Visibility and control: the key to success for any digital transformation initiative

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How an enterprise architect can help you align strategy, IT and your business

As a business decision-maker, you know that it’s critical that your digital change initiative significantly shifts the dial in your organisation. At the same time, you’re facing two key challenges: deciding how to drive this shift, and doing it with minimal risk and maximum return. Your credibility relies on your ability to plan and execute your approach.

Driving this digital change encompasses your entire organisation. From people, processes and technology to behaviours, culture and your fundamental customer interactions, all aspects must be taken into account, and aligned and executed with precision. Without this, you won’t meet your ambitions. Process will change, technology will be introduced, but the dial stays where it is.

To drive this change, you need a team. A team that encompasses many change experts: analysts who understand your market and services; change managers who can persuade and shift the business operation; and designers who determine your new processes and underlying technical infrastructure.

This team will provide you with the knowledge and ability to plan and execute your vision. However, you’re still missing one key ingredient, one that brings these disparate change experts together: your enterprise architecture team. It’s this team that provides the glue, keeping things aligned so that all of these changes result in significantly shifting the dial. This team plays the role of devil’s advocate and keeps your direction and execution in alignment.

What is enterprise architecture?

Simply put, “enterprise architecture” is an alignment of what the business wants to do now and in the future, and how this is enabled by technology.

Most successful enterprise architecture teams take care of specific aspects, some being more business-focused and others more oriented towards technology. Together, they span the entire enterprise. In general, most teams take care of the development of four “architectures”: business, technology, applications, and data.

The most pertinent of these architectures for an organisation’s decision-makers is business architecture. In simple terms, this architecture describes how your organisation generates revenue by providing insight into its value streams. It takes the business strategy and maps it against processes. This architecture also identifies opportunities for innovation and deals with governance and standards.

Why do you need to partner with an enterprise architect?

Enterprise architects use a modern tool, such as BiZZdesign HoriZZon, to design and model the different architectures. Architects typically create something called a capability map that aligns IT to the business strategy. A capability map aims to support business executives’ strategic discussions and decisions. With such a map, you’ll be able to analyse your organisation by looking at it holistically, from a business perspective.

A capability map is drawn up in clear language, without technological jargon, so that non-IT stakeholders can understand it easily. A well-understood capability map quickly becomes the backdrop for many different discussions. For example, the capability map can add value to your decision-making by showing the following:

• A roadmap for successfully executing transformation initiatives
• A path to maximising and prioritising your investments by assessing their architecture impact
• How to ensure end-to-end risk management to increase resilience by relating security concepts such as threats, vulnerabilities, risks and controls to an architectural blueprint of your organisation

(Courtesy of BiZZdesign)

Make digital transformation concrete

Digital transformation often makes organisations more complex and intertwined. As clichéd as it may sound, you need to have the technological upper hand in order to gain a competitive edge. Armed with enterprise architecture tools such as BiZZdesign HoriZZon, architects can help you make data-influenced decisions and execute your organisation’s transformation initiatives with confidence.

Those transformation change initiatives shouldn’t be a disruption. Success shouldn’t be by chance. It should be by design.

Learn how to execute digital transformation change initiatives with confidence. Download our whitepaper: From Strategy to Execution with Capability-Based Planning

Discover how BiZZdesign can help you dramatically increase the success rate of your digital transformation, strategic investment allocation and risk-management initiatives

Originally published on Business Reporter