Edelweiss Service Consulting
A Structured Approach to Digital Transformation

Business and technology executives are increasingly talking about the need for organisations to jump on the digital transformation bandwagon—and for a good reason. Digital transformation enables businesses to respond to market changes much more quickly, be as nimble and dynamic as possible, and remain competitive. But without considering enterprise architecture (EA) in strategic planning, these transformation efforts can quickly spiral in the wrong direction or yield far fewer benefits than they might otherwise.

The reason is that across every enterprise, there are integrated processes, technologies, and a myriad of data. Congregating all of these under one roof is a challenging endeavour. Furthermore, just having a vision of the transformation goals and being committed as an organisation is essential but unfortunately not sufficient.

To that end, the transformation execution requires a more structured, architecture-driven approach to digital transformation. “This is where we come in. We guide our customers in their transformation—be it digital or business transformation by leveraging our 15 years of industry experience along with the assets and tools that we have been developing over time,” says Iwan Gramatikoff, co-founder and co-director, Edelweiss Service Consulting, a Switzerland-based company that is helping organisations govern their digital transformation execution and accelerate their transformation journey.

Whether or not a firm can execute its digital transformation strategy largely depends on its business architecture—the way a company’s people, processes, systems, and data interact to deliver expected services to customers. Edelweiss’ consultants work as a part of the governance and design authority team, bridging the gap between the strategic requirements (transformation vision) and operational goals (transition steps) along the various pillars of EA—people, process, data, and technology. “We structure, consolidate, and optimise our customer’s business architecture and core business components and assist them in projects that are derived from the transformation program,” explains Serge Garcia, cofounder and co-director, Edelweiss Service Consulting.

A unique aspect of the firm is that beyond being ‘consultants,’ Edelweiss’ experts are ‘doers.’ Their assets and tools enable companies to jump-start their operational transformation seamlessly.

Accelerating the Transformation Journey

When it comes to digitalisation, there are five major challenges.

Leveraging established industry standards such as the TM Forum open digital architecture or best practices such as domain driven design applied to business architecture, Edelweiss’ methodologies bridge the gap between business strategy and operational efficiency, business and technical stakeholders, business requirements and IT implementation. The firm’s services are built on four main facets: unparalleled knowledge of the TM Forum Frameworx standards underpinning any service provider operating model or software vendor solution architecture; pre-defined templates to rapidly deliver on the project goals, enabling subsequent vendor solution alignment or vendor solution evaluation; structured methodologies to discover, capture, and assess business environments; “and the final one is extensive pre-defined business capabilities and functional building blocks required to qualify and document the service provider operating model,” asserts Garcia. “Our business capability framework allows us to expedite the definition of our customer’s business architecture and, thus, dramatically reduce the time to deliver value to the business.”

Edelweiss’ digital transformation services span transformation governance, business architecture design, project implementation, reference architecture repository leveraging reference frameworks, and customer and user experience management. While the transformation governance services include solution architecture coordination, program steering, and change management, the firm’s business architecture design services comprise enterprise capabilities (activities and information), business domains (systems and people), common information model, and accountability framework. When it comes to Edelweiss’ project implementation services, the company covers everything from business analysis to solution design to implementation coordination to adoption. “In short, all of our services expedite a business’ running transformation project execution and on the long run helps steer their digital transformation journey,” asserts Gramatikoff.

Tailored Services for the Win

Edelweiss typically caters to digital service providers in the EMEA region. Over the past decade, the firm’s partners have played critical roles in the rollout of major international restructuring and business transformation projects within leading communication service provider environments. The company’s mission is to be the architect for a business’ next-generation operating model, which is individualisation-ready, cost-effective, agile, and flexible to cope with an ever-changing business environment. To that end, with the space of digital transformation maturing, Edelweiss plans to widen its offerings and be more deeply involved in the execution process with some of its key software vendors. Alongside, the company is working on joining hands with some of its key partners to come up with a more comprehensive service offering. “The momentum of companies that recognise the importance of digital transformation is increasing. In that regard, we are working more closely with integrators and software vendors in order to potentially combine offerings to provide a more comprehensive service portfolio," wraps up Gramatikoff.