For some time now I have been promoting the idea that the practice of business architecture is not about creating blueprints and models but applying a set of tools and techniques to form broader perspectives, create deeper insight, and solve business problems. If business architecture is a practice then what is its portfolio of services? I have created my take on the business architect’s service portfolio and broken it down into four categories: strategy development and articulation services, organizational performance services, organizational change services, and project support services. This isn’t meant to be a comprehensive list that completely describes the business architecture practice but a starting place to spur your imagination of what can be done.

Do you have other ideas? Please comment!

Strategy Development and Articulation Services

Business model development – A good business model provides the foundation for other business architecture activities. Facilitate organizations in development of their business or value delivery model. Organizations of any size can benefit from a better understanding of how it creates value for its customers and stakeholders. An excellent reference for this work is: Business Model Generation, by Alexander Osterwalder.

Value chain analysis – Help organizations fully understand and clarify how they create value. Value chains can quickly help organizations differentiate between primary and secondary activities and sketch out a high level process model of how they operate. The original definition and description of value chains can be found here: Competitive Advantage, by Michael Porter.

Scenario planning (large) – Full-fledged, comprehensive scenario planning to help organizations explore strategic options. Scenario planning is a flexible and multifaceted way to explore the future, providing insight into dependencies, hidden opportunities, potential roadblocks and more.

Scenario planning (small) – Scaled back scenario planning workshops for smaller organizations and large projects. While typical scenario planning exercises can get to be fairly large and complex, they don’t have to be. Small, one or two day workshops can help smaller organizations think about their future opportunities.

Value mapping – Value mapping helps organizations determine how they can effectively differentiate their products and services from others. It provides a model to understand the service attributes customers care about today as well as explore additional service attributes that might be attractive in the future. To learn more go here or read: Blue Ocean Strategy, by Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne. 

Strategy clarification – Organizations large and small create planning and strategy documents but most suffer from a lack of clarity and directedness. Help organizations explore and define strategies and goals by providing standard definitions and relationships for strategy elements. Provide mission, vision, goal, and strategy description template(s). A good reference for structuring strategic elements can be found here: The Business Motivation Model. (This is the older version of the document, but I like it better than the newer one.)

Strategy mapping – Strategy mapping is more about goal alignment than strategy formulation. It can help organizations create tighter goal alignment across the organization by linking goals in four perspectives: financial, customer, process, and learning and growth. Read the original work: Strategy Maps, by Robert Kaplan and David Norton.

In the next post, I will look at organizational performance services.

 

 

Tagged: Business Architecture, Business Architecture Practice, Strategy