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Professional Associations Industry Business Reference Architecture

Business capability maps, value streams, and strategy maps for the professional associations industry.

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  • You need to improve your organization’s understanding of business capabilities and how IT can support the delivery of essential services.
  • You work for an organization that wants to sharpen their alignment and focus on organizational outcomes and value by using automation and cost-effective methods that produce the most reliable and high-quality outcomes.
  • You don’t know where or how to begin, or how to engage the right people, model the business, and drive the value of an architecture.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Using an industry-specific reference architecture is central, and has many benefits, to organizational priorities. It’s critical to understanding, modeling, and communicating the operating environment and the direction of the organization but also, more significantly, to enable measurable top-line organizational outcomes and unlock direct value.

Impact and Result

  • Build your organization’s capability map by defining the organization’s value stream and validating the professional associations industry reference architecture.
  • Use business capabilities to define strategic focus by defining the organization's key capabilities and developing a prioritized strategy map.
  • Assess key capabilities for planning priorities through a review of business processes, information, applications, and technology support of key capabilities.
  • Adopt capability-based strategy planning by ongoing identification and roadmapping of capability gaps.

Professional Associations Industry Business Reference Architecture Research & Tools

1. Professional Association Industry Business Reference Architecture Guide – Research to help accelerate the strategy design process.

Leverage a validated view of the professional association organization’s business capabilities to realize measurable top-line mission outcomes and unlock direct value.

2. Professional Association Industry Business Reference Architecture Template – A structured tool to help you prioritize IT strategy activities and build a roadmap to ensure success.

Use this template to document your final strategy outputs, including organization-defining core and support business capabilities, value streams, and strategy maps connecting business goals to professional association core functions and essential services.

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Professional Associations Industry Business Reference Architecture

Business Capability Maps, Value Streams, and Strategy Maps for the Professional Associations Industry

Analyst Perspective

In the age of disruption, IT must end misalignment and enable value realization.

Monica Pagtalunan

An industry business reference architecture helps accelerate your strategy design process and enhances IT’s ability to align people, processes, and technology with key business priorities.

  • A professional association capability map is a generic value chain, independent of any system.
  • It covers all core Level 1 and Level 2 professional association business capability components, specifically fundraising, member/client services, and program development, planning, and delivery.
  • It leverages best practices, cumulated by working with leading professional associations.
  • It can be used for process design, operational analysis, due diligence, channel alignment, and professional association performance management. It serves as an architectural lens for IT to enable professional association transformation.

Professional associations require a unified and validated view of their business capabilities, which aligns initiatives, investments, and strategies to provide value to their members.

Monica Pagtalunan
Research Analyst, Industry Practice
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

Common Obstacles

Info-Tech’s Approach

You need to improve your organization’s understanding of business capabilities and how IT can support the delivery of essential services.

You work for an organization that wants to sharpen its alignment and focus on organizational outcomes and value by using automation and cost-effective methods to produce the most reliable and highest quality outcomes.

You don’t know where or how to begin, or how to engage the right people, model the business, and drive the value of an architecture.

You don’t have a clear path for capturing the right information, engaging the right people, linking to the needs of the business, and aligning with IT.

The business and IT often speak in their own languages, without a holistic and integrated view of mission, strategies, goals, objectives, business processes, projects, and measures of success.

The business and IT often focus their attention within silos and miss the big picture needed for a synergistic approach and successful outcomes.

Build your organization’s capability map by defining your organization’s value streams and validating the professional associations industry reference architecture.

Use business capabilities to define strategic focus by defining your organization’s key capabilities and developing a prioritized strategy map

Assess key capabilities for planning priorities by reviewing business processes, information, applications, and technology support for key capabilities.

Adopt capability-based strategy planning by regularly identifying and roadmapping capability gaps.

Info-Tech Insight

Using an industry-specific reference architecture is central to, and has many benefits for, organizational priorities. It is critical for understanding, modeling and communicating the operating environment and direction of an organization and, more significantly, for enabling measurable top-line organizational outcomes and unlocking direct value.

The image contains a screenshot of Info-Tech's Reference Architecture Framework.

Industry Overview: Professional Associations

The professional associations industry consists of organizations that are operating under the 501c(3) or equivalent designation and were specifically established to provide resources, support, networking opportunities, and professional development for their members. Professional associations tend to face member-related challenges, in particular, attracting, engaging, and ultimately retaining their members.

Country

Designation

US

501c(3)

Canada

Registered Charity

UK

Charitable Incorporated Organization (CIO) or Registered Charity

Australia

Deductible Gift Recipient (DGR)

Source: GrowthZone, 2023

Value Stream for Professional Associations

Fundraise

Recruit & Engage Members

Service Members

Advocate

Challenge Overview: Professional Associations

Professional associations rely heavily on memberships to thrive. Therefore, they must develop initiatives for growth, innovation, and engagement.

IT can play a pivotal role in addressing this challenge by implementing a business reference architecture.

A business reference architecture acts as a strategic tool to foster organizational alignment, identify gaps, discover solutions, enforce collaboration, mitigate risks, and prioritize investments. It must be leveraged to prioritize technology, while remaining attuned to an organization’s unique challenges, goals, and objectives.

