Business Architecture / IT Architecture Alignment:  Assessment & Evaluation

William Ulrich

Consultant: William Ulrich

Offering Duration:  6 days

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Offering Description:
Business and IT rarely function in synchronized fashion. In fact, business units and IT often work at cross-purposes – if they are even communicating at all. As IT toils away on strategic, multiyear projects, front-line users continue to build spreadsheets, databases and pencil/paper solutions to immediate business problems. Can IT still effectively provide business with incremental, quantifiable returns on investment? Can these incremental solutions be aligned with strategic architecture efforts? The answer to both questions is yes. Before this can happen, business and IT must honestly assess their relationship, build common goals and create a collaborative strategy to align business requirements, business architecture and IT initiatives.  This service offering creates a baseline for organizations seeking to build collaborative solutions between business and IT.

Offering Outline:

Sessions focus on short-term and long-term business requirements and plans and activities geared at addressing those requirements. Working sessions also review high level alignment of business functionality along with efforts by the business to understand and align business architecture. Finally, discussions with IT management review IT initiatives and how these relate to business goals.

Onsite working sessions are packaged into a 4-day window, based on organizational complexity, size and objectives. Timeframes can be adjusted depending on organizational size, complexity and depth of analysis desired. An additional day is used to create a summary of findings and recommendations. The following general outline applies.

• Introductions & Working Sessions Overview
• Common Goal Setting & Share Principles of Engagement
• Business Architecture Review: High-level Functional Overview 
• Near-term & Long-term Business Requirements Review
• Tactical & Strategic IT Initiatives Review
• Business / IT Collaboration Review
• Funding / ROI Review
• Interactive Discussion of Findings & Recommendations
• Business / IT Collaboration
• Business / IT Goal Alignment
• Business / IT Architecture Alignment
• Business / IT Project Alignment
• Funding / ROI Alignment
• Practical Next Steps

The post-session deliverable will be a 2-3 page summary of high-level findings and recommendations. This will mirror the final session as outline in the session overview above.

Offering Objectives:

See above.

Instructor Biography:
William Ulrich is President of Tactical Strategy Group, Inc. and a strategic planning consultant. He has written several books, published numerous articles and papers, and has worked with large corporations and government agencies in the area of business / IT architecture alignment and organizational change. His Transformation Portal can be accessed at www.systemtransformation.com.

Target Audience:

Target Audience:

• Business unit management & executives
• IT management & executives
• Front-line users as deemed appropriate by business management
• Business & IT architects / analysts as deemed appropriate by management

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