Map Your Business Architecture to Define Your Strategy
Plan your organization’s capabilities for best impact and value.
RETIRED CONTENT
Please note that the content on this page is retired. This content is not maintained and may contain information or links that are out of date.By not having a holistic and shared understanding of the most important elements of the business:
- Decisions are made in siloes, creating complexity and added cost.
- Inefficiencies and lost opportunities to share knowledge.
- Difficult to demonstrate the connections between business requirements and expenditures in IT projects.
- Technical debt.
- Failure to respond to market forces in an agile way.
Begin important business decisions with a map of your organization:
- Assess your projects to determine if you are investing in the right capabilities.
- Understand how the current state of capabilities (applications, processes, information) support or hinder the critical activities of the organization that bring value to its consumers.
- Establish a common language for stakeholders in the business and IT to describe the assets of the organization.
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Onsite Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn’t enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our Project Workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a road map in place to complete your project successfully.
Module 1: Discover the Business Context
The Purpose
- Identify and consult stakeholders to discover the business goals and value proposition for the customer.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Engage stakeholders and SMEs in describing the business and its priorities and culture.
- Identify focus for the areas we will analyze and work on.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 1.1 | Select key stakeholders |
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| 1.2 | Plan for engaging stakeholders |
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| 1.3 | Gather business goals and priorities |
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Module 2: Define Value Streams
The Purpose
- Describe the main value-adding activities of the business from the consumer’s point of view, e.g. provide product or service.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Shared understanding of why we build resources and do what we do.
- Starting point for analyzing resources and investing in innovation.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 2.1 | Define or update value streams |
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| 2.2 | Decompose selected value stream(s) into value stages and identify problematic areas and opportunities |
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Module 3: Build Business Capability Map
The Purpose
- Describe all the capabilities that make up an organization and enable the important customer-facing activities in the value streams.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Basis for understanding what resources the organization has and their ability to support its growth and success.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 3.1 | Define and describe all business capabilities (Level 1) |
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| 3.2 | Decompose and analyze capabilities for a selected priority value stream. |
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Module 4: Develop a Roadmap
The Purpose
- Use the Business Capability Map to identify key capabilities (e.g. cost advantage creator), and look more closely at what applications or information or business processes are doing to support or hinder that critical capability.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Basis for developing a roadmap of IT initiatives, focused on key business capabilities and business priorities.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 4.1 | Identify key capabilities (cost advantage creators, competitive advantage creators) |
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| 4.2 | Assess capabilities with the perspective of how well applications, business processes, or information support the capability and identify gaps |
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| 4.3 | Apply analysis tool to rank initiatives |
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