“Conquering the complexity in products and services can generate larger contributions to profits and growth than nearly any other business strategy”
-MICHAEL L. GEORGE and STEPHEN A. WILSON
You are serving in a multinational company that operates production facilities in 24 countries and sells its products in over 100 countries. It has few sectors each having several business units. Each business unit acts independently with few shared information or suppliers. This situation has lead company to a complex product portfolio, which translates into both internal business complexity and a complexity for customers.
A consultancy firm has recommended a strategic realignment that will enhance sharing of products information across business units. The implementation of this realignment will require simplifying of business models, reducing the amount of different products and offerings per business model, the development of products information systems.
Your challenge is to align this recommendation with actual delivery.

Enterprise architecture services
The further mentioned tools and techniques are just an exemplary subset of methods, as the simplification approach has to be tailored to a specific organization and situation.
Product simplification
Product simplification cannot start without established definitions for the entities like product, feature or service. Product definition and product concept models should be clear and understood enterprise-wide, otherwise the attempts to reduce the number of product will end up with shifting, bundling, reorganizing of products and hiding the complexity elsewhere and not reaching the overall goal of simplicity.
The next step is the focus on product lifecycle management, which ends-up as a major activity for product managers to analyze market trends, competition to make brave innovative decisions for the future.
Application rationalization
To be able to estimate the reduced cost of IT as one of the outcomes from product simplification program, it is important to maintain the links between products and the underlying systems. Though it doesn’t appear to be the most difficult task, it is often a challenge as products and systems are not located in the same architectural domain and requires tight business and IT cooperation. So it is typical business and IT alignment exercise and cannot be easily performed by teams having only business or only IT skills.
The major deliverable for this activity is products/systems map, the matrix which helps identify the gaps and find opportunities for product systems rationalization. Benefits can be in a form of closing down the system which supports products that business is planning to discontinue, or consolidation of the systems supporting similar products. If we include IT service dimension with the financial part of IT system, we are able to monetize the projected benefits in real savings.
Outcome
The enterprise architecture practice provides tools and methods which help to analyze the current situation of the company and helps to evaluate the opportunities for the future. It visually depicts products or services in relation to IT assets and can highlight where complexity has the biggest impact.
Ultimately it supports business with input for better decisions and helps to improve the overall efficiency and agility of the enterprise or its parts.