From Open Sustainability
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| Where Activities Reside
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Activity: Business Scope for Improved Sustainability
Objective
The Business Scope for Improved Sustainability involves documenting select business processes that are being addressed as part of the initiative to ensure that the adoption of sustainability through Key Sustainability Data Elements (KSDEs) is fully revealed. Business Process Definition includes documenting the users of data and the systems that touch the data. The documented definition must include both operational and analytical uses of KSEs. By providing a definition of the processes that use the elements, the impact of missing or erroneous data and information can be determined to ensure sustainability metrics are properly tracked.
To perform this task, Business Analysts are teamed with Business Owners and are allocated with sufficient time to complete valuation analysis. Business Analysts have sufficient business domain experience to analyze Business Process Definitions and assess impact of KSDEs. Business Owners provide hard numbers or estimated judgment of impact to their business for missing or erroneous data.
For many implementations there is a hesitation to incorporate measurement improvements into the program as there may be a resistance to address data quality issues or recommend changes to source systems. This is often the only feasible approach due to funding. Not taking a comprehensive approach, however, means that there are risk areas that will not be addressed and these should then be highlighted. At a minimum, the scope of the KSDEs to understand the correct measures are in place should be identified.
Major Deliverables
- Business process definitions, supplemented with information about KDEs
- Mapping of KSDEs to business users
- Recommended future-state business processes, with process and system improvement opportunities
- Prioritized KSDEs
- Complement existing business process definition documentation where necessary, with information about how KSDEs are Retrieved, Created, Updated, and Deleted
- Ensure that operational and analytical uses of data are documented
- Documented process and system improvement opportunities
Tasks
Define Business Process Scope for Increment
Objective:
Based on the business requirements, the scope should be refined to include those areas that will undergo an improvement in relation to sustainability requirements. The scope is determined by first mapping the business requirements and processes to the data scope. In the next task, KSDEs then are identified to focus the measurement activiites of this work.
Input:
- Detailed Business Requirements for Increment
Output:
- Business Scope for Improved Data Governance
Determine KSDEs and Prioritize by Business Impact
Objective:
This task determines the KSDEs by meeting with information users and assessing the business impact of missing or erroneous data. These KSDEs should then be prioritized based on the interview results and the business value impact due to associated issues. This prioritization can help drive future requirements for profiling, re-engineering and integration.
KSDEs are selected by prioritising them based on value to the business. In addition, other criteria can be considered in prioritising KSDEs such as:
- Scope of KSDE in terms of number of business process areas impacted
- Likelihood of error (e.g., the conversion rate is known to have significant quality issues)
- Pending requirements
Experience has proven that an effective data quality improvement program should not attempt to address every data element but instead should focus on high impact elements. Once the initial set of KSDEs meet target quality levels, additional data elements can then be added.
Input:
- Business Scope for Improved Sustainability
Output:
Capture Recommend Business Process Changes
Objective:
At this point, there may be some obvious business process changes that can easily be implemented and will provide significant value. Recommendations at this point would involve minor changes to the as-is state as opposed to significant information process re-engineering. Recommendations at this point should not involve technology changes.
Input:
- Business Scope for Improved Sustainability
Output:
- Initial Recommendations for Business Process Changes for Improved Sustainability
Core Supporting Assets
Yellow Flags
- Major issues identified with KSDEs but there is not scope within the programme to address root cause issues
- There is scope within the program to address issues with KDEs but problems are significant and implementation will result in significant delays to project
Key Resource Requirements
Potential Changes to this Activity
May expand this definition somewhat when incorporating unstructured content to mean more than just key data elements.
