All effective businesses face the challenge of achieving and sustaining competitive advantage. Top-performing organizations apply reference models, standards, and other methodologies to improve processes and products. Different challenges require different tools, so many organizations use more than one improvement approach to benefit from unique features and address particular problems.

But using multiple improvement initiatives leads to competition for resources. This competition leads to overlapping efforts that erode the benefits from any single effort. Organizations find themselves in a multimodel environment, with concurrent improvement efforts occurring at different levels across different functions.

Rarely does an organization intend to implement multiple models simultaneously. Rather, each methodology is adopted one decision at a time and they accumulate over decades from different points within an enterprise. This problem is particularly acute in the fields of software and systems engineering, which have their own improvement methodologies but are increasingly asked to also adopt the models and standards of the overall enterprise. The solution, as many companies have found, is to harmonize methodologies to create a multimodel improvement solution.

By supporting such harmonization, organizations realize numerous benefits:

• business focus rather than model focus
• cost reduction through economies of scale for all aspects of model implementation
• cycle-time reduction for improvement efforts and the realization of performance objectives
• culture change related to establishment of enterprise processes, measurement systems, and more
• process robustness to an ever-evolving and dynamic world of models and regulations
• long-term, robust, and effective organizational approach to technology and model selection
• ability to deal effectively with different structures and terminology of implemented models
• cost reduction in relation to audits and assessments for operational units and projects

The challenge for multimodel improvement is to select the most effective set of improvement methodologies—spanning the desired organizational scope, and including process, engineering, and IT technologies—and to develop processes that deliver the capability of each methodology to achieve business objectives. Meeting this challenge involves clarifying and aligning operational goals to business missions, strategically selecting and categorizing technologies using multiple taxonomies, and then making the leap to architecting the processes.