Written by Hanane Khiel
Todays complex organizations are continuously working towards higher efficiency. To do so, they start up multiple transformation projects in business, IT and data departments. But most of them struggle to get a clear overview of which capabilities, such as people, process, tools, and information the organization possesses to successfully execute on the strategic plan, leading to failed projects 70% of the time [1]
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Executives are then asked for the next strategic plan, but still do not have a clear view on the state of their current business. Various transformations are being executed, leading to multiple directions the ship is moving into. This presents an enormous challenge for executives to come up with a strong strategic plan that has high chances of creating the impact it intended to have during execution.
So how do you bridge the gap between a company’s strategy and its successful execution?
The light at the end of the tunnel
The way to address this is to model organizations based on their capabilities , breaking them down in a collection of simple components. The objective is to build a high-level and holistic mapping about how the business works, as one cohesive and visual model. Thus, creating a model that eases communication in the organization, can help you identify capability gaps and map the right initiatives to it to close the gaps.
The collective of methods used to facilitate this process is called business architecture. Business architecture helps you define how people, process, tools and information work together to get the business running and produce revenues. It aligns all parts of the organization to come to a common understanding of how the organization is working now, and should work in the future.
The business architecture view helps you in numerous ways, for instance:
Aligns the team around a shared vision
Facilitates better decision making
Forecasts threats & opportunities
Not as easy as it looks however
Setting up a business architecture initiative seems like the right thing to do. But it isn't always easy to execute on: