Blueprints and Roadmaps

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Richard Swayze

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Blueprints and Roadmaps for Successful Business Transformation


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When lottery and gambling companies embark on a journey to become more player-centric and drive profitable growth, they face the daunting challenge of having to create a cost-effective and secure 24/7 service platform that provides for an enjoyable player experience, and enables the company to optimize revenues in a socially responsible fashion. This challenge means analyzing current channels, business processes, organizational roles and capabilities, and technology to provide a wide range of coherent services to customers in various segments. Key among these segments is a new socio-economic generation of players who float through life on various internet-based social networks, are technology-savvy, prefer a different breed of games, and play for motives other than "winning the jackpot".

Often, transformation managers underestimate by a factor of three to one the time, money, and people needed to deliver business transformation. They often consider transformation a technology problem, underestimating the importance of the required changes to business and operational processes and their required integration with technology to achieve a player-centric gaming approach.

The CHAOS Report from The Standish Group has tracked success rates of large IT-enabled business transformations since 1994. Their results are not for the faint of heart:

20 to 25 percent of these projects are cancelled before completion, providing few or no deliverables.
Only 25 to 35 percent of projects deliver on time, on scope, and on budget.
The remaining projects are “challenged”, exceeding schedules by 80 percent, overrunning budgets by 43 percent, and delivering half the planned scope.

Although not the only success factor, in the modern entertainment business, IT is often the most critical key to achieving true transformation, hence the term “IT-enabled transformation”. New technologies provide many opportunities and legacy systems often represent extreme challenges. Successful managers of IT-enabled transformation often employ two critical sets of documents to reduce complexity: business blueprints and project portfolio roadmaps.

Business blueprints provide schematics of existing and target business operations. They answer the important questions: “what does the business look like today,” “what results do we want to achieve,” and “what will operations look like after transformation?” Good business blueprints are formal diagrams that are integrated with each other, rather than the picture-heavy “slideware” traditionally used for conceptual design. Diagrams start from the top down representing the business goals driving transformation and the process chain the delivers value to players.

The second set of documents provide a portfolio-management “roadmap”; that is, a project-by-project implementation plan that guides the transformation process over months and, if necessary, years.

For example, when transformation managers at one lottery organization created blueprints to represent the “architecture of the business”, they uncovered significant opportunities to automate business processes, streamline and integrate activities, and reduce unnecessary channel service expenditures. They also identified gaps to creating a common view of the customer across service areas,

and they developed the ability to serve players in an individualized, yet cost-effective fashion. Overall, these blueprints provided the necessary requirements for them to overhaul their current IT systems, processes, and organizational structures to achieve a cost-effective multi-channel platform that considerably enhanced the player’s experience.

Investments required to implement transformational changes can be enormous. Therefore, it is important to understand the full business case for key transformational initiatives. For instance, one lottery corporation stratified work into a portfolio of investment projects and prioritized them based on strategic value and feasibility. Projects with a high value to the business and high feasibility were targeted as “quick wins”, while those projects with high value but lower feasibility were scheduled for more detailed analysis and design work to increase their feasibility. Low value and low feasibility projects were dropped from the portfolio. Priority projects were then scheduled into a rolling multi-year investment roadmap.

The management team used the business blueprints and roadmap for quarterly reviews of the implementation of transformational changes. This allowed them to make mid-course corrections where required and to harvest a significant portion of the profits achieved from quick wins to help finance the more costly projects in the portfolio. The use of blueprints and roadmaps became a critical element in delivering a cost-effective, player-centric gaming strategy.

By Hart Mauritz and Ian Gilmour, partners with KPMG's Management Consulting Services.