range needs to be supported to ensure the organization is able to perform as desired.