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Experts Wanted

Presented by William Ulrich, President, Tactical Strategy Group, Inc.

Course Description:

Dates & Locations

Face to Face

San Francisco: Oct 2

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Grand Hyatt

New York City: Nov 7

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The Roosevelt Hotel

Check back for 2009 training dates.

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Executives have mandated deployment of new strategies and the need to get more productivity from their workforce. This translates into new product and service deployment, business unit consolidation, new market exploration and a myriad of other actions. These activities, in turn, spawn a demand for infrastructure upgrades and technology redeployment. Unfortunately, the gap between business strategy, essential requirements and delivery of actionable results is growing.

Business architecture provides a way to close this gap and enable cross-functional, cross-discipline collaboration essential to articulating and implementing strategic business requirements. Actionable results require the ability of business and IT to expose and align business and IT architectures in new and unique ways. This training session provides an overall approach to delivering business-driven solutions and bottom line value. In addition, the session addresses governance requirements essential to architecture alignment.

Course Outline:

I. Business Architecture: Introduction & Overview
An overview of business and IT architecture domains provides a baseline for the remainder of this session. This module defines relevant elements of business and IT architecture, alignment and architecture-driven modernization.

II. Business Strategy vs. Reality: Impacts of Misalignment
Executive demands do not always translate into real results when a strategic plan ripples through the management ranks. This is particularly true when executive demands transition from business units into IT. This module discusses how business strategy and project results have historically failed to align. It examines how business and IT have attempted to respond to strategic directives and includes real world examples showing how organizations have missed the mark.

III. Strategy for Aligning Business Architecture with IT Architecture
This module provides an overview of how to approach business architecture and IT architecture alignment using the “outside-in” and “inside-out” approach. This module provides a baseline strategy and approach for the remaining modules.

IV. Formal Business Architecture Enables Alignment
Business must set the pace and agenda for change. While this may seem apparent, it is not so obvious in practice because business may not have the tools to meet this challenge. This module defines how business architects and analysts can articulate and drive business change and IT architecture alignment. It includes modeling paradigms to address visualization, aggregation and alignment of governance structures, business data and semantics, and value streams.

V. Business / IT Collaboration Model for Architecture Alignment
Turf battles, lack of communication, inadequate communication chains and poorly defined roles and responsibilities can sideline the best alignment plans. Business and IT must be collaborative partners in identifying challenges and crafting solutions to meet those challenges. This module discusses collaborative models for business and IT, including the business architecture center of excellence and rapid response teams for surfacing requirements and delivering results.

VI. Architecture-Driven Modernization Facilitates Business/IT Architecture Alignment
Redundant, inconsistently defined functions, processes, data and systems across organizational stovepipes are a major roadblock to the delivery of strategic requirements. Identifying these issues and related impacts is the joint responsibility of business and IT, but aligning IT architectures with business strategy is largely an IT responsibility. This module outlines a proven framework that supports scenario-driven, phased modernization and alignment of IT architectures.

VII. Using SOA to Achieve Business/IT Architecture Alignment
Services are a useful way of thinking about aligning business and IT architecture. One way to view SOA is that the journey to achieving SOA may generate as much value as the SOA destination itself. This module extends the discussion from the prior module by showing how business and IT can use SOA to align business and IT architectures through a phased approach.

VIII. Architecture Alignment Strategy: Tying it all Together
Selling these concepts to management involves communicating a phased approach to aligning business and IT architectures to meet business requirements. Such an effort must reach beyond many of the organizational slogans and poorly articulated 10-year plans that have limited basis in reality. This module provides attendees with a starting point and an overall approach to creating a business / IT architecture alignment strategy delivers real solutions and actionable results.

Course Objectives:
• Understand the vital impacts of poorly aligned business / IT architectures
• Introduce the concept and essential value of business / IT architecture realignment
• Provide a practical approach to exposing business requirements while delivering business-driven ROI
• Present a collaborative governance solution to business challenges
• Provide a framework for architecture-driven modernization of IT architecture

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.

Prerequisites:
• A desire to think of new and unique ways to address business / IT architectural challenges, requirements specification and IT modernization

Target Audience/Who Should Attend:

• Business Architects and Analysts
• IT Architects and Analysts
• Managers / Executives
• Consultants

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.