When planning a major business initiative, do you find it difficult to know where to start, who to engage or even how to assess the issues that need to be addressed? If so, there is a good chance you lack a knowledgebase or business blueprint for planning and deploying priority business initiatives. Conversely, organizations that do have such a blueprint, along with a mapping between their business architecture and IT architecture, are in a better position to deliver priority, horizontal business initiatives. Consider the last time you sought to deploy a customer consolidation, cost reduction, new product launch, merger or similar cross-functional initiative. Research almost always had to be gathered from scratch and critical impacts were commonly overlooked. This should not be the norm.

The business blueprint – which is the result of a business architecture program, coupled with a business architecture / IT architecture alignment strategy, serves as the foundation for planning and deploying a wide variety of critical initiatives. This requires a formal visualization of the business architecture and IT architecture along with the ability to map these two views of the organization. This training course walks attendees through the process of creating the business architecture blueprint and IT architecture blueprint, approaches for mapping the business architecture and IT architecture, and alignment strategies as appropriate to a variety of business scenarios.

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 / 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.

IV. 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 out your business architecture through the incremental development of a formal blueprint of business governance structures, value streams and business information. This includes ways to visualize and aggregate business architecture based on various business driven scenarios.

V. Visualizing IT Architecture
Redundant, inconsistently defined data 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 as-is IT architectures and extends the business architecture blueprint to include business architecture / IT architecture mapping.

VI. 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. It includes an overall strategy for alignment and business driven scenario based examples of how alignment is evaluated and delivered in practice.

VII. 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.

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 .

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.

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