From Louise A Harris on Enterprise Business Architecture
I just read an interesting article by Nacie Carson, author of The Finch Effect, on the need of operational teams to act tactically in support of strategy. In this article titled As Chocolate Is To Peanut Butter, Strategy Is To Tactics, she particularly focuses on the ability of the team leader to straddle both strategic thinking and tactical action. Two questions came to mind as I read Nacie’s post.
- How does the team leader/manager identify which of their organization’s strategic outcomes they can impact, either directly or indirectly and how much impact can they actually have?
- How can companies “crowd source” within their ranks to identify tactical initiatives that implement strategy in addition to, or perhaps even instead of, large business initiatives?
Business Architecture is an effective tool in both these situations.
Lets look at the first question. The key idea here is the ability to link operational tactics with strategic outcomes. Not every operational area or team will have the potential to directly impact a strategic outcome, so how does the team identify where and how much, they can potentially impact strategic outcomes? This is where business architecture is an effective tool. One of the key purposes of business architecture is to describe the structure and behaviour of an organization in relation to its mission and strategic goals. A central aspect of business architecture is a clear definition of measurable strategic outcomes and a map of the capabilities needed to achieve these outcomes, including their supporting capabilities. Linked to the capability map is identification of all the resources needed to implement each capability, including business processes, people & organization structure, information, technology, physical infrastructure, etc. This capability resource identification provides an easily traceable path from each operational team and their work, to the relevant strategic outcome(s).
Another characteristic of business architecture is that it provides different views of the business from different perspectives. By looking at the organizational view of the business architecture any employee can immediately see which strategic outcomes they can impact. By looking at a business process view of the business architecture a team leader can narrow down the areas where their team’s tactical efforts can make a difference. Armed with this knowledge, an operational team can now focus their creative thinking in the right areas and assess their ideas for the most potential impact.
In summary a business architecture for an organization is both a useful communication tool and a simple analytical tool to enable business managers and team leaders to both think strategically and act tactically.
I shall explore the second question in Part 2.
The post Business Architecture enables Tactical “doers” to implement Strategy – Part 1 appeared first on Louise A Harris on Enterprise Business Architecture.
