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In Today’s episode we are highlighting a process to determine Business Requirements, Business Priorities, Business Drivers, Business Outcomes, Business Capabilities, and Business Solutions. If you follow this process, at the end you will know how to create a Business Plan for your organizations and customers that they can leverage for the next 1, 3, 5, and 10 years! Lets get started my friends!
Business Requirements: Industry Needs to Change
The industry doesn’t teach the topic of business requirements and it should. There isn’t a technical requirement or prerequisite to learn business requirements!
When I say requirements what do I mean? I want you to think about requirements not from a technical perspective but from a business perspective. This is why I will continuously harp on Business Requirements.
We briefly discussed these topics in the Consultive Engineer mini series: ZNDP Episodes 11 – 16, but from a different perspective. Here are the link to these 6 episodes. Take some time and listen to this to get a good understanding of how to properly think outside of the technical stuff:
- ZNDP 011 – Network Design…But Why?
- ZNDP 012 – Evolving your Design Mindset
- ZNDP 013 – Business Benefits and Business Outcomes
- ZNDP 014 – What is Best Practice
- ZNDP 015 – How can you identify your requirements
- ZNDP 016 – Consultative Engineer
Business Requirements: Priorities
The Priorities for an organization are the foundation of this process and the associated Business Plan we are going to create. Everything further into this process roles up under these Priorities. My suggestion here is to limit the number of priorities to 3 – 5 as that is a good number for each item to have an appropriate place. Its not enough in my opinion to just define all of this, I need to show you all examples so here they are!
Example Priorities:
For an Service Provider organization Customer Experience is a great priority! Here is a high level description, enable customers to securely and efficiently accomplish their business.
For an Enterprise organization Digital Transformation is another great priority. Here is a high level description, reduce manpower intensive tasks by streamlining them with modern technology and tools.
For most organizations Security is going to fit right into their Business Priorities. Here is a description, committed to safeguarding our business, customers, and infrastructure by protecting digital assets from our adversaries. I like to tell people to think Business Assurance.
Business Requirements: Drivers
Business Drivers are what the organization must follow. A lot of our constraints come from Business Drivers. Here are some examples of Drivers with the Priorities above.
Customer Experience
- The adoption of new customers with new demands is so rapid that the Service Provider cannot keep up
- Customer applications are not treated properly and are not reliable
Digital Transformation
- Provide an agile infrastructure that can meet the on going demands of the business and its customers
- Increase speed to market on new solutions and capabilities
- Data, Applications, and Services must be online and accessible all of the time
- Reduce the time required to troubleshoot, operate, and maintain the environment
- Less overhead related work and more direct business impacting work
Security
- Required to maintain security standards (HIPPA, PCI, Federal, etc..)
Business Requirements: Outcomes
Business outcomes fall into the following sub categories:
- Requirements
- Functional
- Technical
- Application
- User
Customer Experience
- Proper implementation of a quality of experience policy that increases end user reliability and efficiency
Digital Transformation
- Leverage technology to increase operational efficiency
- Reduce the management overhead required to support day to day operations of the environment
- Reduce and consolidate redundant solutions and capability overlap
Security
- Properly authenticate users and devices, and only allow them the access that they need
- Full situational awareness of all data 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
Business Requirements: Capabilities
Customer Experience
- Application data Analytics with Anomaly detection
- A process to agree too and properly meet customer performance requirements
- Reliable End to End Quality of Experience for customers
Digital Transformation
- Software Defined Networking
- Agile Business Network Support System
- Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Strategy
Security
- Automated Vulnerability Management
- Identity Management Service
- Network Access Control
Business Requirements: Solutions
Customer Experience
- Real Time Application Analytics
- Customer SLA Process
Digital Transformation
- SD-WAN, SD-A, SDDC
- Next Generation Cloud
Security
- Session / Transaction based security
- Identity Access Management
- Automated Vulnerability Reporting and Patch Management
Never once did we just talk about a specific vendor or their solution. There is no need to solutionize at the start. Everything must be tied back to the business and we must ask Why are we doing this?!! We must ask whats the value to the business if we do this.
This processes is a tried and true process. When conducted correctly, the organization you work for will have a business plan that they can leverage for years to come. None of what we just talked about was hard or required a huge amount of technical experience or depth.
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