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Question of the month: What is OBASHI?

The Managing Director of a private sector SME writes:

I see that your company offers training in OBASHI and recently we had a consultant spending some time in my own organisation who was waxing lyrical about OBASHI and how it could help the company move forward.  He said it involved creating some sort of visual map that shows how the business works and then helps to define a clear pathway for refining company processes and procedures. This all sounds too good to true!  OBASHI is a bit of a mystery to me I’m afraid so you could you possibly lighten my darkness

Is it a Japanese Production Methodology? A Star Wars character? Is it a martial art? The answer is no.

It is basically a methodology, a way if you like a viewing your organisation from top to bottom. It looks at the ownership of certain artefacts within the organisation; how those artefacts are then used by various processes, business processes. Those business processes then work out that they need some applications, those applications run on a particular system software setup, that system software will then run on hardware, the hardware will eventually be attached to each other by some infrastructure, so OBASHI is Ownership, Business process, Application, System, Hardware and Infrastructure.

And basically you draw these layers out and you work out how your business works, and you can do it at various levels: you can do it at portfolio level so you get a big picture of how the whole operation is strung together. Then you can drop it down and if you are into a programme or even a project, you can use OBASHI to then bring that detail down to a level where your business analysts, your technical analysts can start to map out exactly what changes are going to be. So it gives you clarity and gives you vision and once you got your clarity and vision, then you can develop, and then you can improve.

So that is the start of it. So where can it be used? I mentioned portfolio management, I mentioned programme and project portfolio, but it top-to-bottom, side-to-side within the organisation, it is a way of mapping the whole thing. If you have developed your strategy, you do know what you want to do, you can then use it as a route map to work out which bits of the strategy you can deliver before any other parts, which bits are more cost effective to deliver than other parts, whether you are going to put pressure on the organisation at certain points.

For those of you who are used to ITIL, you will be probably thinking “I have a configuration management database that keeps all this stuff”. But has it? Has it got all this stuff? I will almost guarantee that if you have a good config management database you probably got the bottom few layers. But does the config management database really understand where the application then interfaces with the business? Do we within the configuration management understand the data flow through those systems and therefore which systems are most impacted when there happens to be some latency or failure within the whole of the enterprise? And then on top of that, you may have some call signals if you like from our ITIL service delivery function, service management function, which alerts us to say a particular application is down, therefore you phone this particular user group or department, but with OBASHI you split those applications down across processes, so Finance may use a particular application, but then Sales do as well, and maybe order processing does and then part of it is done in your warehouse or out on your shop floor, so you do need the whole thing strung together to get a proper picture. Who uses the information? Well, I talked about the programme project managers. What about business managers out there? What about those who are going to employ the new ways of working to improve their department flow and hopefully reduce costs, make things simpler, make things smarter? They will be able to use this pictures not only to understand how it works, but they also will be able to use them as a resource for communication. And right at the top of the three, SEO and CFO; they will be able to understand where they are going to put their investment and how they are going to get a return on their investment. And OBASHI will allow you to do all those sorts of things. So ultimately, you have a set of things and drawing around, that can start to underpin, or put a foundation for our development of our change going into the future.

What will it allow us to do? Finally, let’s have a look at some simple benefits!

If we have mapped the business properly, we can find areas where there is a waste, and there is duplication, may be a duplication of IT product.

What about latency? Where can we find that? What about resilience in the system? You suddenly find that highly important or sensitive data is now running through part of the system which has a single point of failure in it. How do we get our fail over that straight, cause that single piece of data is now flowing through that particular part of our system?

We ought to be able to manage our projects more efficiently. Let’s go back to the portfolio for a moment. Portfolio management is all about scheduling your programmes, your projects, your initiatives, that they flow nicely through the organisation, and you don’t get bottlenecks, you don’t hit the same department, time after time, therefore you get change fatigue. With OBASHI what you can do is to identify the areas that you change and then just make sure that you don’t keep hitting the same areas, pictorially it is much easier to view.

I mentioned ITIL. If you actually deliver a more robust service to your service management team, they then deliver a more robust service to the user population and that has to be positive.

Business continuity, disaster recovery- we have business continuity and disaster recovery features that have to be fulfilled within our business environment. What we can do with OBASHI is identify all the necessary components and people in business continuity that need the protection and the planning that goes around both business continuity planning and disaster recovery planning. You can see it all within the OBASHI model.

And finally you should be able to link all your IT assets to an owner and if you are into costing and pricing your IT and therefore making sure that various departments who use that IT pay for their appropriate use, then you need that ownership and the ownership layer will indicate who owns which slices down through the picture, and how much data they are pushing through,  and therefore you can cost your data, and therefore cost your business.

So OBASHI defines who owns things, it allows us to understand specific business processes; their particular applications that are used by those processes across departments; the certain software system that we need and that runs on a particular hardware, and then finally how all attaches to your infrastructure- that is OBASHI. And it works! We use it in Pearce Mayfield, we help people use it in our client sites.

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