Unlocking Value with Digital Business Optimization

For federal agencies trying to navigate today’s complex digital environment, digital business optimization helps leverage emerging technology, identify areas of improvement, and transform performance.

The current complex digital operations environment requires more from agencies than ever before. From constituent-facing applications to back-end operational infrastructure, federal agencies are run on the strength of their digital architectures. Thoughtfully selecting near-term tools based on long-term goals and optimizing digital operations accordingly is therefore crucial for reducing spending on near-term solutions that are ultimately replaced and for realizing more value through improved performance. Deploying advanced digital business capabilities and optimization in touchpoints such as constituent interactions, service provision, operations, asset management, and employee relations can help an organization more efficiently achieve its core mission.

Digital business optimization consulting services help organizations identify and strategically navigate their high-impact and long-term digital initiatives. These services can also enable agencies to better leverage their digital business capabilities in the near term to reduce regulatory burden, address structural issues, better navigate silos, reduce costs, improve service, optimize decision-making, automate and streamline processes, reduce security risks, empower workforces, and modernize information technologies.

Implementing these changes strategically is critical, not just to ensure digital optimization success, but also to better understand an organization’s unique technology requirements to ensure that solutions are focused on long-term coordination with other strategic initiatives. If done successfully, organizations can see significant benefits from making applications more intelligent, having a coordinated application and infrastructure portfolio, and driving more value from existing activities.

What is digital business optimization?

This comprehensive approach includes the following core digital business optimization capabilities: 

• Intelligent applications
• Application rationalization 
• Infrastructure optimization
• Digital value management

Guidehouse Helps Unlock Value

Guidehouse’s digital business optimization process helps agencies systematically choose the best digital optimization strategy by combining business and IT strategy work, to ensure that organizations are realizing the most value from their digital business activities.

Digital business optimization projects, such as application rationalization, infrastructure optimization, and intelligent applications, can focus on creating a strategy to accomplish agency goals. They can also focus on the timing for leveraging emerging technologies to further improve user and workforce satisfaction with an organization’s digital offerings.

Guidehouse collaborates with agencies to holistically evaluate strategic options for fixing a business problem while implementing and optimizing technology. Then, our experts help generate a detailed roadmap for completing the work to increase the project’s impact and value.

Guidehouse’s Digital Business Optimization Capability Framework

Guidehouse’s digital business optimization capability framework focuses on four core optimization capabilities:

Intelligent applications —These features within applications assess the underlying intent and sentiment of inputs, whether spoken or typed, to provide users with personalized and interactive intelligence at the time of decision-making or transactions. They combine AI, ML, and other capabilities to augment human decision-making and expedite business processes. Examples include chatbot/virtual agent interactions, predicting text to suggest for auto-completion, and providing real-time, targeted guidance throughout transactions and processes.

Application rationalization — This is an assessment of current application portfolios and their value to the organization to identify potential changes and recommend application replacement, retirement, modernization, consolidation, or even expansion.

Infrastructure optimization —This comprises an assessment of existing infrastructure and business needs to identify modernization opportunities. These could include consolidating, optimizing, or migrating data centers with outcomes that increase reliability, reduce costs, and improve security.

Digital value management — This measures the level of digitalization in business and operational activities and the value realized by transforming areas including customer interactions, products, services, operations, asset management, and employee management. Measuring the results from optimization initiatives recognizes the value gained and can motivate future improvements for transparency, automation, user experience, security, and cost savings.

Guidehouse’s Digital Business Optimization Process

For digital business optimization engagements, we employ the following process:

Mobilization — Understand goals and drivers, confirm priorities, gather relevant inputs, and create the project schedule.

Assess current state — Evaluate the maturity and alignment of technology and related governance content, and their alignment with customer needs. Then, review areas like metrics, costs, compliance measures, security, and vendor relationships.

Design future state — Conceptualize future state infrastructure, applications, and business process architectures to support the agency’s vision and competitive needs today and in the near future.

Develop roadmap — Develop recommendations and create an actionable roadmap that incorporates the appropriate near-term initiatives and optimization efforts to tee up longer-term digitalization plans for transitioning organizations from their current state to the future state.

Benefits of Digital Business Optimization
Agencies see significant benefits from optimizing their digital technologies:

• Up to 52% improvement in customer satisfaction
• Up to 40% reduction in IT costs
• Up to 50% faster time to market
• Up to 40% increase in operational productivity
• Improved security and reduced risk across the enterprise

When starting a digital business optimization process, it is critical that agencies approach it from a holistic perspective. For organizations hoping to leverage emerging technologies, strategic long-term planning for digital business optimization is essential for choosing appropriate near-term initiatives in alignment with long-term feasibility, realizing near-term benefits, and smoothing the journey. Guidehouse helps clients evaluate their long-term digitalization needs and identify opportunities to create an IT strategy that drives more value for the organization and the citizens it serves. We do that with a technology-agnostic approach that looks for the best solutions for each agency’s mission and IT needs.

Our experts integrate business and IT strategy, allowing us to deliver true solutions to operational problems for our clients—rather than just short-sighted technology suggestions. This helps organizations streamline processes and systems, and positions them to better meet, or even exceed, their future digital goals.

This article was co-authored by Robert McNamara, Anil Krishnananda and Jenny Wein.