Business Architecture: A Comprehensive Deployment Roadmap

Leader: William M. Ulrich, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

Length: 2.5 days

Course Delivery: Onsite

Content Provided: Training Material Hardcopy and PDF Format

Course Objectives:

• Understand the vital impacts of poorly aligned business architectures
• Provide a total view on how to establish a business architecture team and program
• Learn how to create basic business architecture blueprints such as the capability map
• Build an understanding on how to establish the business architecture knowledgebase
• Learn how to establish or solidify your business architecture team
• Understand the basics of business architecture / IT architecture mapping and alignment
• Gain experience with engagement models required to deploy business architecture roadmaps
• Walk through various scenarios, case studies and exercises for deploying business architecture
• Deliver a set of “getting started” guidelines for business architecture

Attendee Profile:

• Business Architects
• Business Analysts
• Business Strategists
• IT & Enterprise Architects
• Business & IT management

Course Description:

Most organizations lack a well articulated blueprint of their business. While everyone can see their small piece of the puzzle, no one has visibility into the enterprise as a whole. This in turn constrains the organization's collective ability to visualize the root cause of critical issues and rapidly craft viable solutions. To address this lack of enterprise visibility, organizations must be able to visualize their business through formal business architecture.

Just as the business functions within a series of silo-based vacuums, information technology implements various aspects of the business within a parallel series of silo based application and data architectures. When there is no blueprint of a business, IT initiatives can suffer as well. In the absence of business architecture, it is difficult to determine the overall impact of key decisions, deploy cross-functional initiatives, optimize key resources and funding, and streamline communication and deployments.

This training course provides attendees with the ability to establish formal blueprints of their business and use these blueprints to drive strategy, solution oriented roadmaps, funding and project deployments. In addition, the course provides basic approaches for business / IT architecture mapping and alignment. Discussions draw upon state-of-the-practice work by a number of organizations in business architecture and business / IT alignment. In addition, the sessions deliver state-of-the-art insights on business architecture from a standards and vendor perspective.

Course Outline:

1. Business Architecture Alignment: Introduction & Overview

   This module overviews business architecture, which provides a basis for the remaining sessions. This includes defining baseline aspects of business architecture and discussing the relationship between business architecture and IT architecture as a prelude to the topic of business architecture / IT architecture alignment.

2. Business Strategy vs. Reality: Impacts of Misalignment

   This module discusses how business strategy and bottom line results have historically failed to align, particularly when it required cross-functional, cross-disciplinary coordination across business units. The module walks attendees through industry case studies of successful and failed business initiatives and how business architecture alignment or misalignment played a role in each story.

3. Business Architecture Alignment Process Overview

   This module overviews the process of establishing the business architecture team, visualizing the business architecture, aligning the business architecture, visualizing business / IT architecture mappings and aligning IT architecture to the business architecture.

4. Business Collaboration Model: Basics of Visualizing and Aligning Organizational Structure

   Turf battles, poor lines of communication, lack of transparency and poorly defined roles and responsibilities can undercut the best laid strategy. Business units must collaborate to craft solutions to meet major business challenges. This module discusses a proven collaborative governance model for business and includes a discussion of how to setup and mature the business architecture center of excellence.

5. Visualizing Business Architecture

   Lack of transparency across an enterprise stalls the planning and deployment of a wide variety of business initiatives. This module defines how to map out your business through the incremental evolution of a formal knowledgebase and related management blueprints. The blueprints include governance structures, capability maps, value streams, information views, business processes decomposition and aggregation, and additional views based on industry best practices.

6. Business Architecture Alignment

   This module discusses an overall approach to business architecture alignment and includes examples of how alignment is evaluated and delivered in practice. The topic includes a differentiation between virtual and physical enterprise alignment -- a challenge in highly politicized environments, as well as the creation of shadow governance structures.

7. Business / IT Architecture Alignment: A Cross-Disciplinary Approach

   This module provides an approach to visualizing IT architecture and aligning IT architecture to business architecture using the dual focus, “outside-in” and “inside-out” approach. The outside-in approach is an agile, business-driven approach that focuses on delivering near-term business value. The inside-out approach is based on an industry tested iterative IT architecture transformation framework. The last section of this module provides examples of collaborative business-to-business and business-to-IT engagement models that support business / IT alignment.

8. Business Architecture Deployment Scenarios

   Business scenarios provide a context for business architecture analysis, visualization and alignment as well as business architecture / IT architecture alignment. This module includes a walkthrough of common projects and how they would be approached from a business-driven perspective.

9. Launching a Business Architecture Program -- Note: See Getting Started Session Below

   Launching a business architecture program, building collaborative governance and selling business architecture concepts to management involves communicating how to use business architecture to address priority business issues in a timely manner. This module provides guidelines for establishing as well as maturing your business architecture efforts, allowing you to scale up as is appropriate to your unique situation.

Half-Day "Getting Started" Working Session

Launching a business architecture program, building collaborative governance and selling business architecture concepts to management involves communicating how to use business architecture to address priority business issues in a timely manner. This module provides guidelines for establishing as well as maturing your business architecture efforts, allowing you to scale up as is appropriate to your unique situation.

A topic summary includes:

• Getting started discussion walkthrough
• Seven stages to launching a business architecture program
• Interactive discussion on how to apply the seven stages to in-house requirements and programs
• Interactive discussion of in-house scenarios and challenges
• Scenario walkthroughs based on attendee input, questions and comments

For more information about how your organization can create and deploy a business architecture, contact your account executive directly, email sales@cutter.com, or call +1 781 648 8700.