Opportunity Assessment flows hand-in-hand with Baseline Assessment. The Proact approach is to leverage the Reference Models to focus on highly productive areas for transformation. This involves assessing Basic Service Function capabilities against two criteria:

Strategic Driver Relevance.

Opportunity to Improve.

Strategic driver relevance involves analyzing each Basic Service Function in terms of its ability to support the Strategic Drivers of the enterprise, which may change rather suddenly in dynamic business environments. Basic Service Functions will contribute differently depending on whether the driver is improving customer service or reducing operating costs. Companies can place a higher focus on business growth or on margin improvements. Sometimes protecting the customer base from erosion to new competition becomes more important than the bottom line. Whatever the changing conditions, a small number of strategic drivers will emerge to provide guidance in prioritizing functions for opportunity assessment.

Opportunity to improve comes from the Baseline Assessment of those same Basic Service Functions. The degree to which performance is deemed sub par (either to expected targets or to outside competitive benchmarks) will create a further ranking of Basic Service Functions.

These two criteria can be charted using the convention 2X2 grid as shown below. Those Basic Functions that score the highest in combined Strategic Driver Relevance and Opportunity Improvement scores are the ones on which to focus all energies.

Opportunities for impacting a given Basic Service Function are explored for all four views of the Proact Framework using the appropriate Reference Models. These opportunities may include:

Mergers and acquisitions

Developing e-business channels;

Reorganizations;

Process re-engineering;

Enhancing systems and IT infrastructure capabilities;

Etc.

Once these opportunities are defined, development of the highest impact business cases as well as target architectures can proceed in parallel.