Most organizations lack a well articulated blueprint of their business. While everyone can see their small piece of the puzzle, no one has visibility into the enterprise as a whole. This in turn constrains the organization’s collective ability to visualize the root cause of critical issues and rapidly craft viable solutions. To address this lack of enterprise visibility, organizations must be able to visualize their business through formal business architecture. Yet, this is only one piece of the puzzle.
Just as the business functions within a series of silo-based vacuums, information technology implements various aspects of the business within a parallel series of silo based application and data architectures. Where there is no blueprint of a business, there is no corresponding blueprint of how the business relies on and is intertwined with IT architecture. As a result, it is difficult to determine the impact of key decisions, deploy cross-functional initiatives, optimize key resources and funding, and streamline communication and deployments between business and IT. Strategic and tactical requirements drive solutions that are then reflected in the future state business architecture. The future state business architecture, in turn, allows IT to more concisely articulate the future state IT architecture. Business and IT can then craft a collaborative approach for keeping business and IT synchronized through various business / IT transformations.
This training course provides attendees with the ability to map out formal blueprints of their business and IT architectures and use these blueprints to drive strategy, solution oriented roadmaps, funding and project deployments. Discussions draw upon on state-of-the-practice work by a number of organizations in business architecture and business / IT alignment. In addition, the sessions deliver state-of-the-art insights on business architecture as it is evolving from a standards and vendor perspective.
Course Outline:
I. Business Architecture Alignment: Introduction & Overview
An overview of business and IT architecture domains provides a baseline for the business / IT alignment discussion. This module defines baseline aspects of business architecture and IT architecture to position the discussion of business / IT architecture alignment.
II. Business Strategy vs. Reality: Impacts of Misalignment
This module discusses how business strategy and bottom line results have historically failed to align, particularly when it required cross-functional, cross-disciplinary coordination across business units and IT. The module walks attendees through industry case studies of successful and failed business initiatives and how business / IT alignment played a role in each story.
III. Business Architecture Alignment Process Overview
This module overviews the methodological process of establishing the business architecture team, visualizing the business architecture, aligning the business architecture, visualizing the IT architecture and aligning the IT architecture to the business architecture.
IV. Business / IT Collaboration Model: Basis for Business / IT Architecture Alignment
Turf battles, poor lines of communication, lack of transparency and poorly defined roles and responsibilities can undercut the best laid strategy. Business and IT must collaborate to craft solutions to meet major business challenges. This module discusses a proven collaborative governance model for business and IT and includes a discussion of the business architecture center of excellence and rapid response team concepts.
V. Visualizing Business Architecture
A lack of transparency of the business architecture stalls the planning and deployment of a wide variety of business initiatives. This module defines how to map the business architecture through incremental evolution of a formal blueprint. The blueprint includes governance structures and related business artifacts including capabilities, value chains, information, processes, products / services and customers / constituents. The discussion includes how to collect, visualize and aggregate business artifacts based on various business driven scenarios.
VI. Visualizing IT Architecture
Redundant, inconsistently defined data architectures and application architectures across organizational stovepipes are a major roadblock to the delivery of strategic business initiatives. This module provides an approach for assessing and visualizing the as-is IT architectures and extends the business architecture blueprint to include business architecture / IT architecture mapping.
VII. Business Architecture Alignment
This section discusses an overall approach to business architecture alignment and includes business driven scenario walkthroughs that provide examples of how alignment is evaluated and delivered in practice.
VIII. Business / IT Architecture Alignment: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach
This module provides an approach to business architecture and IT architecture alignment using the dual focus, “outside-in” and “inside-out” approach. This section is based on two proven approaches to aligning IT with business architecture. The outside-in approach is an agile, business driven collaborative approach that has been successfully deploy at a major telecommunications company. The inside-out approach is based on a proven architecture-driven modernization methodology.
IX. Business Architecture Scenarios
Business scenarios provide a context for the business architecture analysis, visualization and alignment as well as business architecture / IT architecture alignment. This module includes a walkthrough of common projects and how they would be approached from a business-driven perspective.
X. Launching a Business / IT Architecture Alignment Program
Launching a business architecture program, building collaborative governance and selling business / IT architecture alignment to management involves communicating a phased approach to aligning business and IT architectures to meet business demands. This module provides attendees with a starting point and an overall approach to creating a business / IT architecture alignment strategy that delivers real solutions and actionable results.
Unique Value of Course:
Attendees will learn to recognize the root cause of business / IT architectural alignment challenges and ways to address those challenges using a pragmatic, phased approach. They will also walk away with governance concepts that prove invaluable regardless of their roles in their respective organizations.
This course is a part of a Learning Path, a collection of suggested courses for the Certificate of Training program.
