Name: Ian Louw
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Bio: Transformation Consultant & Manager, Virtusa Corporation. Ian is a Transformation Consultant and Manager with more than 17 years experience in the IT industry. During this time he has worked for various System Integrators, Management Consultancies and Software Vendors in client facing and managerial roles and has setup and managed both EAI and BPM Practices. Ian has worked with organisations in both private and public sectors and has been a consultant engaged in business strategy, business and systems analysis, design, and development. He specialises in the design, development and delivery of pragmatic Enterprise Architectures for the implementation of business strategies.
Posts by Ian Louw:
BPM Program Implementation – An Important Checklist for Success
July 25th, 2011Since the emergence of Business Process Management (BPM), organisations adopting it have had a wide variety of experiences – some successful and others less so. Some would argue that because BPM is so amorphous that any project is considered to be analogous to ‘boiling the ocean’ and therefore the outcomes may vary from exceptionally successful to, in some cases, disastrous.
Typical challenges that often cause concerns during a BPM initiative include Read the rest of this entry “
Understanding the Potential for BPM ROI
August 30th, 2010Understanding how Business Process Management (BPM) can deliver value to business is becoming increasingly well understood by businesses and IT. The following points, however, provide insight as to why there may be slow adoption across some organisations Read the rest of this entry “
Focussed Business Architecture is making a Resurgence
July 28th, 2010In recent months there has been a noticeable resurgence in the need for Business Architecture at both tactical and strategic levels. In my experience, there are many Enterprise Architects (EA’s) thinking about Business Architecture, but very few who are really doing Business Architecture.
The Standish Group, an IT research organisation, documents this annually and has historically found that 31.1% projects are cancelled before completion, 52.7% of projects will cost 189% of their original estimated cost and only 16% of projects are completed on-time and on-budget. Read the rest of this entry “
BPM Excellence – Lifting the lid on the Value a CoE provides
June 18th, 2010Over the years the search for IT and/or Business ‘Excellence’ has led to a concept that is often misunderstood and can be very amorphous in definition and execution – Business/IT Transformation. The term also commonly used in the same context is that of a Centre of Excellence or ‘CoE’ aka ‘Competency Centre.’ In this post, I will not attempt to redefine either, but rather explain a bit more about how the various constituent parts of a CoE can support Transformation projects and more specifically Business Process Management (BPM) initiatives. Read the rest of this entry “
BPM Adoption – Organisational Factors that Influence Changeability
May 20th, 2010Foreword: The following post has been adapted from a post I wrote few years ago and for those interested in some of the more theoretical aspects, they can be found here.
I have worked in many diverse organisations in my career but over the past year I have been in some interesting organisational situations that has highlighted the fact that the human species has a very interesting way of adapting (or not) to Change.
I am reminded of a post that I wrote some time ago about how critical it is to consider the affects the introduction of Change (technological solution e.g. BPM or other) will have on the ‘status quo’ (real or perceived) of people in an organisation. In my experience, I have found that companies that are open to Change does not always mean they react well to it when it is imposed on them. Often this is due to type of culture in the organisation, in other cases it is just due to complacency. Read the rest of this entry “
BPM Adoption – How to derive extended cost savings?
April 27th, 2010Recent research has shown that there is a marked increase in the move to outsourcing application development and maintenance of organisational applications.
Computer Economics have found that based on an annual survey of 200 IT organisations, there has been a marked decrease in ‘in-house’ IT staff ratios for application programmers and system analysts. It has declined from 25% of the IT staff on average in 2007 to 20% in 2009. Read the rest of this entry “
