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About KCI


Business and IT Architecture

Business and IT Architecture (14)

Organizations are faced with high-demand response to changing business conditions. The business and IT Architecture certification provides and insight into the different dimensions associated with architectural thinking. Enterprise Architecture, as used in the industry today, is focused on information technology delivery and services. But, does not address a number of critical organizations considerations not part of the information technology environment. This certification is designed to assist someone to be versed in the differences associated with sets of business architectures that have a significant influence on the organization.

Tuesday, 03 July 2018 07:34 Written by

Business Analytics Solutions

The use of advanced and emerging analytics is no longer limited to data scientists only. Advances in technology and the increasing availability of user-friendly analytics software have made it easier for managers and the various types of analysts to leverage the power of data-driven insights. These analytics help managers make better decisions, identify trends and patterns, and optimize their operations.

In addition to traditional statistical analytics, there are also newer approaches such as semantic analytics that can provide even more valuable insights. For example, semantic analytics can analyze unstructured data such as text, images, and audio to uncover patterns and trends that might not be apparent from structured data alone.

Extending the use of analytics to business analysis can bring significant benefits to an organization. By leveraging analytics, business analysts can gain deeper insights into customer behavior, strategic alignment, market trends, and operational performance. They can use this information to identify areas for improvement, optimize processes, and make better-informed decisions.



Thursday, 16 March 2023 21:45

Business Analytics for Managers and Analysts

Written by

Business Analytics Solutions

Wednesday, 20 November 2019 15:45 Written by

Landscape impacts on your strategies

The PESTLE framework has become a standard approach in analyzing the external landscape of the organization. By understanding how the political, economic, social, technology, legislation, and environmental factors all impact your strategic direction, you’ll be in a better position to meet or excel in the challenging new circumstances.

The Wizsm Landscape Impact workflow is built around analytics that work with known management approaches, such as PESTLE. Wizsm brings both a semantic and a quantitative view of external impacts on strategic direction. The workflow begins with organizing what we know about the external environment and then linking that semantically with strategic statements and typical characteristics such as impact, importance, risk level and so on.

To determine what is known about the external ecosystem of the business, PESTLE looks at 6 key areas. Briefly these PESTLE components are:
  • P – Political – What are the political situations that affect your organization and what type of impacts do they have?
  • E – Economic – What economic factors are you most concerned with?
  • S – Social - What social trends are most important to your organization?
  • T – Technology – What technologies are you most exposed to that determine the direction of your products and services?
  • L - Legislative - What new laws or regulations are you concerned with?
  • E – Environment – What environmental changes or concerns help or hinder your organization?
Organization often add one or two more factors to the PESTLE perspective. These factors may have specific meaning in their industry or organization. We have found two more factors useful for most organizations and have added them to the workflow:
  • M – What are the markets of interest to your organization?
  • B – What issues do business executives think are important today?
Understanding the relationships between the PESTLE factors allows you to assess the impacts of changes in one factor on other factors. Having these cross impacts at your fingertips makes assessing the importance and impact of the PESTLE factors more meaningful. Once these components are determined, Wizsm goes to work using quantitative and semantic analytics to evaluate the impact, uncover opportunities, and then prioritize the perspectives.

Monday, 17 October 2022 08:59 Written by

Strategic Alignment Overview

Click to Enlarge - Connecting the Landscape PerspectiveConnecting the Landscape Perspective to the Strategic Perspective
  • Strategic Alignment is a subset of business alignment
  • Strategic Alignment relates the landscape to the strategic perspective of the organization
  • Landscape analysis is based on the PESTLE approach extended to PESTLE-MB
  • Strategic analysis is based on the strategic categories of the organization

Unique Strategic Alignment Analytics

Following ‘Path to Point’ analysis of properties of the core processes of an organization showing the links of Importance and Impact of a process.

  • Landscape analysis is based on the PESTLE approach extended to PESTLE-MB
  • Common Categories of PESTLE: Political, Economic, Social, Technology, Legislative (e.g. regulatory), Environment
  • Plus: Markets and Business Concerns
  • Strategic Analysis is based on the Strategic categories of the Organization such as: Strategies, Initiatives, Risk, Capabilities, And so on...






Special analytics are needed to make this happen


Using composite ranking techniques to identify high
value options.


Filtering initiatives based on properties to select those of high impact and importance filtering out the rest.




Using path to point analytics for hidden relationships

Wednesday, 20 November 2019 16:00 Written by

Business Alignment

Business alignment: Connects the landscape to operations through 4 perspectives shown below. The goal is traceability of external impacts through the four perspectives (and the reverse) to assess potential impact of external and internal change to the performance, viability, and survival of the organization. A key goal is reducing the number of unknown relationships and increasing the quality, reliability and value of decision making. No decision has 100% probability. You are lucky to have 70% success. Organizations say just having a better than 50% success rate is good as it says you are minimally ahead of the game.

