Translating the strategy

Gartner defines Enterprise architecture as “the process of translating business vision and strategy into effective enterprise change by creating, communicating, and improving the key principles and models that describe the enterprise's future state and enable its evolution.”  We have been taught that our architecture efforts should be fully aligned with the corporate strategy and that business should be fully engaged. The question is how can we achieve this?

It all starts with understanding where your organization is heading to?  What are its explicit and implicit goals? Even if it is not well articulated, you should be able to discover and derive the strategy, in order to define the business context on which your EA work will be based.  Sources like annual reports, presentations to stockholders and senior management communications can be of great help.

You should also invest some time in trying to understand the environmental forces that affect the enterprise and the enterprise strategic responses to them. These forces can be internal such as budgetary constraints and organizational culture or external such as technology trends, competition and changes in regulations.

Stakeholders is another great source; both internal and external. You can get significant insights and inputs from stakeholders across all the levels of the enterprise from the senior executive team to the line management, the support functions and IT operations. Contractors and service providers’ perspectives should also be considered as it may shed the light on some of the strategic drivers of the enterprise.

Once you have something solid in hand to be presented, go and validate it. Engage with the stakeholders in workshops and use what you have to guide the conversations. You will probably encounter different views and colliding perspectives. Nevertheless, everything will eventually synergize as you continue to refine your work. Towards the end, everybody will agree on a set of business outcomes that must be achieved.

Now that  you have a big picture of the enterprise, its critical business issues and priorities. You can start stage planning your business outcome-focused architecture into iterations. This way, your EA program’s value to the business can be perceived, measured and appreciated.

Have a nice week!