Public health leadership requires a unified and validated view of business capabilities that help CIOs and the organization’s leadership accelerate the strategy design process that aligns key initiatives, business, and health information requirements with strategy and health information technology solutions.
In public health practice, the business and IT often focus on a singular project, ignoring the holistic impact and value of an overarching value stream and business capability view aligned with core functions and essential services.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Using an industry-specific reference architecture is central and has many benefits to organizational priorities focused on enabling and enhancing capabilities associated with core functions and essential services. It is critical to understanding, modeling, and communicating the operating environment and the direction of the organization, but more significantly, to enabling measurable top-line organizational outcomes and the unlocking of direct value.

Impact and Result

Demonstrate the value of IT’s role in supporting the organization’s business capabilities while highlighting the importance of proper alignment between organizational and IT strategies.
Apply reference architecture techniques such as strategy maps, value streams, and capability maps to design usable and accurate blueprints of your public health organization’s operations.
Assess your initiatives and priorities to determine if you are investing in the right capabilities. Conduct capability assessments of core functions and essential services to identify opportunities and prioritize projects.

Public Health Practice Business Reference Architecture Research & Tools

1. Public Health Reference Architecture – Leverage an architected view of public health business capabilities to realize measurable core functions and essential services and unlock direct value.

This Reference Architecture Guide is designed to help healthcare and government industry members align with the business of public health practice. It provides tools to identify and assess core function health information management (HIM) and health information technology (HIT) capabilities and capacity including business capability maps, value streams, strategy maps, solution architectures for Enterprise Architects, and a catalog of resources for public health practice.

2. Reference Architecture Template for Public Health Practice – 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 public health core functions and essential services.

3. Public Health Solution Architecture Tool – A structured tool including business, data, application, and technology architectures for data and analytics modernization.

Public health solution architectures for enterprise architects depicting business, data, application, and technology layers for data and analytics modernization including data lakehouse architecture and views from four (4) personas – administrator, data engineer, data analyst, and data scientist.

4. Catalog of Resources – A comprehensive companion tool to strategically support and improve public health information management and health information technology service capability and capacity.

A comprehensive list of business-aligned health information management and health information technology solution sets including diagnostics, blueprints, workshops, concierge, and consulting services that address the data, analytics, and technology landscape supporting public health core functions and essential services capabilities.

Public Health Practice Business Reference Architecture Guide

Business Capability Maps, Value Streams, Strategy Maps, Solution Architectures for Enterprise Architects, and a Catalog of Resources for Public Health Practice

Analyst Perspective

In the age of digital transformation toward data and analytics modernization, IT must align with the business of public health practice and focus on future enabling value realization at a time when AI and machine learning are poised to disrupt every industry.

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

Public health professionals require a unified and validated view of their business capabilities that aligns core functions, essential services, and strategy to provide value to diverse populations served.

Public health is tasked with protecting the public, promoting health and well-being, and increasing health equity. Public health IT professionals have a role to play in empowering the workforce and enhancing service delivery through optimized data and technology.

Public health budgets are under constant strain due to pressures from government appropriations and funding allocation directives and limits, procurement requirements, and workforce costs, among other pressures.

The technical environment supporting the provision of public health services is rapidly changing with myriad new solutions and platforms to digitally transform and future enable the foundation and core functions of public health practice: assessment, policy development, and assurance.

This reference architecture guide is designed to help healthcare and government industry members align with the business of public health practice, and it provides tools to identify and assess core function health information management (HIM) and health information technology (HIT) capabilities and capacity, including business capability maps, value streams, strategy maps, solution architectures for enterprise architects, and a catalog of resources for public health practice.

Neal Rosenblatt

Principal Research Director, Public Health

Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

Common Obstacles

Info-Tech’s Approach

You are a CIO, CTO, applications lead, or head of EA who needs to improve your organization’s understanding of business capabilities and how IT can support them.
Public health organizations want to sharpen their alignment and focus on organizational outcomes and value by using architecture to better inform their IT governance, stakeholder management, and IT strategy capabilities.
Before executing any strategic initiatives, use this blueprint to understand how the organization creates value and the underlying capabilities and processes of the organization.

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

The business of public health practice and IT often speak in their own languages without a holistic and integrated view of mission, strategies, goals, processes, and projects.

Business and IT often focus on a single project, ignoring the holistic value of an overarching value stream and business capability view in alignment with core functions and essential services.

Build your organization’s capability map by defining the organization’s value stream and validating the 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 road mapping of capability gaps.

