Opportunities, Roadmap & Analysis Chat

Architect's To-Be views help plan improvements. They're shown to admins (org admins, and admins of that Initiative) and to members whose admin turned on To-Be access in Settings → Members & Access. Regular members without that grant see the As-Is views only.

Opportunities

Specific improvements with value, complexity, governance checks, and Pilot → Scale readiness. Opportunity detail pages are shareable and include readiness, governance, people/change impact, and supporting evidence, plus an Ask AI panel and a "Design AI-enabled to-be" button for people with To-Be access.

Hours and dollars. Each opportunity shows hours per week as a range when the analysis has one. Hover the hours value to see where the number came from: measured (timed from the recording), stated by ‹name› (what the person said in the interview), or assumed. How often the work happens is noted separately when it differs — stated cadence or assumed cadence. Duration comes from the recording when one exists; how often the work happens comes from the interview. The dollar figure is work exposed to change (those hours × your Initiative Assumptions), not measured savings or ROI — Linc has not compared before and after. The Opportunities summary does not add every row into one total: overlapping work (for example inbox triage that already includes confirmations and tracking) would be counted twice. When the analysis marks overlapping rows, the headline uses each overlap group once; otherwise you only see per-opportunity figures.

Excel and CSV exports follow the same wording: the dollar column is Work exposed to change and the hours column Hours / week exposed, with Hours / week (low), Hours / week (high), Hours source and Cadence source alongside them. On the Summary sheet the totals only carry a number when overlapping rows could be de-duplicated; otherwise it says the figures are per opportunity. If you have a spreadsheet or macro built on an earlier export, its column headings have changed.

Better use of current tools: some opportunities can be delivered with a capability you already pay for — usually a feature sitting unused inside software you already own (drawn from Settings → Your Systems plus systems named in your Brief, Company Context, and interviews). The detail page's "Get more from what you already pay for" section names the capability, the platform, how to apply it, and vendor documentation links. In the Opportunities Filters menu, "Better use of current tools" narrows the table to these. Absence of the marking just means the analysis didn't find a fitting capability you already own.

Industry reference: some opportunities come from comparing a process to a cited reference model (IIA, APQC, or one you imported), not from something observed in interviews. They carry a book icon; hover it to see the named reference step. Filter the table to Industry reference to see only these. They carry no hours or dollar figures — a reference model is not evidence of how much time your team spends, so Linc leaves those at zero rather than estimating them. They're all filed under the Standardization type. Treat them as recommendations to investigate and to confirm in an interview before they earn a place on the roadmap. Turn them off under Settings → Brief → Create opportunities from industry-reference divergences if you want the Benchmark tab without these rows.

Asking IT/Security whether opportunities are feasible

Whether an opportunity is truly doable often depends on things only your IT or security team knows — whether a system's API is available on your subscription, whether single sign-on is required, how sensitive data must be handled. Tick the checkboxes on the left of the Opportunities table for the opportunities you care about (up to 10 at a time), then press Ask IT/Security in the toolbar. Linc writes a short list of targeted questions — informed by the systems your company owns and any governance findings — and skips anything that has already been answered.

The generated questions appear on Architect's Backlog tab, tagged Ask IT/Security and listed under that filter, grouped by opportunity. From there an admin can forward several together in one email to the right person (for example your IT administrator), who confirms or corrects a stated best guess without needing access to the analysis. They can answer some now and the rest later. Recorded answers are kept and used by the next analysis run.

Implementation cost

Annual dollar figures are work exposed to change, not measured savings — they don't subtract the cost of building the change. That cost is estimated when you generate the opportunity's implementation roadmap; until then there's no cost figure. Treat it as a rough order of magnitude for comparing opportunities, not a budget or a quote.

Once a roadmap exists, the opportunity's Summary tab shows an Implementation section: estimated cost, timeline, payback period, and first-year net (one year's exposed-work figure minus the one-time cost). The Opportunities table is ordered by work exposed by default. An opportunity that costs more to build than that figure in a year is flagged in amber on its detail page — a caution, not a veto. Excel/CSV exports carry the same figures as extra columns.

Each re-analysis names opportunities afresh, so a roadmap you generated earlier may be filed under an old name — an opportunity's Roadmap tab lists "Roadmaps from an earlier analysis" from the same interviews so you can open the existing one instead of generating a duplicate.

