TopEase®The Best Start for Business Control See the Relationships between Processes, Applications, People and Data for Improved Business Control and Change Management TopEase® is a software tool for discovering, mapping and visualising the complex structures, processes, systems, information and responsibilities that make up an organisation’s business. This insight provides a solid foundation for managing enterprise change and mitigating operational risk.

The challenge: understanding the current enterprise landscape

Large enterprises struggle to visualise the overall structure of the business, making it

hard to model new processes, manage large change projects or assess their impact.

Using different tools to manage systems, processes, organisation and compliance produces a fragmented view that obscures important relationships and dependencies. These ‘black holes’ of knowledge can create unforeseen problems that cause change management projects to fail or over-run.

A single view of the business

TopEase® addresses these issues by carrying out three tasks to create a single view of the business:

• Discover: TopEase® discovers the elements that make up the existing business environment, including hardware assets, software applications and application interfaces, information, employee profiles and responsibilities, business processes, contracts and compliance obligations.

• Map: It maps all of these elements and their relationships to each other, for example which applications support which business processes, and which processes support which services, internally or to customers. It also maps where gaps exist, for example, where there is no designated person responsible for a given process.

• Visualise: TopEase® generates diagrams of the business landscape that can be tailored to users’ roles and interests. So a risk officer can view any gaps in compliance processes, while IT can visualise the interfaces between applications to see how they support business users.

Value driven business control - a powerful foundation for change

Protected by four global patents, TopEase® is built on the concept of value driven business

control, helping organisations understand relationships and interdependencies between processes, applications, people and data. Only with this knowledge can senior management demonstrate real control of the business. TopEase® delivers significant benefits to any organisation that is planning or undertaking a major change project:

• Create a baseline for change – map the organisation’s current products, processes, organisational structures and IT landscape to create a starting point for change

• Discover any gaps – understand where gaps exist before the project starts

• Understand the impact – run “what-if” analyses to understand the impact of proposed changes, and plan change management projects effectively, taking into account the impact of other projects running in parallel

• Control operational risk – having a real understanding of how the business operates enables controls to be implemented and enforced

• Meet corporate goals – align IT transformation and modernisation programmes with business objectives

• Remain compliant - highly regulated businesses can keep on top of regulations and understand where data and processes can be reused for more than one, or where new requirements must be satisfied

• Improve strategy – get the necessary insight for cost management (cost and value driver), comparisons with best practices, value-chain optimisation and continuous process improvement

• Assess the impact of change – identify the future impact of Business / IT strategy and new project portfolio through systematic measurement and analysis of the business architecture

How it works

TopEase® is a browser-based software application that is installed within an organisation’s firewall. Once installed, it draws on four patented technologies to discover, map and visualise the organisation’s current business structure. The resulting visualisations can be used as a starting point for a wide range of major projects and activities, including:

• Business process re-engineering: introducing new processes for greater efficiency

• Risk and compliance: introducing new policies, regulations or compliance frameworks

• IT modernization: moving to a virtualization or cloud model, or insourcing or outsourcing IT capabilities

• Application modernization: rationalising and upgrading the applications estate

• Merger or acquisition: integrating the systems and processes of two or more businesses

• IT audit: ensuring new and existing technology performs as intended, has no unintended consequences on other technology, that investments are aligned with business strategy, security and access is appropriate, IT contracts are properly managed, operational risks are known and controlled, and that business continuity measures are in place.

Manage complexity

Start with the biggest painpoint of the organisation and enhance the solution along your priority list. TopEase® makes sure, that you wont loose your focus and the big picture stays consistent.

Discover

Most of the required information is somewhere available in the organization. Identify the relevant source and integrate with the TopEase® Connectors.

Map

Data becomes Information, information becomes knowledge by mapping various data sources together and combine it to one big picture.

Visualize

Visualize the knowledgefor each stakeholder in order to analyze current situations, or come up with suggestions for improve.

TopEase®

Involve the organization along the implementation process. TopEase® becomes an integrated part of the current system landscape and is used to control the changes within the organization.

Empower people

Get started fast with TopEase® Accelerators

TopEase® can be implemented even faster with the use of one or more TopEase®

Accelerators: pre-built components and templates that encapsulate industry best practice for certain types of project.

Accelerators include:

• IT-Asset Visualizer – delivers visibility and control of your IT assets and infrastructureContract Monitoring & Alerts – delivers visibility and control of your contractual agreements, liabilities and responsibilities

• Idea and Issue Management – a central repository to manage ideas and innovations (Requirements)

• Interactive process portal / MIS – a central database of operational data (processes, activities, services, value chains, products, roles, people, organisation, IT applications, controls, KPIs, risks etc.) and the relationships between them

• Business Continuity Management – analyse the risk and impact of major incidents and plan and test business continuity procedures

• EfficientAnalyticsandRegulatoryReporting – a central repository for all information relating to compliance with one or more regulatory regimes

• Internal Control System – the essential elements and structure of an internal control system

• Workflowrules - a status-based Workflow functionality to automate your operational processes of maintaining TopEase® and providing quality assurance

• Action Management – an intuitive, web-based application to document, categorise, plan and control important actions

• Automatic Model Replication – a rule set to replicate content of one repository to another

• Multi-Compliance Excellence – support for the process of introducing a new policy, from legal interpretation to sustainable implementation and monitoring

• Incident Management - identify, register and manage incidents, monitor their impact and analyse any losses

• Multi Model - model complex enterprise structures (e.g. cross-border reporting hierarchies and ownership structures) with the ability to view the big picture

• Fingerprint – provide secure access to confidential data based on roles and permissions

• Report Set Synchronizer - synchronise and update the local installed report set (TopEase® Designer) automatically.

Implementation

TopEase® implementations are swift, carried out by experienced SecondFloor consultants on a fixed-price, fixed-term and fixed-content basis. TopEase® is a proven software product in use within many complex and highly regulated organizations. Contact us on info@secondfloor.ecom to discuss your particular requirements.

Support and training

TopEase® is supported online or via phone, dedicated forum, and it’s Customer Zone. Training is given by staff with experience of many successful TopEase® implementations via the SecondFloor University training programme.

Keybenefits• Visualise the entire enterprise

• Understand complex dependencies

• Control operational risk

• Manage major change effectively

• Use for many different projects

Key features• Role-based visualisations

• Intuitive, web-based interface

• Model the impact of change

• Secure, role and permission-based access (Fingerprint)

• Rapid implementation with TopEase® Accelerators

Find out more

To learn more about how TopEase® can help establish

an as-is insight into business architecture, processes, systems and data structure

contact us on +31 (0)20 6589 700, email us at info@secondfloor.com, or visit our website www.secondfloor.com.