63% of professional associations do not have a formal innovation or plan to pursue new ideas for adding value to members

Top Two Growth Challenges of Professional Associations

  1. Difficulty reaching prospective members
  2. Difficulty attracting young members
Source: GrowthZone, 2023

Business Value Realization

Business value defines the success criteria of an organization as manifested through organizational goals and outcomes. It can be interpreted from four perspectives:

  • Profit generation: The revenue generated from a business capability with a product that is enabled by modern technologies
  • Cost reduction: The cost reduction when performing business capabilities with a product that is enabled by modern technologies
  • Service enablement: The productivity and efficiency gains of internal business operations from products and capabilities enhanced with modern technologies
  • Customer and market reach: The improved reach and insights of the business in existing or new markets

The image contains a screenshot of the business value matrix.

Value, goals, and outcomes cannot be achieved without business capabilities

The image contains a screenshot of a diagram that demonstrates the importance of business capabilities.

Professional association business capability map

Business capability map defined …

In business architecture, the primary view of an organization is known as its business capability map.

A business capability defines what a business does to enable value creation, rather than how. Business capabilities:

  • Represent stable business functions.
  • Are unique and independent of each other.
  • Typically have a defined business outcome.

A business capability map provides details that help a business architecture practitioner direct attention to a specific area of the business for further assessment.

The image contains a screenshot of the professional association business capability map.

Glossary of Key Concepts

A business reference architecture consists of a set of models that provide clarity and actionable insight and value. Typical concepts that are used to develop these models are defined below.

Term/Concept

Definition

Business capability map

The primary visual representation of an organization’s key capabilities; this model forms the basis of strategic planning discussions

Capability

An ability that an organization, person, or system possesses; capabilities are typically expressed in general and high-level terms and typically require a combination of organization, people, processes, and technology to achieve.

Capability assessments

A heat-mapping effort that analyzes the strength of each key capability, based on people, processes, information, and technology

Industry strategy map

A visualization of the alignment between an organization’s strategic direction and its key capabilities

Industry value chain

A high-level analysis of how an industry creates value for the consumer as an overall end-to-end process

Industry value streams

The specific set of activities that an industry player undertakes to create and capture value for and from the end consumer

Strategic objectives

A set of standard strategic objectives that most industry players feature in their corporate plans

Source: The Open Group, 2009

Tools and templates to compile and communicate your reference architecture work

The image contains a screenshot of the Professional Associations Industry Business Reference Architecture Template.

The Professional Associations Industry Business Reference Architecture Template is a place for you to collect all the activity outputs and outcomes you will complete, for use in the next steps.

Download the Professional Associations Industry Business Reference Architecture Template.

Info-Tech’s methodology for reference architecture

1. Build your organization’s capability map

2. Use business capabilities to define your strategic focus

3. Assess your key capabilities for planning priorities

4. Adopt capability-based strategy planning

Phase Steps

1.1 Define your organization’s value streams

1.2 Develop a business capability map

2.1 Define your organization’s key capabilities

2.2 Develop a strategy map

3.1 Review your business processes

3.2 Conduct an information assessment

3.3 Identify technology opportunities

4.1 Consolidate and prioritize capability gaps

Phase Outcomes

  • Defined and validated value streams specific to your organization
  • Validated Level 1 business capability map
  • Decomposed Level 2 capabilities
  • Identification of Level 1 cost advantage creators
  • Identification of Level 1 competitive advantage creators
  • Defined future-state capabilities
  • Identification of capability process enablement
  • Identification of capability data support
  • Identification of capability application and technology support
  • Prioritization of key capability gaps

Info-Tech offers various levels of support to best suit your needs

DIY Toolkit

Guided Implementation

Workshop

Consulting

“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.” “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.” “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.” “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.”

Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options

Guided Implementation

What does a typical GI on this topic look like?

Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 3 Phase 4

Call #1: Introduce Info-Tech’s Industry reference architecture methodology.

Call #2: Define and create value streams.

Call #3: Model Level 1 business capability maps.

Call #4: Map value streams to business capabilities.

Call #5: Model Level 2 business capability maps.

Call #6: Create a strategy map.

Call #7: Introduce Info-Tech's capability assessment framework.

Call #8:
Review capability assessment map(s).

Call #9: Discuss and review prioritization of key capability gaps and plan next steps.

A Guided Implementation (GI) is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

A typical GI is six to nine calls over the course of one to four months.

Professional Associations Industry Business Reference Architecture preview picture

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst

Get the help you need in this 4-phase advisory process. You'll receive 9 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.

Guided Implementation 1: Build your organization’s capability map
  • Call 1: Introduce Info-Tech’s industry reference architecture methodology.

Guided Implementation 2: Use business capabilities to define your strategic focus
  • Call 1: Define and create value streams.
  • Call 2: Model Level 1 business capability maps.
  • Call 3: Map value streams to business capabilities.
  • Call 4: Model Level 2 business capability maps.

Guided Implementation 3: Assess your key capabilities for planning priorities
  • Call 1: Create a strategy map.
  • Call 2: Introduce Info-Tech's capability assessment framework.

Guided Implementation 4: Adopt capability-based strategy planning
  • Call 1: Review capability assessment map(s).
  • Call 2: Discuss and review prioritization of key capability gaps and plan next steps.

Author

Monica Pagtalunan

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