Roadmap

A transformation roadmap with views like Overview, Investment View, Strategic Map, Roadmap, Risks, and Strategies. The Overview leads with the portfolio's headline numbers, still labeled Annual savings, hours per week, FTE exposure and opportunity count — the same dollars the Opportunities tab calls work exposed to change, rolled up across linked opportunities and excluding processes marked Transform or Replace. Then the Executive Summary, What we propose doing with each process (Keep / Improve / Transform / Replace / Retire), Process maturity (today's average and where the roadmap would take it), and a collapsed Basis of analysis.

When the roadmap marks a process Transform or Replace, a "Redesign with AI" button opens it in the Designer.

On an implementation roadmap, an Ask AI panel beside the document knows the roadmap you have open and reads the section you're viewing — ask "summarize this phase" or "what should I do first here?". Your roadmap conversation is your own; teammates have separate conversations.

Who sees the numbers

Financial and headcount figures — work-exposed dollars, labor rate, hours exposed, FTE impact, Investment View, implementation cost, and the People & Change-Management assessment — live in the To-Be views, so they're shown to admins and members with To-Be access. The Chat assistant and roadmap assistant won't reveal these figures to people without that access, and exports leave the financial columns out for them. If you expect to see Opportunities, Roadmap, Designer, Analysis chat, or savings figures and don't, ask an admin for To-Be access.

The Analysis chat

It opens on the right side of Architect when you load the page, once the Initiative has a completed full analysis (needs To-Be access). It works from that analysis, so while the results are still Preliminary it stays closed, and opening it tells you a full analysis is needed first. Close it if you want more room: it then stays closed on later visits (in that browser) until you open it again with the Analysis chat button (or ⌘I / Ctrl+I) or an Ask AI link. Type your question straight into the box, or pick one of the suggested questions; a new chat takes a few seconds to get ready the first time. Besides answering questions and creating charts, documents, and reports, it can edit the analysis when you ask: rename a process everywhere, change a gap's type or suggested action, correct an opportunity's savings inputs, or change a roadmap disposition. Click "Ask AI" on a specific gap, opportunity, or roadmap item to start focused on it; if the chat is still answering, your question is queued and sent when the answer finishes. Answers that draw on an interview SOP show clickable source chips so you can check where an answer came from.

• Proposed changes are reviewed, not applied. A "Proposed analysis changes" card lists every change with a before → after preview and Accept / Reject buttons. Nothing changes until you accept; accepting writes the change to the current analysis straight away (there is no separate draft). Removing a wrong opportunity or gap sticks across re-analyses.
• Facts for future runs are saved at once. When you tell the chat something there is nothing to edit for — a constraint, a vendor that already covers something, a team that no longer exists — it saves that as a written document on the Initiative (Saved from Architect chat in the Library) and shows a Saved to the initiative card with Undo. There is no Accept step for these; Undo removes the document, and the Library is where to edit or delete it later. Every later run reads it as background. When the chat fixes a field of the current analysis instead, that edit is already remembered for future runs, so it does not also save a note for the same fact. Saving this way is for org admins and admins/owners of the Initiative.
• Wording fixes don't mark the analysis out of date. Accepting a typo fix or a reworded description leaves the out-of-date banner on Architect alone. Accepting anything that changes what a finding claims — a number, a type, a recommended action, a gap or opportunity added or removed, an SOP correction, or an assumption change — adds it to the banner's reasons so you can re-derive.
• Money figures are calculated, not stored: work exposed to change = hours per occurrence × occurrences per week × your Initiative's labor rate, working weeks, and automation efficacy (Settings → Assumptions). Hours per occurrence come from the recording when one exists; cadence comes from the interview. To change a dollar figure, change its inputs — tell the chat "our labor rate is $60/hour" and accepting the proposed assumption card updates the setting and every figure follows. Overlapping opportunities are not added into one initiative total.
• Correcting hours re-tags them: accepting a change to an opportunity's hours per occurrence marks those hours stated instead of measured and drops the range — your number replaces what the recording measured. Correcting how often the work happens re-tags the cadence the same way. Setting weekly hours directly also drops the range so the table does not keep showing the old band.
• The chat can also correct an interview SOP the analysis is based on — proposed as a text diff, and accepting saves a new version of the real SOP document so future re-runs read the fix at the source.
• Your chats carry over to new analyses. After a re-run, your chats are still in the chat's History and continue with the new results. Chats you started while viewing an older analysis from Run history stay with that analysis.
• You can queue messages while it's working (up to 5), and attach files (images, PDFs, spreadsheets, Word, PowerPoint, text — up to 20MB per file, 5 per message).
• You can write in your own language and it answers in it — but anything it changes in the analysis and any documents it creates are saved in English.

The Architect header's Changes button opens a panel of every change to the analysis — who changed what and when — and flags corrections that lost their target after a re-run.