In anticipation of his presentation at Building Business Capability in Vegas, Nov. 2 – 6, 2015, we asked Koji Shiota, President and CEO at CreaVision, Ltd., a few questions about pursuing business excellence. Check out his interview in relation to his BBC presentation entitled Challenges and Success Factors in Establishing Value Driven Business Analysis Organizations.

Q: How is your organization advancing the pursuit of business excellence and how does it impact your business units/departments?

A: The consumer electronics product industry is facing an extraordinarily fast change in business and technology. Both business strategy and operation need to be continuously improved, transformed, and even experimented. The business group is required to implement more radical business transformation, while the IT group needs to contribute to business value creation rather than cost reduction. The key issue is discovering how to fill up the gap between strategy and operation as well as business and IT.

Q: Can you describe the challenges you face or have already overcome in establishing a more cohesive and productive company or organization?

A: It is crucial that the organization has the capability of forming innovative solutions through close collaboration and alignment between business and IT at strategy and architecture levels as well as the capability to implement the real change at an operational level  in the organization in order to make real transformation happen.

Q: What are your near term goals for creating a more agile organization at your business or company?

A: Agile business organizations need the capability of the experimental/exploratory approach under uncertain and complex business environments. The organization needs to run fast operational and learning cycles including decision making, implementation, feedback and valuation. In addition, it is required to have the capability of execution via quick, organizational actions in order to respond to the market feedback and lessons-learned.

Q: What’s the most valuable thing you’ve learned in 2015 thus far? What’s the most important goal/trend for [pick one or two: business analysts, business architects, business process managers and/or business rules managers] to keep in mind?

A: IoT (Internet of Things) has a big potential impact not only to business but to overall society and life. Business analysis framework has to be robust enough to apply to the solution development of social problem as well as expanded business scope under the IoT trend.

Q: What’s the latest method/process/tool you have implemented to help your organization or business run more efficiently and effectively?

A: One of important actions to achieve business transformation is to model the business process without “Who” and others attribute information at early stage. But we sometimes face resistance from business SMEs and IT professionals who are very familiar to swimlane type of process flow diagram. The business process tool that we implemented before could provide both templates and easily convert each other, which contributed to buy in those members.

Q: If you could give your five-years-ago self-insight and advice about this industry, what would you say? 

A: Agile software development process has become more popular these five years; accordingly agile BA process has been discussed and developed. If we discuss the enterprise level agility, the current agile management framework has not been matured yet. More close BA and agile community collaboration is expected.

Q: Sneak preview: Please tell us a take-away that you will provide during your talk at Building Business Capability?

A: Real business transformation happens only when the organization develops the right strategy & architecture and actually implements the change in real life operation (GEMBA). We need to know how to create this two-wheel organizational capability to realize business transformation.

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Don’t miss Koji’s case study presentation, Challenges and Success Factors in Establishing Value Driven Business Analysis Organizations, at Building Business Capabilityon Thursday, November 5, 2015 from 4:50 to 5:50 pm. Click here to register for attendance.