Contributed by:Raj Ramesh, Chief Story Teller,
TopSigma
Large companies do not have exclusivity on using the discipline of business architecture. Smaller companies and non-profits can derive tremendous value by leveraging the discipline.
Like many other states, the funding for schools in Illinois has been on the decline. A concerned group of local citizens in one town wanted to do something about it. They started a non-profit Foundation with the goal of raising funds from the local community; funds that will be used to supplement the loss of revenue from the state.
A major strength of this Foundation is the high degree of enthusiasm amongst its members. There is no dearth of ideas on how to raise funds and how to spend it. Proposals for fund raising range from holding bake sales to getting corporate sponsorships. Likewise, proposals for spending those funds range from educational excursions for students, to buying equipment for the school.
David Starr Jordan, founding president of Stanford University, said “Wisdom is knowing what to do next, skill is knowing how to do it, and virtue is doing it.” It applies to enterprises as much as it does to individuals. Modern enterprises rely on the capital planning process to determine “what to do next” and “how to do it”, which results in change programs for the enterprise. These change programs are then implemented via standard portfolio management processes of the enterprise. Capital planning depends on a clearly defined business strategy and a good understanding of the current state of the enterprise.
At the Business Architecture Innovation Summit in Reston, VA this past March, a major challenge voiced by attendees was the difficulty they were experiencing in tying business strategy to business architecture. Because business strategy drives change, and business architecture enables change to become actionable, it follows that these two concepts should be closely aligned. But how does such alignment occur? The answer lies in ensuring that strategy mapping is adopted as an essential business architecture discipline that serves as the basis for integrating business goals, objectives and related action items into a comprehensive, business-driven perspective.
At the recent Business Architecture Innovation Summit in Reston, VA, one of the main challenges cited by attendees was the difficulty of aligning their business architecture with business strategy. While strategy mapping has historically been viewed as a standalone discipline, business architecture views strategy mapping as an integral component. Making your strategy actionable requires formalizing that strategy and aligning it to business architecture components that include capability, organization, value, information and initiatives. This article discusses strategy mapping frameworks and how to align those frameworks with related business architecture components to further prioritization, budgeting, portfolio planning and deployment.
Before we discuss how strategy mapping is incorporated into business architecture, let’s review a sampling of commonly used strategy mapping frameworks.
Contributed by:Drew Guitarte, Enterprise Business Architect,
Wells Fargo & Company
I’d like to make the case why business architects should operate outside of enterprise architecture (EA).
First, business architects are “big thinkers” and more business savvy than their EA counterparts. Their cultures clash. No matter how much EAs cast themselves as strategic thinkers, trusted advisors, or business partners there still seems a stigma that EA is only all about IT. This stigma stuck for decades and may help explain why IT-oriented EAs attracted only their kind. Meanwhile, recent converts to business architecture possess a distinct left- and right-brained aptitude for stating holistic viewpoints that are rigorous, well-understood, and fact-based. Some of them are ex-product managers, ex-business analysts, ex-sales, ex-entrepreneur, or simply ex-EAs or ex-IT pros who recently earned their MBAs and a light bulb went on, so to speak.
A year ago, I wrote a BA Bulletin article entitled “A Business Architecture Body of Knowledge.” In that article we examined the grassroots evolution of a body of knowledge and early signs of adoption. We spoke of selected success stories, business architecture as a worldwide phenomenon, the move towards business-driven business architecture and initial automation efforts. That article also discussed the rollout of release 1.0 of “A Guide to the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge” (BIZBOK™).[1] Since that time, business architecture has matured as a discipline and in practice, moving beyond simplistic discussions that were commonplace just a couple of years ago.
Leveraging a Foundational Business Discipline
Capability mapping is commonly recognized as a business-oriented foundation for communication and collaboration, issue analysis and resolution, and prioritization and roadmap creation. Capability mapping is not hype and it is not an IT discipline. Rather it is a rapidly growing business practice that establishes a common business vocabulary that enables an organization to articulate an actionable vision, state a clear direction, focus investment priorities, address merger, acquisition, divestiture and outsourcing challenges, and focus technology investments on clearly articulated business demands. To begin leveraging this powerful discipline, attend this half-day workshop. The session will allow you to jumpstart or accelerate the mapping and use of business capabilities for a variety of business initiatives. Half-day workshop topics include:
Leveraging a Foundational Business Discipline
Capability mapping is commonly recognized as a business-oriented foundation for communication and collaboration, issue analysis and resolution, and prioritization and roadmap creation. Capability mapping is not hype and it is not an IT discipline. Rather it is a rapidly growing business practice that establishes a common business vocabulary that enables an organization to articulate an actionable vision, state a clear direction, focus investment priorities, address merger, acquisition, divestiture and outsourcing challenges, and focus technology investments on clearly articulated business demands. To begin leveraging this powerful discipline, attend this half-day workshop. The session will allow you to jumpstart or accelerate the mapping and use of business capabilities for a variety of business initiatives. Half-day workshop topics include:
Contributed by:Satya Iluri, Founder,
CapabilityArchitecture.com
The drum beats are echoing across the Global 2000 about the value of business architecture, and more specifically business capability mapping. Business capabilities – in other words “What a business does” – are in vogue. Business capabilities, in conjunction with value stream (process layer) mapping and business service to IT service transition (service layer) mapping, are supposed to lead businesses to a state of nirvana.
Contributed by:Drew Guitarte, Enterprise Business Architect,
Wells Fargo & Company
Business and Information Technology (hereafter referred to as business-IT) alignment is so passé. Welcome the (relatively) new concept called Business-IT aggregation. The phrase “business aggregation” sometimes refers to a corporation that’s controlled by several key investors tasked to manage the corporation based on a succession plan. The word “aggregation” means the sum of the parts, the totality of components, or simply “the whole”. One dictionary (AllBusiness.com, 2010) defines it as “any bringing together of parts or units to form a collective whole.”