Business alignment can be done end-to-end, applied in part, such as aligning the strategic view with the tactical view or tactical with operational view. It can also be done top-down, bottom-up or middle out. Bottom-up (reverse analysis) is used to assess impact of operational changes like applying AI for hyper automation on strategic direction. Tools with current and emerging management analytics (E.G. Wizsm from IYCON) provide key insight from linking together the different perspectives of the organization, identifying missing, important, or irrelevant linkages and ranking the factors that are most important to the organization.

Business Alignment Overview

Click to Enlarge - Business Alignment Workflows
What is it?
Business Alignment analysis is used for analyzing organization structure changes such as:
  • Mergers & Acquisitions
  • Consolidations
  • Divestitures
  • Reorganizations
  • Expansion/Contraction
  • As – Is/To – Be analysis and so on
Why do it?
  • Business Alignment is an analytical method of assessing change options on an organization


Business Alignment – The Complete Picture

Incremental alignment can be done independently and then linked using a common set of management analytics

Click to Enlarge - The Complete Picture
End to end business alignment is accomplished by doing all 3 alignment relationships


Business Alignment Analytics

  • Unique algorithms such as ‘Path to Point’ provide graphic insight that exposes relationships that are part of the planning and execution linkage
  • Here we see the potential impact of legislative changes on the core processes of th organization
  • Insight like this is key as to where to focus automation and improvement efforts for processes

Click to Enlarge - Business Alignment Analytics


Wednesday, 20 November 2019 16:31 Written by

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is the process of evolving an organization from its current state to a highly digital or even fully digital state.

Digital transformation is real. It is part of a long cycle of change that relates to digital disruption that reflects the impact of digital technology on economics. Long term organization viability and survival requires a digital transformation strategy and approach in order to stay in business.

Three things are needed to make digital transformation happen:
  1. A digital twin to test ideas and look at options
  2. A list of available technologies that are used for the transformation
  3. Analytics applied to the digital twin that evaluate and rank the options
Wizsm provides workflows for developing a digital transformation plan and for creating the digital twin. Once the twin is available, analytics can be applied to determine what will likely be the best path to transformation. Having a plan and executing it well provides an organization with an increased probability of success.

Thursday, 21 November 2019 09:54 Written by

Customer/Consumer Behavior

Key analytics available in Wizsm provide the focus you need to identify marketing and selling opportunities:
  1. Understanding what products or services correlate with each other
  2. Identifying what products or services tend to be purchased in pairs
  3. Connecting the first two with observing trends in sales to take advantage of in order to grow your market.
Wizsm provides several analytics that are used by marketing to determine what buyer habits would support improved sales of products or services. Techniques such as those used by Amazon and other organizations focus on products or service that are bought together.

This is the typical scenario of ‘people who bought this book also bought that book’ or ‘people who bought this product also bought that related product’. These insights arm the sales effort with focused opportunities leading to increased sales in the products and services that show the most promise.

Thursday, 21 November 2019 09:59 Written by

Operational Consolidation

When simplifying an organization, the first observation needed is whether things can be consolidated. It can be processes, databases, organizations, locations or other factors of the enterprise.

Wizsm provides semantic comparative analytics that identify which items in two organization, processes etc. are the same, or different. Using this analytic, managers or the analyst can decide by the degree of overlap whether consolidation is difficult or easy. The most common use is consolidating two or more processes to get a corporate standard such as for hiring or payments etc.

Applying combinations of factors for comparisons, managers or analysts can see which of a group of organizations is a best fit and is a good candidate for merger or acquisition. This increases the chances of success in the restructuring of the organization.

Thursday, 21 November 2019 10:00 Written by

SWOT Analysis

Most management decisions are predicated upon knowing the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats associated with a problem or situation in which an objective is known. SWOT Analysis is traditionally used in strategic planning activities. Strengths and weaknesses are used to reflect internal factors within the organization while opportunities and threats are external to the organization. But SWOT analysis can be applied in many other decision-making situations.

Wizsm analytic flows provide a quick means to capture relevant SWOT perspectives across participants to assess the risks or rewards. It helps to focus on the actions that need to take place to achieve desired outcome. With Wizsm’s semantic analytics, you can identify possible relationships associated with the descriptions of each item. The evaluation of the hidden relationships from the semantics opens possibilities not considered before. Various matrices associated with these relationships also provide insights that point to the actions that are desired.

Thursday, 21 November 2019 10:17 Written by

Business Innovation

Organizations constantly look for actions they can take that assure their continued growth and survival.

Without a means to capture, understand, consolidate, test, and implement ideas, an organization faulters. Innovation and digital transformation are driven by a constant flow of ideas that are assessed for risk and impact on the organization. It means these ideas produce new revenue opportunities, optimizing existing channels and, ultimately, generating higher profits within existing products or services or completely new.

Wizsm’s analytics gives management a way to gain insight into the various ideas and their potential impact on the organization’s ability to change. Then, the resulting innovation chosen from those ideas can be examined and evaluated prior to executing the change on its products, services or both.