HOLZER & Associés SA - HOLZER & Associates Ltd

Our i-Transformation Model

Following IBM CEO, Samuel Palmisano, assertion: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”, it’s no wonder many CEOs are gun shy on claims that technology investment will help us improve performance – do you remember Y2K, eCommerce and even CRM? Clearly many technology solutions have been oversold in their ability to drive effective ROI. Managers are in the “Drivers’ seat”. But, do they really have the map? Do they drive profit and performance with IS? And finally, are they able to accurately measure their success?

Holzer & Associates’ Best Practice Implementation Tools offer a vendor-neutral approach (Holzer & Zimmermann i-Transformation Framework™) to determining the most appropriate technology, quantifying the value-added generated that one might reasonably expect to obtain and creating an implementation blueprint addressing people, process and technology to ensure this return is obtained. This proprietary approach, called BI Transformation, works as a handbook for efficient CXOs. 

HOLZER & Associates Ltd has developed a model of decision-support tool addressed to CIOs and CFOs. With this model we'll help you focus more specifically on tangible results which can be reasonably expected from information systems' investments, by analyzing the organization’s current IS-investment levels and their impact on four major business dimensions. The results of this analysis will allow you ranking or setting your organization’s IS-priorities in a readable scatter diagram that has been conceived in analogy to the Boston Consulting Group’s growth-share matrix. On the basis of the current IS-investments and the financial return expected, this model helps you make appropriate IS-decisions, i.e. to invest in, to efficiently set the level of required investments or eventually to drop specific IS-categories.

The analysis usually starts with a formal presentation of financial statements from both enterprise’s IS-investments and the respective economic return perspectives over the entire product or service lifetime (historical).

In this grid, the first column from the left contains the main identified internal categories of technologies. The first line from the top of the proposed assessment grid focuses on the business dimensions impacted by the analyzed technologies. We understand a business model as a tangible description of the value a company offers to its customers and stakeholders, the enterprise architecture and the related network of partners for creating, marketing and delivering this value and relationship capital, in order to generate profitable and sustainable revenue streams or tough control and anticipation. In the end of the day a successful business model finally always results in increased financial benefits, the applied measures of this first step recommendation model exclusively focus on tangible, financial measures. Such as:

1. Product added value: This dimension describes, what business the organization is in, as well as the product or service innovation and the value proposition it offers to the market. The impact of the specific IS-categories on this dimension will be assessed using the product/service profitability, i.e. the increase/decrease of the product margin
2. Customer relationship: This dimension specifies who the organization’s target customers are, how it delivers its products, and how it builds strong relationships with them. The impact on this dimension will be assessed by measuring the increase/decrease of the sales turnover generated by the additional number of customers compared to the average of the one generated by the previous customers’ portfolio
3. Infrastructure/operations: This dimension describes how efficiently the organization performs infrastructure or logistics issues. The impact on this dimension will be assessed by measuring the IS-related operational cost savings
4. Financials: Finally, this dimension specifies what the revenue model and the cost model are. The impact on this dimension will be assessed by measuring the net return of the investments for each IS-category

HOLZER & Associates Ltd method supports CIOs and CFOs in systematically decomposing the strategic problem of defining unambiguous IS-priorities into clearly defined elements, by depicting all potential alternatives in a scatter diagram. As a first step of any decision making, our tool thereby ensures consistency in the chief information officers’ IS-investment decisions. In clear, it aims at providing organization/companies with effective support by recommending appropriate decision-making alternatives, i.e. to invest, to milk or to outsource/drop specific IS-categories.