Info-Tech Insight

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

The image contains a screenshot of the thought model Reference Architecture Framework.

Industry overview: public health

Public health departments are engaged in the science and art of preventing disease and promoting health through informing society, including public and private institutions, communities, and individuals. Additionally, public health is tasked with helping people prevent injury, illness and premature death. Public health programs are supported by federal, state/provincial, and local governments and aims to reduce the incidents and prevalence of disease, disability, and mental health conditions. Public health is interdisciplinary and involves professionals from a range of fields including epidemiology, biostatistics, behavioral health, mental health, oral health, environmental health, nutrition, health education, health promotion, community medicine, social sciences, and management of health services.

Public health challenges are on the rise, and increasing weather-related emergencies and global pandemics like COVID-19 have put the importance of competent public health practice into sharp focus. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has developed a framework that describes the public health activities that all communities pursue called the 10 Essential Public Health Services. Originally released in 1994, this framework was revised in 2020 and promotes the health of all people. “The Essential Public Health Services actively promote policies, systems, and overall community conditions that enable optimal health for all and seek to remove systemic and structural barriers that have resulted in health inequities,” (CDC, 2020). Barriers that result in health inequities include poverty, racism, gender discrimination, ableism, and other forms of oppression.

Public health technologists are engaged in initiatives to improve outcomes for populations, and this guide outlines the various defining, shared, and enabling capabilities that will support the three core public health functions – assessment, policy development and assurance.

The image contains a diagram of the value stream.

Figure above: Value stream for the public health industry

Public value realization

Public value defines the success criteria of an organization as manifested through organizational goals and outcomes, and it is interpreted from four perspectives:

Public safety: Initiatives that result in an informed populace that are generated from a business capability enabled by modern technologies.
Cost reduction: The cost reduction when performing business capabilities with a product that is enabled with modern technologies.
Service enablement: The productivity and efficiency gains of internal business operations from products and capabilities enhanced with modern technologies.
Community outreach: Improving outreach efforts and providing insights related to public health initiatives in existing or new communities.

The image contains a screenshot of the Business Value Matrix. The matrix considers: Community Outreach, Public Safety, Service enablement, and Cost reduction.

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

Break down your business goals into strategic and achievable initiatives focused on specific value streams and business capabilities.

The image contains a screenshot of an example of the text above. There is an example of breaking down business goals into business initiatives, then into specific value streams and capabilities.

Public health business capability map

Source: CDC, 2020

Business capability map defined...

In business architecture, the primary view of an organization is known as a 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 will have a defined business outcome.

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

Soon to be available in ArchiMate Metamodels for enterprise architects. Download theSolution Architectures Tool

PowerPoint version available here

Glossary of key concepts

A business reference architecture consists of a set of models to provide clarity and actionable insight and value. Typical techniques and terms used in developing these models are:

Industry value chain	Definition
Industry value chain	A high-level analysis of how the industry creates value for the stakeholder as an overall end-to-end process.
Business capability map	The primary visual representation of the organization’s key capabilities. This model forms the basis of strategic planning discussions.
Industry value streams	The specific set of activities an industry practitioner undertakes to create and capture value for and from the end user or stakeholder.
Strategic objectives	A set of standard strategic objectives that most industry practitioners will feature in their organization or agency plans.
Industry strategy map	A visualization of the alignment between the organization’s strategic direction and its key capabilities.
Capability assessments	Based on people, process, information, and technology, a heat-mapping effort that analyzes the strength of each key capability.
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.

Source: The Open Group, 2009

Tools and templates to compile and communicate your reference architecture work

The image contains a screenshot of the Public Health Industry Reference Architecture Template.

The Public Health Industry Reference Architecture Template is a place for you to collect all the activity outputs and outcomes you’ve completed for use in next steps.

Download the Public Health Practice Business Reference Architecture Template

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.

Table of Contents

Need Extra Help?
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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 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 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 & review prioritization of key capability gaps & plan next steps.

Authors

Neal Rosenblatt

Jennifer Jones

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Search Code: 99610
Last Revised: October 4, 2022

TAGS:

reference architecture, public health, government organizations, government, public health practice, business capabilities, value stream, solution architecture, business architecture, data architecture, application architecture, technology architecture, LFBP, healthcare data management, ecm healthcare, health information management

Public Health Practice Business Reference Architecture

Business capability maps, value streams, strategy maps, solution architectures for enterprise architects, and a catalog of resources for public health practice.